The Webinar Blog

A First Look At GoToMeeting Webcam Beta

Citrix just announced that users can try the new webcam video option (HDFaces) in GoToMeeting as part of a public beta. Of course I had to jump on and give it a shot.

I don’t do formal reviews of applications still in beta, as that isn’t fair to anyone. So these are just some very fast initial impressions of my first try at their new video.

1) Video quality was very good. I tested on two computers on my desk, going through the same network hub. That is a torture test, as I’m passing full video bandwidth up and down the connection simultaneously. I saw no video breakup, pauses, or image degradation. The webcam window is infinitely resizable on both the host and attendee computer, and it did not have any problems even blown up to full screen size. Attendees can position the webcam image on any of the four borders of the shared screen image and can undock and resize it.

2) There was virtually no image lag between my host computer and the attendee computer. When I turned my head, the attendee machine reproduced it immediately.

3) At first, audio sound lagged the video image by a startling two seconds. After about three minutes or so, it fixed itself and the sound lagged the video by half a second or less. I don’t know if this is reproducible or if my attendee machine was in the middle of other hidden operations such as downloading one of the ubiquitous Microsoft updates.

4) When I first started my meeting from the host computer, GoToMeeting couldn’t “see” my webcam and said none were available. My external webcam was plugged in, but I hadn’t started the Logitech control panel. After starting up the webcam controller, GoToMeeting still couldn’t find the camera until I left and reentered the meeting. This is a common problem with applications trying to see USB-connected peripherals. I have run into it on several web conferencing products.

5) The beta version of the software is a different application than normal GoToMeeting. So even if you have had GoToMeeting conferences with attendees in the past, they will go through a new download/install cycle when they try to join one of your meetings with the new beta version. The beta software replaces the normal production GoToMeeting software on your computer, and you can’t go back and forth between versions. So if you are running mission-critical meetings, I would not suggest trying out the beta. Stick with the stable software version.

6) I liked the fact that when I used the GoToMeeting option to adjust settings for my webcam, it automatically fired up the Logitech webcam control panel application. That’s much better than trying to compete with the native control application inside the GoToMeeting software. Good decision.

All in all, I was more than satisfied with the beta performance. According to the press release, production availability is targeted for late July. As previously announced, there is no additional cost for webcam video. It will be a standard feature of GoToMeeting/GoToWebinar.

 

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Can You Read What You Wrote?

Scripting has its place in webinars and webcasts. Moderators should usually have initial technical instructions and speaker introductions scripted out. Presenters often benefit from scripting their opening and closing paragraphs to help them move smoothly into and out of their presentation flow. And webcasts created purely as short, focused recordings should always be scripted.

If you write out something for use in your presentation, it is vital that you read it out loud as you are writing it and as you practice your presentation. Some things look good on paper but sound terrible when they are spoken.

A writer can get away with a phrase like: “The mellifluous chant of the muezzin wafted sonorously over the languid sun-baked square.” But words such as mellifluous and muezzin can trip up the best of speakers, and all those sibilant sounds at the end of the sentence are going to make you sound like a snake. The sentence is also likely to come across as rather flowery for conversational speech.

In general, your script should favor words of fewer syllables and short, powerful phrases rather than long sentences filled with adjectival elaboration. When I write scripts, I say each sentence as I type it. If I stop to think about what I want to say next (yes, it happens) I start by saying the last line I wrote to make sure I keep the tone and flow consistent.

If you want a practical illustration of this tip, attend a public webinar featuring a guest speaker. Almost certainly, the host will have a short biographical introduction for the speaker. Almost certainly, it will have been lifted from a web page or formal professional document. Almost certainly, the host will read it in a singsong recitation that sounds nothing like a human being talking to you. It’s a great way to hear what not to do.

You have a lot of experience listening to people and determining whether they sound natural and convincing. Use that on yourself. Read your material out loud and trust your ears.

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Will Cisco Dump WebEx?

I have no insider information and I have heard nothing on the grapevine that would indicate a sell-off is imminent. But The Register in the UK posted a rumor that Cisco plans to sell both Linksys and WebEx in a move to divest consumer-oriented product lines.

IF this turns into fact rather than idle speculation, it will be absolutely fascinating to see who has the capital and the will to take ownership of WebEx. Four years ago, Cisco paid almost three billion dollars for WebEx. Will they make back their investment, or sell it for a loss?

Would IBM buy WebEx? Would Cisco even sell to IBM? I don’t think so. Oracle is an intriguing possibility. And then there’s always InterCall / West Corporation, which has been on a conferencing annexation spree over the last decade unseen since Hannibal took his elephants out for a stroll over the Alps. I am sure they would love to get WebEx as a proprietary solution (in which case, watch out resellers!), but I don’t think they have enough cash.

What do you think? Unfounded hogwash, or just a matter of time? Who is your pick for a new owner?

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Tips For Making Recorded Presentations

Today I am going to plagiarize my own work. Or as we used to say in Silicon Valley marketing meetings, I’ll be “repurposing content.”

Brainshark published a guest post I wrote for them with tips for creating better quality Brainshark recordings (a technology I use on client projects and for my own promotional/informational recordings). Some of my tips were specific to that platform, but I realized that many of the guidelines applied to any recorded presentation. So here are a few pointers for you if you create on-demand presentations for a web audience.

1) Shorter Is Better. I aim for five or six minutes per recording.  If you are producing 30, 40, or 50 minute productions, you are scaring off potential viewers. People want to know they can get valuable information quickly and concisely.

2) Link Your Recordings.  You can still cover your full 30 or 40 minutes’ worth of content… Just break it into individual topics and then use a menu system to let each viewer decide what they want to watch next.   Of course if your material absolutely must be presented in sequence, you can limit the choices to: Advance to the next topic or Exit the presentation. A simple set of hyperlinks on a web page can usually suffice as a table of contents.

3) Keep Your Slides Moving.  If your recording consists of narration over slides, you want to keep each slide visible for no more than one minute. Your audience is used to YouTube videos. They want visual change.  Use animations if your software allows it, otherwise use a series of slides to recreate builds.

4) Use Your Best Speaker.  It is tempting to sign up speakers based on their title or knowledge. But there is an art to sounding clear, enthusiastic, and compelling on an audio track, and the experts may not have that training.  If you must put your mush-mouthed CEO in the recording, give him an introductory slide with a paragraph or two and have him play up the value of the content to follow. This trick also works with subject experts who can introduce a topic, giving it their implied authority before turning the main presentation over to a better speaker. 

5) Audio Quality Is Crucial. If you must record your presenters over the telephone, here are two absolutes: No cell phones and no speaker phones… EVER! If your presenter has a bad telephone connection or a low quality phone, cancel the session and do the recording later from a different line. You cannot make up for bad source audio.  If at all possible, work with your speaker on-site with a good quality desk microphone and a pop filter (they are cheap and easy to find online). 

6) Save Music For Intros/Outros. Don’t run a constant stream of music underneath your vocal track. Music under your vocals gets annoying, repetitive, and distracting after a very short time. Pick about 5-10 seconds of instrumental music that suits the tone of your material and use it on your opening and closing slide to welcome viewers and to signal that the content is over.  There are stock music sites available for you to select and purchase music clips very cheaply. Check the Audio category in www.istockphoto.com as one example.

7) Script Your Presentation. I will not record a presenter who doesn’t have a script. They will argue all day long that they know the material backwards and have given the speech 100 times. Then on the recording they will ummm and ahhh and fumble for the right words. If you are the “production engineer” and have their script in front of you during the recording session, you can highlight phrases where you hear little fumbles, or background noises, or volume changes. Then at the end of the session you just go back and re-record those bits so you can splice them into your recording with audio editing software. Or if your software allows slide-at-a-time vocal recording, you can have the speaker re-record the slide in question.

8) Re-Record The First Slide. Record the entire presentation, then go back and re-record the first slide. It will now sound more natural and more consistent with the rest of the slides. When a speaker starts out doing this unfamiliar recording process, they are always stiff and unnatural at the start. Just plan to throw away the opening and use the retake.

9) Learn To Use An Audio Editing Tool. If you do many recordings, it is worth the frustration and time necessary to learn how to work with digital audio editing software. Two of the most popular programs for PCs are Audacity and GoldWave. Audacity is free and easier to use. GoldWave costs a small amount and is much more complicated, but offers incredible power and flexibility. It took me quite a while to master GoldWave, but I can now filter recordings, splice in short retakes, match volumes, and generally clean up audio tracks to get the best possible sound for my recordings.

You don’t have to do all of these things at once, but each piece of advice you can incorporate will give you a small incremental improvement and make your recordings more engaging and popular with your audiences. If you would like to see how I applied these guidelines in my own lead generation Brainsharks, you can start with the short presentation below and see how it allows the viewer to select an action path. If you are reading this in an email or in a limited functionality feed reader, you might not see the embedded clip. In that case you can put this link into your web browser:  http://www.brainshark.com/wsuccess/audience

 

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Live Video In Webinars And Webcasts

The past two years have seen amazing growth in the video capabilities of web conferencing products. Just about every major vendor now markets their live videocasting functionality as a major selling point. You can find products that allow high resolution images, 16:9 widescreen format, simultaneous videos of multiple participants, low bandwidth compensation algorithms, and other video “bells and whistles.”

So let’s take it as written that you CAN use video. The question then becomes: SHOULD you use video?

I won’t tease you… Short answer first, then a longer discussion:

• Small, informal meetings are often great places to include video
• Larger, more structured public webinars usually suffer from video
• There are exceptions to each of the above statements

What is my reasoning behind these answers and what do you need to think about when considering video in your webinar/webcast?

In smaller collaborative web meetings, the participants usually know each other, so first impressions will not be made via the image projected over the webcam. This type of meeting typically does not involve the use of prepared statements or formal presentations, so the presenter does not need to frequently refer to notes or a script, and can spend more time looking at the camera and maintaining a sense of “virtual presence.” Participants are willing to accept and discount lower quality lighting and video in preference of a productive work session.

Conversely, public webinars and webcasts are slanted towards one-way presentation of information from a presenter out to an audience, many of whom will not have seen the presenter before. Presenters may have perfectly natural jitters about having to speak in public. They need to make sure of their talking points with a script or presentation notes. If the audience sees someone who appears nervous, or keeps glancing away from the camera, it lowers the perception of professionalism, confidence, and trustworthiness.

I often teach and coach speakers on the unique aspects of presenting via web conference. There is a lot to think about, from consciously considering the needs and reactions of an unseen audience, to best use of web conferencing features, to proper speech patterns and vocal delivery tips.

When I add in tips and considerations for appearing on camera, the completely unnatural things to practice in order to appear natural seem overwhelming. Proper lighting, proper background, proper eye contact, facial expressions, clothing choices, staying in frame, staying in focus, what to do with your hands… All of these make conscious and subconscious impacts on your audience.

We have become a society used to polished and professional appearance on camera by trained performers who make it look easy. We see talk show hosts, sportscasters, news reporters, and other on-air personalities who set our expectations for how a presenter should appear. It seems effortless and natural, because we never see them until they have been highly trained, supported by top professionals working with proper equipment behind the scenes, and they have years of experience under their belts. How do you think you compare to that kind of level setting?

I’ll tell you how you compare… Your webcam field of focus is ridiculously narrow. Your lighting is probably awful. Staying in frame and in focus on a fixed camera makes you look stiff and unnatural. The background behind you includes distractions for your audience. You make gestures that disappear out of frame. Your clothes fade into the background, make your skin appear washed out, or create wavy moiré lines. You blink too often or not enough. Your sound is distant and echoing, or is out of synch with your image. You appear shifty-eyed or fixated like a deer in the headlights. Are you doing yourself or your business any good with all that negative psychological baggage?

What are the exceptions to my general case answers?

• A small person-to-person web meeting can have the same considerations as a large webinar if it is a formal presentation to someone you have never met. I would not use webcam video to make an investor pitch, present a business plan, or to impress an industry analyst I don’t know. I also try to avoid webcam video if the majority of my presentation consists of a live demonstration or other use of screen sharing. I need to look down at my screen to see what I am doing, and the other participants should be watching the demo rather than my face.
• A large webinar can use video successfully if the hosting company is ready and willing to invest in care, training, and support of the video aspects. That means setting up a controlled environment (call it a video studio) with proper lighting, proper sound, ideally a teleprompter, a camera operator who can adjust framing and focus, and a presenter who has had training and practice in how to appear on video. Unfortunately, this kind of setup is all too often reserved for C-level executives in large enterprise organizations.
• The most difficult situation to give an absolute answer for is in the area of a training class delivered via webinar. Teaching really can benefit from a sense of presence for the instructor. But web classes can also last longer than other types of webinars and may involve the need to show significant amounts of factual detail to the students. The best answer in these cases may be to start with video for introductory remarks and then switch it off during the formal training portion. Switch it back on for interactive questions and answers with the students. Your comfort level and the type of training/type of audience will dictate what is right for you.

When I have control over proper video setup and the time to do the extra preparation and setup necessary to make myself look good on camera, I’ll use live video. But that doesn’t happen very often. The rest of the time I would rather use strong vocal skills and a keen grasp of web conferencing techniques to engage my audience than run the risk of inadvertently devaluing my presentation.

So watch out for that webcam… It’s a double-edged sword!

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Conversion Features For Webinar Technologies

Brian Massey just wrote an impassioned article about features he wants to see from online service providers to support better conversion of guests to leads, leads to customers. He included some webinar features in his list, but I thought I would reinforce and expand on the webinar-specific items we need if we are going to take advantage of best practices when using webinars as a marketing tool.

1) Allow Customizable Registration Pages. This one really peeves me. I wrote out the entire issue last year. None of the self-service webinar providers allow true customization of registration pages. Sure, some allow you to add some fields, but nobody lets you position them, add graphics and text where you wish, and so on. I want the same functionality I have available in the free SurveyMonkey software.

2) Follow Lead Source Tracking From Start To End. Some webinar vendors do allow lead source tracking. This lets you use a slightly different URL to get to your registration page when you promote it through various channels. It tells you which marketing methods got you registrations. This lead source needs to be attached to the user in all reports showing attendance, time in session, polling, comments, and feedback. I have seen too many reports that include lead source only in the initial registration report.

3) Identify The Attendee In Post-Event Surveys. If the webinar product includes the ability to create a post-event survey/feedback form, it needs to automatically identify the attendee in the feedback report so they don’t have to enter their name and contact information again. If the webinar software doesn’t include a survey building utility, partner with a third-party survey tool to programmatically transfer the attendee information to the form when it is logged. Attendees know we have their information from the registration page and the webinar login page. Why are we asking them for it again at the end of the event?

4) Allow A URL For All Thank You Pages. Brian has this one well-covered. Not just thank you at the end of the webinar (most technologies do allow a redirect), but thank you after registering (where most technologies show their own webinar-branded confirmation page).

5) Allow Total Control Of All Email. I can’t believe in this day and age that webinar vendors are still forcing their content into emails sent on my behalf. I want to specify the subject line, the From account, Reply-to, and every single word of text (and HTML) in the message body. That goes for registration confirmation, reminder, thank you for attending, sorry we missed you, event cancellation, event time change, and anything else you send out. Sure, give me a starting template or sample. But get your name and your content out of my emails!

6) Create Better Q&A Management/Reporting. The questions and comments entered during a webinar are incredibly important for proper lead conversion. Nobody gives me the amount of control I would like as a moderator. I want the option to label comments with “Answered in session”, “High priority followup”, “Low priority followup”, “Answered privately”. I want a spreadsheet formatted report that I can open in Excel and sort by time, by attendee, by status label. I want the contact email to be associated with every comment. Stop giving me just a big text document log showing name and comment. Oh, by the way, I need all comments logged, including those that were deleted during the session. Just add a label showing “Deleted”.

That’s a start… What else should we add to the list?

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Why You Need To Control Your Webinar

Web conferencing as a collaborative tool between team members can be extremely productive. Webinars as a way to present information to large groups and then solicit feedback from the audience are also a wonderful business tool. But if you mix up the two, you are destined for trouble.

Matt Brunk of Telecomworx published a short description of webinar anarchy on the No Jitter blog. It is sadly hilarious in its description of unmuted phones, presenters getting interrupted, attendees unknowingly showing up on conference webcam, and other travesties.

If you are holding a webinar that is primarily one-way transfer of information from speaker to audience, it’s your responsibility to tighten the reins. Have a moderator in place who can manage technical issues as well as audience problems. Make sure your presenters know what is expected of them, including privacy requirements during the presentation.

Remember, just because your web conferencing technology allows an open forum doesn’t mean you have to structure your meeting that way.

Oh, and by the way… An excellent rule of thumb as a host or audience member is to always assume you can be seen and heard by other participants in a webinar until unambiguously proven otherwise.

Thanks for the lesson, Matt!

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Practicing Your Webinar Without Speaking

As I was clicking rapidly through the hundreds of press releases I scan while looking for webinar news, a curious title caught my eye. It read “Effective Tips For Practicing Guitar Without Your Guitar In Your Hands Now Available.” Despite the somewhat awkward sentence construction, I was intrigued. How can you practice guitar without a guitar?

The gist was that you can do a lot with mental imagery and thinking about how to use musical foundations to improve your compositions and improvisations. The author says “I remember vividly using the 30-45 minute bus ride to and from school to think about what scales I could use to improvise over a song… or to think about the chords in a song I knew and try to analyze the progression mentally. In fact, I would even go so far as to come up with progressions in my head, and then try them out when I got home to see if they sounded the way I expected.”

Now you might argue that this is not so much practicing as studying or preparing. But practice is just a form of preparation, so why not include a wider range of activities in the definition?

I started thinking about how this concept could be applied to webinar presentations. As with guitar playing, there is no substitute for putting in the time actually performing a piece over and over until you can hit the right notes at the right time, adding emotional content and pacing to communicate with your audience. For us, that means speaking the presentation out loud from end to end, checking phrasing and timing.

But can we utilize downtime and quiet bus rides to think about additional aspects that will affect the success of our performance? Absolutely! Let’s examine just a few things you can do in addition to (NOT INSTEAD OF) reciting your presentation ahead of time:

1) Match Content to Promises
People come to a webinar because of promises you make (or promises that a marketer makes on your behalf). Promotional materials, invitations, even the title of the webinar promise specific things that will be on offer. Think through your content and your presentation flow. Are you delivering on the specific promises that were made? Are you satisfying at least one of the promises within the first three minutes of your presentation? Your contemplative time should help you practice how to quickly acknowledge and meet your audience’s expectations.

2) Communicate Why Information is Important/Interesting
As you impart data and facts to your audience, are you also helping them to assimilate, understand, and make use of the information? I hear technical and professional presenters overlook this aspect all the time. Don’t just recite factual information. Tell your audience why they should care about it, what it means to them personally or professionally, why it’s interesting and useful. People can get straight facts and data out of textbooks and white papers. They don’t need to listen to you recite the details. They need you to help them know which information is actually important and why. On your bus ride, review each piece of data you will present and make sure you have something to say about it.

3) Hide Your Script
As you look through your PowerPoint slides, ask yourself if they are supporting your talk or duplicating it. Are the slides acting as your personal teleprompter, helping you remember everything you want to say? Have you written complete sentences that you either read to your audience or silently leave for them to read to themselves? You should always have more to say than the slide text states. Your quiet practice time includes figuring out what you are going to say about each topic point, then just including a keyword or two on the slide that you can embellish vocally. Sentences become part of your presenter notes, part of your memorization practice, part of your “cheat sheet” outline that you will reference while speaking, part of the separate handout you will provide to attendees afterwards. Practice eliminating text from your slides and including it in your speech.

4) Visualize Questions and Answers
Use your quiet time to think about possible questions your audience members might ask. Determine how you will answer them in a succinct, authoritative fashion. Write down the questions for your moderator (or you) to use as “seed questions” if the live audience is slow to interact with you. Are there uncomfortable questions someone could ask… Pricing, competitive position, missing features? How will you deal with them if they come up? Practice your answers until they are smooth and confident.

 

Let’s not kid ourselves. Practice is no fun. It takes time, it’s frustrating, and there is no immediate gratification as when performing for an audience. But giving a good presentation is no different from performing on a guitar. The only way you get good at it is by practicing, both physically and mentally.

[Fun Fact: Pablo Casals at the age of 13 discovered Bach’s previously unknown unaccompanied cello suites in a second-hand sheet music store in Barcelona. He practiced them in secret every day until he felt ready to debut them in a public performance. That day came 13 years later, at age 26. He didn’t agree to record them until he was 59 years old. Now can’t you afford a few hours of practice?]

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