The Webinar Blog

The Theatrics Of Webinar Presentation

After one of my recent public webinars, an attendee named Shelby sent me an interesting question. She said that she has a degree in Music Theatre and was wondering whether experience in stage acting and voice could carry over to webinar presentations.

That struck home with me, as musical theater was a hobby of mine from third grade right up until Webinar Success used up all the time I used to spend in rehearsals and shows! That’s more decades on stage than I like to think about at this point.

I started thinking about the things I consciously and instinctively do as a webinar presenter that carry over from stage acting. Here’s what I came up with (please note that I am specifically referring to large-audience webinars, not intimate small group web meetings):

• You need to be ready, willing, and able to “go big” in front of an audience. Webinar presenters need to think like stage actors rather than movie actors. In a movie, you internalize your thoughts and emotions and let the camera closeups bring them to the audience. But stage actors need to “play to the back row.” My presentation voice on a webinar is like my acting voice on stage. I need to make sure that everyone can hear me, that my diction is as clear as possible, and that I am overemphasizing brightness and emotional content as I speak. As a matter of fact, a typical slides and narration webinar requires even more vocal prominence. You don’t have the assistance you would normally get from props, body language, movement, and reactions from other characters. It’s just you performing a monologue in front of the slides acting as your “set.”
  
  
• You need to work at building an empathetic or emotional connection with the audience. Yes, this applies to professional, technical, and factual presentations too! Delivering a flat recitation of facts is utterly useless. Your audience can read a book, white paper (or script!) if they just need to ingest raw information. Your job is to make them care about the subject, make them believe it applies to them, create a bond between your experiences and their own. That is why you so often hear presentation advice of “tell your audience a story.”
  
  
• You need to make the script sound extemporaneous. I like writing down my opening and closing in a webinar. It helps me start and end strong, sounding confident, poised, and knowledgeable for my audience. Sometimes I will even write a sentence or two related to a particular slide when I know I want to say something in a certain exact way. But in all these cases, I then practice saying the lines out loud, over and over again, until they sound like me truly saying them from my heart rather than reading words off a piece of paper. There is a world of difference, and your audience can spot it instantly. You don’t have to memorize your script word for word as a stage actor would. But you should be intimately familiar with it, having practiced different cadences and emphasis of key phrases so that you know it sounds like your own conversational (or presentational) voice. Having something written down does NOT relieve you of the responsibility to rehearse out loud! It requires just as much preparation and practice as off-the-cuff speaking.

If you want a delightful example of building an emotional reaction with your audience, preparing it thoroughly, and making words sound extemporaneous rather than scripted, I recommend renting the classic 1937 comedy/drama “Stage Door.” This is a film about the world of stage acting and a group of women trying to make it in the theater. The script is razor-sharp. Great actresses abound: Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Lucille Ball, Ann Miller, Eve Arden…

But the thing EVERYBODY remembers is Hepburn’s character reciting a short monologue about calla lillies. It stayed with her the rest of her life (and beyond). Her character starts out terrible, delivering the lines flatly and matter of factly, as if she is reading a script out loud. Then on opening night she finds an emotional context and makes the words her own, bringing the audience with her into the meaning of the monologue and making herself a star. (Admittedly, there is a cheat here… Since you are watching a movie rather than a real stage play, Katharine can speak MUCH more quietly than she could have gotten away with on an unmiked Broadway theater stage. But we have to make allowances.)

If you want an edgier, more modern example, watch Naomi Watts do the same thing in her character’s audition in “Mulholland Drive.” But note… This David Lynch movie is not for everyone’s tastes!

 

Technorati Tags: presenter training,presentation tips,speaking tips,speaker training,webinar,web seminar,webcast,webcasting

Free DVD Ripper Giveaway

This has nothing to do with webinars or webcasts. But it’s a chance for you to score some free software if you think it would benefit you. As a blogger with good readership and syndication, I sometimes get seemingly random offers from companies wanting to promote themselves. I figured I would pass this on to my loyal readers as a lagniappe.

The first ten people to add a comment to this post and tell me they want the software get a download link for WinX DVD Ripper Platinum Thanksgiving Edition. According to the marketing copy:

• No.1 fast DVD ripper software capable of ripping both homemade and commercial DVDs to popular videos, such as rip DVD to AVI, MP4, H.264, MPEG, WMV, MOV, FLV, 3GP, etc. It can also help users faultlessly rip and backup DVD to iPhone/4S, iPad, iPod, Apple TV, Android, HTC, Samsung, XOOM, Galaxy Tab, Kindle, ThinkPad, DELL Streak, PSP, etc.
• One of the few DVD rippers that support the latest encrypted DVDs such as Thor, Transformers 3.

Apparently this version has no tech support or free upgrades available, but it seems to be a fully-functional version of the utility.

Enjoy!

 

UPDATE: All ten have been spoken for. Keep reading the blog though... Who knows what giveaway some other manufacturer might send me?!

The Case Against Talking Head Video

Webinar/webcast vendors continue to promote the use of video in their products. It’s cool, it’s sexy, it has great marketing power. “Show the audience your face while you present to them!”

I don’t mind the use of video for peer-to-peer web meetings and the equivalent of videophone conversations. But I have long advised against webcam video for presenters in one-to-many webcasts or webinars, especially when it is the audience’s first exposure to you or your company. For a full in-depth discussion of my argument, click here.

Today, Joel Jacobs at Brainshark blogged in reference to video in a recorded presentation. He asked “Do We Need a Video of the Speaker Next to the Slides?” His answer was “NO.”

But lest you think this was merely one man’s subjective opinion, Joel referenced a 2005 study written up by Jakob Nielsen, where eyetracking of web users revealed that “Talking-Head Video Is Boring Online.”

Jakob’s research fascinates me. It is the first time I have seen scientific evidence that the much-hyped addition of video may not be giving you any benefits even when done correctly!

It may be time to challenge your belief that adding video is automatically going to help engage your audience or make them pay more attention to your presentation. You’ll probably do better by concentrating on quality content, extensive preparation, and building energy and interaction into your presentation technique.

 

Technorati Tags: Brainshark,Joel Jacobs,Jakob Nielsen,video conferencing,web conferencing,web conference,videoconference,webinar,webcast,webcasting,web meeting,online meeting,online seminar

ON24 Creates New Webcast Solution For DIY Market

If you go all the way back to a post I wrote in April of 2010, you will find a breathlessly enthusiastic write-up (based on sneak previews at the time) of a new webcasting interface from ON24. I called it a “quantum leap in user configurability and control” and “a fantastic advance in making webcasts more attractive, useful, and engaging for attendees.”

Unfortunately the new technology (later dubbed Webcasting Platform 10) was only available for big-ticket web events intended for very large audiences in the multiple thousands, or high profile events that justified dedicated attention to complex production and configuration of the webcasting environment by production professionals. It wasn’t cheap enough or easy enough for a typical business end user to fire up and say “Let’s put on a lead-gen webinar next month.”

Today ON24 put out a press release saying that the Platform 10 interface is finally available to business users who want to create their own webcasts. I spoke to Mark Szelenyi, the Senior Director of Webcasting Product Management at ON24. Mark told me that the new product, labeled ON24 Webcast Elite, is targeted at the kind of business applications typically associated with marketing, training, and other one-to-many presentations handled internally in a department (as opposed to those requiring an events management team).

Webcast Elite eliminates some of the complexity associated with professional large-scale webcast production. So it doesn’t have integration with fancy outside signal sources going through switches and encoders. It would be more appropriate for people using a standard PC webcam. It allows basic customization and branding of registration pages, but doesn’t open up all the HTML permitting Javascript routines and custom-built behaviors.

As a first version, some things are roadmapped for later addition. For instance, you can record a webcast, but you can’t replay it as a live session for new registrants (the infamous “fake live” type of event).

ON24 does not publish standardized pricing on their website. Webcast Elite is sold through ON24 direct sales personnel who customize a package price. I asked about the general pricing model, and Mark told me that this is not intended for one-off single webinar events. They will be selling packages based on a fixed number of events taking place over the course of a year. So you might pay up front for the ability to host 12 events over the next 12 months. If you end up only hosting 11 events, there is no refund. Mark said that Webcast Elite will see typical use cases with audience sizes up to perhaps 1000 people at a time. They don’t plan to charge on a per-view basis for people watching recorded archives of live webcasts.

To try the product, you need to contact ON24 and work with a salesperson and sales engineer, who will set you up with a test account and make sure you are comfortable working with the product. There is no “Free 14 Day Trial” kind of offer for single-click testing. I am waiting for my trial account to get set up so I can give you a report on how the system works in practice. But I have high hopes for its ability to put more power in the hands of business professionals for a more interesting webcast/webinar experience.

 

Technorati Tags: ON24,Webcast Elite,Webcasting Platform 10,webcast,webcasting,webinar,web event,online seminar,Mark Szelenyi

Is Adobe Connect A Lame Duck?

[Please see important updates at end of article. I am keeping the original text in place so I am not accused of revising history.]

Wednesday I wrote about Adobe’s decision to pull Flash out of mobile browsers. But at that time I did not have this significant statement, reported by Jim Finkle in a Reuters article following Adobe’s annual Analyst Day: “The company said the revenue shortfall is partly because it plans to scale back promotion of its LiveCycle business process management software and Connect web conferencing businesses. It will stop marketing those products to most customers, though it will continue to support them.”

That’s a pity. Adobe Connect has been a good and innovative product for web conferencing and webinars. That marks two major companies this year who have bought prominent webinar products, shoehorned them into larger software families, and then pulled them from public licensing and standalone usage.

With Adobe it was the purchase of Macromedia Breeze, renaming it to “Acrobat Connect” and attempting to make it a part of the Acrobat product family. This mirrors Microsoft’s purchase of Placeware, renaming it to “Microsoft Office Live Meeting” and attempting to make it a part of the Office product family.

Neither approach really made sense, both went through subsequent name changes and product positioning attempts, and now it looks like both will be swept under the rug of “failed acquisitions.”

So far Cisco seems to have escaped the curse with its purchase of WebEx. But if I see them rename it to take on a prefix of a separate, unrelated Cisco product family I’ll know the writing is on the wall!

UPDATE NOV 15: Director of Adobe Connect, Guillaume Privat, wrote a post on the Adobe Connect Blog saying that Connect Mobile will continue to thrive through native apps. He also wrote the following sentence:

"First, while Adobe is realigning its resources around two key growth opportunities, the Adobe Connect business will continue to further product innovation for customers in key verticals."

I have to admit that I have no idea how to interpret that statement. I'll try to contact him to get clarification.

 

UPDATE NOV 16: I just spoke with Guillaume. I am now completely satisfied that Jim Finkle's statement was either a misinterpretation of Adobe's announcement or got confusingly edited and shortened somewhere in the publishing cycle. Guillaume told me what I already know... That while Adobe has historically had licensing information and "buy it now" buttons for Adobe Connect on their website, they have heavily favored sales and first-level support through resellers and channel partners. I have experienced this over the years for myself and my clients. It is almost impossible to get proper sales support for Connect directly through Adobe unless you are a massive enterprise account. Adobe merely formalized that go-to-market strategy. They are only going to market and actively sell the product through their direct sales force to big financial and government entities. Everyone else should go through resellers and channel partners. That seems like a prudent cost-savings approach to me. In the meantime, the product support and development teams continue to work on Connect and there is no sunsetting strategy in place. So I apologize for my role in helping to spread the confusion.

 

 

Technorati Tags: Adobe Connect,Adobe,Microsoft Office Live Meeting,Microsoft Live Meeting,Placeware,Macromedia Breeze,webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,webcast,webcasting,web meeting

 

Is This The Death Knell For Flash-Based Web Conferencing?

The Associated Press just published an article by Barbara Ortutay stating that Adobe Systems is eliminating Flash on mobile web browsers. Instead, they will pursue only HTML5 for rich media display in that context. That should worry a lot of web conferencing software vendors.

Don’t get the wrong impression… I am not running around shouting “The sky is falling!” Adobe says it will continue to support Flash for PC-based web browsers and that Flash will still work on mobile apps. So it’s not like Flash is going away tomorrow.

But we have to be realistic. Web conferencing vendors would far prefer to have a single code base to develop, support, and document. They may have been forced into separate apps to support display on iOS devices (which have never supported Flash), but they can’t enjoy being backed into that requirement. A cloud-based web conferencing system should be able to promote a web link to any user and let them join (and ideally, present) from any web browser on any computing device.

A few years back, before iPhones and iPads became ubiquitous, Flash seemed like the answer to the web conferencing manufacturers’ prayers. Flash didn’t care whether you were on a Mac or a PC. It didn’t care whether you were on Internet Explorer or Firefox. Adobe was going to take care of all that. You make your web program work in Flash, and it simply works. No downloads, no program installation.

But over the years, several problems emerged. Flash turned out to have security vulnerabilities that needed lots of versions and updating of the underlying player. Some end users upgraded, some didn’t. New features and capabilities came along in Flash forcing vendors to make choices between increased functionality and backward compatibility.

Some organizations have simply banned Flash from their employees’ computers (either as a security measure or as a misguided attempt to prevent work distractions such as YouTube and web games). It’s no fun advertising a public webinar and then finding out on the day of your event that desirable registrants from major banks or government agencies can’t connect!

The AP article has an interesting sequence of recent events. Less than two months ago, Danny Winokur (VP and General Manager of interactive development at Adobe) said that Adobe was equally focused on both Flash and HTML5. Today he blogged that “HTML5 (is) the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across multiple platforms.”

With the accompanying announcement of personnel layoffs and “concentration of focus” at Adobe this week, I can’t imagine they are going to be dumping a lot of resources into pursuing and expanding development of a technology that a chief executive thinks is inferior to a competing in-house development program. In other words, Flash may be here today and tomorrow, but don’t bank on a long-term strategy for it.

And that means the web conferencing vendors who spent so much time and effort developing their products to work well on Flash better start looking ahead and planning for a complete re-write from the ground up. Sounds fun.

 

Technorati Tags: Adobe,Flash,HTML5,web conferencing,rich media

Webinar Overload – Too Many Slides

Far too often, I see presenters quickly skip over a slide, moving quickly on to the next. Sometimes they will flip through several slides in a row before continuing their presentation. Maybe they say something such as “Let’s skip this because time’s running short” or maybe they say nothing and just start talking again at the new position in the deck.

I don’t mean to sound accusatory, but… Oh what the heck… I DO mean to sound accusatory. This is terrible presentation etiquette and is completely avoidable with a little time spent on better preparation.

In most cases, the plain and simple fact is that the presenter has not rehearsed the presentation out loud. If you don’t recite the entire speech, word-for-word as if an audience was listening, there is no way to judge your timing. And we almost always misjudge in favor of too much material and not enough time to get through it.

If your webinar is scheduled for 60 minutes, calculate all the minutes spent outside your presentation slides. Perhaps 10-15 minutes for Q&A, 2 minutes of introductions and instructions to the audience, 2 minutes of wrap-up instructions and thank-you’s at the end, and 2 minutes of dead time waiting for poll results to come in or other interactivity time. So the “60-minute webinar” is very likely to give you only 40 minutes of speaking time. If you create a 60-minute talk, you are doomed to failure before you start.

Then as you quickly skim through your finished slides in a private review, it seems like some concepts are trivial and will fly by quickly. But once you start talking to that unseen audience and you can’t hear any response or see heads nodding, the natural reaction is to fill the silence with more and more words. An unrehearsed presenter will always spend way too long on the first five slides. They dedicate massive amounts of time to introductions, setting up the talk, going over the agenda, and trying to settle in and feel comfortable in this unnerving environment of talking to the air. Those first five slides have now sabotaged the final 10-12 slides.

But let’s say I’m being unnecessarily harsh. You rehearsed your timings, you were prepared, and something in the webinar took longer than planned. You got started late, you hit a technical glitch, you had to spend extra time waiting for audience responses. Now you get towards the end of your talk and you find yourself running long. What do you do?

A well-prepared presenter has an “emergency jettison” plan. You pick a few specific slides towards the end that could be omitted without destroying the flow and continuity of your talk. You plan to present them, but just in case… They are expendable in an emergency. You won’t mention them, you won’t signal your audience that you are skipping things you planned to show them. Your magic phrase is: “You will see in the handout slides that I have included some additional reference material you can study on your own.” That makes the handouts a value-added bonus, not evidence of omission during the live webinar.

But how do you skip those slides without making it obvious? That depends on the type of webinar software you are using. Products that let you upload your slides to the conferencing room ahead of time should always have a way to direct-access a slide. Some of them do this by having you type the desired slide number in a “go-to” box. Some show you thumbnail images or titles of your slides in a list, letting you click on a desired slide to show the audience. Easy. You just have to know how to use the feature.

Products that rely on screen sharing typically involve you showing your PowerPoint presentation in slideshow mode on your computer. A little-known feature of PowerPoint is that while you are in slideshow mode, you can type a number on your keyboard and press the enter key. PowerPoint immediately displays that slide number. So you can type in the slide number following your emergency jettison section and go directly to that point, without flipping through slides too rapidly for your audience to follow.

Your goal is to make the audience believe they are always seeing and hearing exactly what you intended them to see and hear. Don’t give them a reason to make complaints such as “she skipped over content I wanted to see” or “the presenter seemed rushed and had to skim over some points.”

 

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

Audio Options For Webinars

I just had a Twitter exchange (@klmonline) with a reader asking me an oft-repeated question. “Which microphone should I use for webinars?” Let me try to run through your options, which are many and varied depending on the specifics of your situation.

If you are using VoIP for your audio, you need a microphone connected to your computer. Get yourself a good quality USB-connected headset. Even the good ones aren’t very expensive. $50 American is more than enough. Go to Amazon.com, search for USB headset and select Customer Reviews of 4 stars and higher. You’ll get 1200 results! I have had good luck with Logitech, but any of the major name brands are likely to serve you well. Don’t be a penny-pincher. The difference between a $10 and $40 model is significant, and while the percentage price differential is large, is $30 more really that big a burden for a long-term asset? Do not use a desk microphone. They restrict your movement and pick up too many extraneous sounds.

If you plan to speak via telephone, things get trickier. Cell phones are forbidden. You cannot hold a constant volume on a mobile device and they are prone to interruptions, power loss, and dropouts. Speaker phones seem convenient, but are a bad idea. They make you sound distant, they pick up surrounding noises you may not even be aware of, and some cut off the first microsecond of each phrase as they switch from receive to send.

If you are on a budget, just use a standard wired desk telephone and pick up the receiver. Yes, just like we all did when dinosaurs roamed the Earth (about 15 years ago). Sound quality is good on telephone handsets. You needed to develop your arm muscles anyway.

Much more convenient and highly recommended is a telephone headset. But these cost more than computer headsets and can be trickier to connect. Different phones use different connections (some modern phones have a headset jack built in, while others force you to connect an external amplifier between the headset and handset). I have had good luck with Plantronics and Jabra (aka GN Netcom) equipment. A good headset might cost around $100 USD and you might need an external amplifier.

My old setup was a Plantronics Vista amplifier and Encore H101 headset. Now I’m using a GN Netcome GN8050 amplifier and GN2100 headset with good results. The advantage is that I can connect it to both my computer and telephone and switch between systems without needing to swap headsets. I reviewed the unit in a previous post.

I prefer binaural headsets (earpieces on both ears). These are less common than one-ear headsets, but I don’t want to hear outside noises when speaking on a webinar. My office is very quiet, with no other people around me. So I use “sound tube” microphones rather than electronic noise cancelling mikes. I like keeping the extra circuitry out of the voice pickup if possible. But modern noise reduction mikes are very good and are worthwhile if you have a noisy office environment.

I am not a fan of wireless headsets. I admit that they are wonderfully convenient. But I don’t want any chance of signal loss, momentary interruptions, radio interference, or power loss during my webinar. I’ll understand if you choose to accept the low risk in favor of getting rid of the cables.

If you create a lot of prerecorded webcasts you may want to invest in a serious vocal recording microphone. This is not cost-effective unless you really do a lot of voice-over work and need to ensure very high quality. I just upgraded my recording gear to an Audio-Technica AT2020 condenser microphone mounted in an AT8458 shock mount on a boom arm and desk stand. The main microphone competition in this category is the Blue Microphones Yeti. Reviews indicate very close performance characteristics between the two mikes. If you go this route, make sure to also purchase a pop filter to go between the mike and your mouth. It’s a necessity for clean sound. I don’t use this higher quality mike setup for live webinars because it restricts my movements and can pick up mouse clicks or typing as I interact with the webinar software.

If you appear on camera, you may elect to forego the use of a headset because it can make you look “geeky.” Unfortunately this leaves you with two options that can be equally problematic. Most webcam mikes are of mediocre quality compared with dedicated microphones or headsets. You may end up sounding distant and you may pick up background noises. You also have to be very careful about arranging your computer speakers so they don’t interfere with your audio pickup. Angle your speakers away from the webcam and turn down your volume so you can just hear it.

I have used a fancier setup in an attempt to get better quality while hiding the equipment. I plugged in an “FBI style” earpiece, with a clear tube going around the back of the ear and then down my back. I wore a tiny lapel mike (called a lavaliere) clipped onto my lapel. It looked great, but I found that some webcast systems had trouble maintaining synchronization between my audio and video because the two signals were coming from different sources and being processed through the computer separately. Even a 1/4 second lag between mouth movements and sound can be distracting to viewers.

I hope this helps give you some direction as you make your decisions on webinar/webcast audio!

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,online seminar,webcast,webcasting,web meeting,web conference,web conferencing,microphones,computer audio,broadcast audio