The Webinar Blog

Fuel To The Webinar Flame(rs)

There is a group of linguistic purists who strongly object to the existence and use of the coined term “webinar.” I’m never going to win them over, but given that the name of my company is Webinar Success I am obviously not going to join their ranks.

Despite the lexicographic veracity of the naysayers’ arguments, webinar continues to gain in popularity and usage. I just used the Google Trends application to check on the relative change in search frequency and news reference volume for the terms “webinar” and “web conference”:

 

Changing the comparator from “web conference” to “web conferencing” shows the same trend, but with an earlier crossover point:

Webinar seems to have hit the public radar in early 2005 with a sudden jump. Should I take personal responsibility for this corruption of the English language simply because I started Webinar Success and The Webinar Blog in late 2004? (Wink and grin intended.) No, the term existed before me, and continues to gain ground because it is concise and useful. If you have been shying away from using webinar in your promotional activities, fear no longer. The world is ready for it.

This subject always generates interest and controversy. If you would like to read up on past ruminations about the term webinar, you can start here:

• Legal Status of Webinar
• You Can Say Webinar
• Webinar Webinar Webinar… Nyah nyah
• Webinar Or Webcast – What’s The Difference

 

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,web meeting,online seminar,online meeting

Adobe Introduces Managed Services For Connect

Adobe quietly put an announcement on their blog this morning that Adobe Connect customers now have an option to use the product in a managed services context. If that phrase means nothing to you, stay with me and I’ll explain.

Web conferencing was one of the early successes in Software as a Service applications (aka: SaaS, hosted applications, cloud computing). Customers could sign up to use the application and instantly have it available via the web. Companies did not have to install or maintain the programs on their own data center computers. This is still the most common implementation of web conferencing (I am using “web conferencing” as a generic in this article to encompass web meetings, webinars, and webcasts).

But some companies (especially large enterprise customers) balked at this setup. They didn’t like being at the mercy of the vendor’s server status. They didn’t like having upgrades and patches applied to the software at the vendor’s discretion. They didn’t like having maintenance downtimes imposed upon them. They didn’t like the inability to pretest and alter integrations with other applications before changes went live.

So some of the larger web conferencing vendors started offering the option for corporate clients to license the software and install it on their own internal computer servers. This on-premise approach fit a traditional IT-controlled strategy. The licensee is responsible for implementation, customization (if desired), integration with other applications, load balancing, testing, and applying vendor-supplied fixes and upgrades. They control what will happen to their software and when it will happen.

But since no solution satisfies everyone, we have started to see a scenario where IT departments are shrinking while demands on the remaining data center staff continue to grow. How can companies stay in control of their own software packages while lessening the burden on their IT departments? Enter “managed services” as yet another software purchase option.

Managed services is a remarkably literal description of what it entails. A third-party provider manages the services associated with maintaining the software application, while the purchaser still maintains control over their own unique copy of the software itself. Sometimes the managed services company comes in and actually works at the licensing company’s locations, taking care of the software running on the company’s servers.

Adobe’s version of managed services for Connect is different and reflects a more modern computing environment that straddles the line between traditional on-premises and cloud-based solutions. A company buying the managed services version of Adobe Connect never takes delivery of the software code. They don’t install it on their own servers. Instead, Adobe installs that code for the company on a data cluster owned and operated by Amazon Web Services. The version of the software used by the licensee is physically distinct from the code used by the general SaaS user community. The licensee can request changes and customizations to the software, they can create special integrations with other applications, and they can determine their own maintenance schedule. When upgrades or fixes are released by Adobe, the customer can take as long as they want to create a test version and check it for proper operation before moving it into production for their users.

Adobe assigns a dedicated Customer Success Engineer to the client. This person is responsible for making sure that the client’s requests for their software are implemented correctly. Managed service customers also automatically get Adobe’s Platinum Support package.

I talked to Michael Londgren and Mitch Nelson from Adobe, directors in the Adobe Connect and Managed Services groups. They told me that the dedicated Amazon Web Services account offers advantages for managed services clients. Load balancing and resource scaling is automatic. A master image of the client’s software code is made after every customization or upgrade and is propagated to backup servers in the Amazon cloud. Customer-specific database contents are backed up and duplicated on a negotiated schedule. If a server fails, Amazon can automatically switch to a fail-over backup server quickly and automatically, preserving the company’s ability to continue web collaboration. Amazon also offers distinct physical deployment sites around the world, so an international company could elect to host their conferencing on a server located closer to operations in a specific geographic region if desired and could even make different customizations in the different regions.

Because of the highly customized implementation for each customer, there is no standard “rack rate” price for licensing Adobe Connect on a managed services basis. But you can bet that it isn’t a budget option. This kind of solution is appropriate for enterprise customers who are willing to pay for the particular advantages offered in this scenario. The benefit side of the equation is less oversight and work for the company’s IT team, less resource utilization for the company’s hardware, less bandwidth overhead for data flowing through the company’s server connections, and more control over the company’s implementation schedules.

Adobe is not the only web conferencing vendor to offer the option of managed services to its clients. But there is definitely a short list for companies looking for this alternative. It’s good to have another major player in the space.

Technorati Tags: Adobe Connect,Michael Londgren,Mitch Nelson,managed services,web conferencing,web conference,webinar,web seminar,webcast,webcasting

The Curse Of The Recorded Video

Web conferencing technology has made it ridiculously easy to record, archive, and publish audio/video presentations. This is not always a good thing.

The World Wide Web is an immensely flexible and powerful repository for materials designed for entertainment, persuasion, shopping, and information (to name just a few categories). Video presentations – when done right – can stand out from surrounding content. They can convey rich, compelling stories. They can influence and persuade viewers to adopt new attitudes or take actions. They can also frustrate and alienate the people you are trying to reach.

If your content is primarily factual reference information, I beg you to think carefully before embedding it in a video. It is infuriating to search for a single answer to a single question only to find that I need to load a video and scan through it linearly until the presenter finally gets around to talking about the thing I am interested in.

The worst offender is technical support or product help videos. This has grown wildly in popularity, particularly among presentation technology vendors who want to showcase the use of their own tools. A video tutorial for a first-timer getting familiar with the technology might make great sense. A video answer to an FAQ or knowledge base question about a single feature is almost always a waste of time. I can scan through a web page full of keywords and screen shots a lot faster than I can sit and plod through a video. Search tools for textual information are plentiful and easy to use. Search tools for content embedded in videos are clunky and less capable.

Pick your favorite cliché: “Horses for courses” or “The right tool for the right job” or “Don’t use a hammer to swat a fly.” They all mean the same thing... Consider the context in which your audience is likely to be looking for your information content.

If a storyline and video image offers advantages your audience couldn’t get from a static web page, by all means use it. But if you are just taking a set of written bullet points and putting them in a video because you think your technology is cool, you need to step back and concentrate on the content rather than the delivery medium. Make life easier for the people using your technology and they will appreciate your thoughtfulness and practical recognition of their priorities over your own.

Technorati Tags: video,webcast,recorded presentations,on-demand presentations,video presentations

MediaPlatform WebCaster Adds Pay-Per-View

MediaPlatform announced last week that they have added payment processing for webcasts via PayPal. That’s great news. If you read my blog regularly, you know that I have been beating the drum for some time, trying to get more webinar/webcast vendors to integrate payment processing into their platforms.

Webinars and webcasts have long since proven themselves as great tools for lead generation and information sharing. People have come to equate a web event with free information flow. But there is a huge potential market for fee-based webinars and webcasts that is being underserved today. Professional training and continuing education, consulting, or professional services should all be accessible via webinars and webcasts for a fee.

The devil is in the details of course. I don’t know any vendor who has come up with a brilliant implementation that covers all the payment scenarios their clients might want to implement. Some of the tricky requests include:

• Let an administrator quickly and easily issue a refund to an attendee.
• Allow different prices or discounts to selected registrants.
• Allow pricing and payment in multiple currencies.
• Let one payment cover repeated access to an archived recording or to a series of live webinars/webcasts. And somehow prevent the purchaser from sharing their access with the world.

MediaPlatform used some interesting approaches to their implementation. First of all, they chose not to skim a portion of collected revenues, which will be welcome news to small businesses who already have to pay fees to PayPal or credit card processors. MediaPlatform charges one initial setup fee to establish a link to your own PayPal merchant account. In this way, funds come directly to you, rather than having the webcast company collect the money and forward it to you by check (some vendors take that approach).

MediaPlatform did not include features for issuing refunds from their system… The hosting company can take care of any needed refunds themselves.

MediaPlatform says that their approach to dealing with different prices or currencies is to let the hosting company create multiple lobby/registration pages for the same event. Each page has its own price on the registration button. It is the hosting company’s responsibility to drive the right people to the right page to get their price.

I foresee revenue-based webinars as a big growth market that needs some innovative product offerings to support it. MediaPlatform gets my commendation for joining the relatively small number of web collaboration vendors addressing the need.

Technorati Tags: MediaPlatform,WebCaster,webcasting,webcast,webinar,web event,online event,web seminar

Review: Videssence View Me Light For Webcasting

When I first read Videssence’s press release about their announced “See-Me Lites” for personal desktop use (subsequently renamed to "View Me Light"), I thought my prayers had been answered. My home office setup is absolutely horrendous for webcam video, lighting being one of the biggest problems. The room lights don’t fill the workspace well, especially when I have a backdrop set up behind me, cutting off even more light. I have used a variety of jury-rigged solutions, with desk lamps, reflective surfaces, torchieres, and other attempts to get a nice white light on me that lets the webcam do its job. Here is a webcam shot of me at my desk, taken only with available room light.

(All pictures taken with a Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 using auto-focus and “right light” auto exposure activated)

You can see that the image is a little grainy because of the generally low light, and you can see the “hot spots” on my temple and top of the head.

I contacted Videssence and spoke to Gary Thomas, their regional sales manager. He was kind enough to send me one of their first production sets, which had been making the rounds at trade shows.

Each light is roughly 3” by 6”, with one side sloping in to form an irregular trapezoid. The light is produced from an LED hidden behind a front lip. It reflects onto a curved white surface, which shines the light back out through the front opening.

You have two choices for mounting. You can screw them onto pole stands that telescope from about 8.5” to 14.5” high. Or you can choose a bracket assembly that lets you stick-tape them to the top of a flat monitor (the brackets are an inch wide, so they won’t work on an ultra-thin knife edge monitor bezel).

Set up is technically easy. One light is the master. It connects to a power adapter that you plug into a standard wall socket. The light has a push button on-off switch located on the back. The other light connects to the master light with a supplied connector cable and turns on and off based on the master light’s switch.

Positive aspects first… The emitted light is a lovely white spectrum that the webcam likes. And my favorite feature is simply the fact that it is an LED. You can run these all day and they generate absolutely no heat. That means you can stick homemade diffusers on them such as wax paper or parchment paper without fear of something catching on fire. Here is a good shot using the lights:

Now why do I mention diffusers? The light is already reflected off the back surfaces, so you get no direct point-source glare from the LED. But the fact remains that the light is coming from a 5” x 1.5” opening. That’s a small, bright area. I had no problem with my glasses off, but as soon as I put them on, I ran into serious issues with reflections on my lenses.

I tried wax paper, parchment paper, thin typing paper, and even a borrowed overhead fluorescent light fixture diffuser in an attempt to remove the bright patch. My glasses still picked up the white rectangles, very clearly and intrusively.

I tried turning the units around and reflecting the light off paper, white cardboard, and corrugated foam. I either got a bright reflection or a shadow from the light housings. I even tried a trick I once read, spraying hairspray on an old pair of glasses. It blurred my vision, but didn’t eliminate the reflection.

So in the end, I had to bow to the laws of physics and work purely with positioning of the lights to angle them above or far to the sides. Unfortunately, my early evaluation unit only had a three-foot connector wire. I couldn’t get them far enough apart to cast a good oblique angle. I tried putting them closer to me and just outside the video frame, but it made for a rather eerie and unnatural glow:

And if I turned my head, the reflections were back in all their glory:

Gary assures me that the production units are shipping with a six-foot connector wire, so this should allow for much more flexibility in positioning. In an ideal world I would probably mount these well above head height and spread wide apart, angling them down and in towards my face. That should eliminate the reflection problem (and is the lighting angle used in professional video setups). I tried setting the stands on top of my speakers to raise them, but there is no way to angle them downwards when attached to the poles. They just shot their light out over my head and onto the backdrop.

So what is the verdict? If you don’t wear glasses, the View Me Lights are an excellent webcam lighting solution. If you wear glasses, be prepared for a lot of trial and error positioning, some cursing, and the need to avoid turning your head once you work out the magic angle. Positioning would be a lot easier if Videssence created a universal tilt and swivel bracket that would allow the lights to be mounted high and wide and then angled down and in towards the face.

The lights are not yet featured on the Videssence product page, but they are available for shipment. They can be special ordered by contacting the company. The retail price is $249 for two lights and stands.

Technorati Tags: Videssence,See-Me,lighting,webcasting,webcast,webinar,web seminar,web conferencing,webcam

The State Of The Webinar Industry

There is an interesting discussion going on in the LinkedIn Group titled “Webcasting & Webinars Best Practices.” I tried putting in a link there, but it may not work from outside the LinkedIn environment. You may need to log in to your LinkedIn account and search for the group on the Groups Directory page. The group has 952 members and the discussions seem to be much less about self-promotion than I see in other webinar groups.

Anyway, the discussion is entitled “The Current State of Webinars: What have we learned and where are we going?” There are quite thoughtful and insightful responses from people really working with the technology. I had to add my two cents of course, and in the spirit of being inclusive, I wanted to share my thoughts with you in case you don’t participate in the LinkedIn discussion.

So full speed to the self-plagiarizing engines… Here’s what I wrote:

1) Terminology only seems to be of interest to those of us in the industry. The average end user will swap terms randomly, with no distinction made between a webinar, webcast, web conference, or "webex" (used generically). I like to think there's a difference, but I always have to ask them what they really mean when they start talking about needing a webinar.

2) Same applies to non-virtual or hybrid events. I've taken to calling them "in-room" or "local" as opposed to "remote" audiences. But concentrating too much on terminology is a recipe for frustration. Our clients don't care and aren't standardizing.

3) Video is the number one priority feature hype for the various technology vendors right now and probably will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Increased availability has meant much lower quality (both broadcast and on-camera) in a majority of use cases. That's fine for collaborative peer meetings and some educational uses. But I think it is sabotaging public address webinars such as for lead generation, investor relations, and external training. Many clients are creating an unprofessional first impression, and they need serious help in setup, support, and presentation techniques on camera if they are to be seen as trustworthy and quality-oriented.

4) We will see more attention being given to the "virtual environment" vendors by the press, because the avatars and background settings are cool and fun to write about. But they won't supplant normal end-user webinars because of the extra cost and complexity in setup. Eventually (5 years), some of that technology will trickle into end-user webinars in a more simplistic fashion.

5) I still don't get why there isn't more emphasis from the vendors on integrating payment processing for revenue-generating webinars. There is pent up demand and this is a huge growth area as a single feature.

6) I hope we will see an improvement in recognition and integration of peripherals such as headsets and webcams. These still cause users lots of trouble, with order-based dependencies, confirmation boxes, conflicting control panels, etc. This needs serious attention (and it's complex because it is tied in with the underlying operating system, hardware setup, and runtime platform such as Flash, AIR, or Java).

7) I hope for (but do not expect) better exception fallback from vendors who rely on a particular platform to let users connect. For instance, letting in non-Flash users when your platform is Flash-based. Or having alternate connection schemes for firewall/port/RTMP problems at a user's site. There should be an alternate connection method with perhaps lessened functionality that would at least let a user watch/listen.

 

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,online seminar,online meeting,web meeting,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing

Double Checking Your Webinar

As a presenter, you know you need to create your materials, rehearse, and figure out how to integrate some audience interaction into your presentation. You know you should be logged in a good 30 minutes early to make sure all your technical components are working properly. What else should you go over ahead of time to make sure you don’t get any nasty surprises?

If you are using a webinar product that uploads your slide deck, make sure to run through the slides to confirm that they converted properly and look the way they did in PowerPoint. Don’t leave this one till the 30-minute preshow. If something is wrong, you’ll need time to work around the conversion error and upload the new version.

If you plan to use screen sharing to show a live demo, make sure your application is already up and running. Go into share mode in your webinar product. Have someone else confirm that they can see everything you wanted to show. Oh, and make sure to reset all your starting data in the application so you are ready to run the demo from the beginning.

If you have created polls that you will share with the audience, double check that they are ready for use, with the proper question and answer choices. Make sure you know how to start the poll, tell the audience how to interact with it, share the results, and return to your slides. If you are working with a moderator, confirm who will manage the poll operations.

If you are working with other presenters, confirm the order of speakers and how the handoff is to be made between speakers. Does speaker 1 introduce speaker 2, or does she turn it back to the moderator?

If you are working with a moderator who will select and ask audience questions, remind him of any subjects you do NOT want to bring up in the public session. Also confirm that the moderator has your backup seed questions and is ready to use them if needed.

It is amazing how the one thing you take for granted will be the one that comes back to bite you. I just gave a webinar where I had worked with a moderator in a rehearsal ahead of my live session. Then a different moderator was assigned to me for the live webinar. We confirmed that we had my poll question set up and ready to use, and that we knew where it would come in the presentation. But I didn’t look at the poll to double check it. Sure enough, I was the one who got confused during the session… I thought I had given them poll A, but I had actually given them poll B. So I introduced the wrong poll at the wrong time. Not catastrophic, but a silly error that I could have so easily avoided.

Reviewing the obvious feels silly. Right up until you discover something unforeseen.

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,webcasting,webcast,online seminar,online meeting,presentation tips