The Webinar Blog

Webinars About Webinars

I am delighted to announce that I will be giving two more free educational webinars this Thursday and next. These give you a great opportunity to pick up tips on creating and delivering a successful business webinar. I also answer audience questions live during the session.

This week my host is Citrix Online (makers of GoToWebinar). We are primarily inviting a United Kingdom audience. So if you live in the UK, the 3pm London time should work out nicely. You can see a translation to other time zones at http://j.mp/mar1time. We are keeping this one short… Just 45 minutes in total. To register for March 1, please visit http://j.mp/mar1reg

Next week my host is Adobe (makers of Adobe Connect) in conjunction with BtoB Magazine. The time should be more convenient for a North American audience… 10am East Coast or 1pm West Coast. You can see the time zone conversion chart at http://j.mp/mar8time. I’ll spend a little longer on this webinar… 60 minutes total. To register for the March 8 webinar, visit http://j.mp/mar8reg

 

Technorati Tags: Citrix,Adobe Connect,GoToWebinar,BtoB magazine,webinar,web seminar,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing,online seminar

Book Review: 8 Steps To Amazing Webinars

Sharon Burton has written a new book to add to the small but growing body of works dedicated to creating and delivering better webinars. Titled “8 Steps to Amazing Webinars,” it is available in eBook format on Amazon.com for the Kindle and Barnes & Noble for the NOOK. I got an early edition for review.

The book is nicely compact and straightforward. It is easy to read in a single sitting. Sharon has pitched the book very specifically for first-timers just getting started with the concept of business webinars. She starts with the basic idea of what a webinar is and why you might want to use it in business. She also makes it clear that although presentation technique and slide design are important aspects of a successful webinar, those complex topics are not her focus in this work.

Sharon mentions different use cases for webinars, but marketing and customer communications quickly become apparent as the area of interest. This is not the book to study for an in-depth examination of how to do a 1-to-1 sales demo or how to teach a formal training class via the web. And that’s fine… Marketing and communications is tremendously important in every industry, and webinars are a fabulous way to add results.

The book leads the reader through a high-level view of the many things to consider as you plan to start adding webinars to your operations. From selecting “seductive” topics, to deciding who should present, to promotion, presentation, and administration of the webinar, Sharon lays out ways to approach each aspect.

Sharon’s writing style is personal and conversational. This is not a jargon-laden textbook requiring a glossary. Many suggestions come from Sharon’s own experiences with business webinars.

There were a few times that I felt suggestions were a little over-simplistic or applicable only in specific cases. But it is easy for me to come up with exception cases, as webinars are my entire career and field of study. I completely understand the point of making instructions clear and easy to follow for newcomers so they are not overwhelmed by outlying possibilities and hypotheticals. I like the fact that she includes an appendix with sample slide formats, task lists, and even a sample speaker agreement form.

It also became clear to me that Sharon was most familiar with Citrix GoToWebinar as a sample webinar technology. For instance, she writes at one point that “most webinar software will start rendering your recording when you exit the webinar.” She talks about needing to leave your computer free to perform the processing for an hour or two to let it complete the local process. That GoToWebinar behavior is actually rare among webinar products… most do not rely on the presenter’s own PC to produce the recording file. But I don’t consider this a major problem… GoToWebinar is a very common technology for people to start with when they get into webinars.

All in all, it’s a very nice introduction to the topic. Having a short and readable eBook available at a low price makes it easy for businesspeople to hit the ground running as they put together their first webinar. You can always refine technique and modify specifics to your individual needs and results as you get more familiar with the technology and production aspects.

 

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

InterCall Updates Webcasting Solution

InterCall announced a new release of InterCall Webcast Studio, their platform designed for large audience web broadcasts incorporating streaming audio and video. The company says the new release (which I have not seen) includes “improved self-service, micro-site, mobile and multicasting capabilities.”

InterCall Webcast Studio is primarily a Flash application, letting it take advantage of Adobe’s latest peer-to-peer multicasting capabilities for efficient webcasting to large groups of employees inside a company firewall or network. Because Flash does not run on Apple devices, InterCall also offers a special version of the software for use on mobile devices.

I was interested to see that the company’s press release and product data sheet say that the software detects a viewer’s available bandwidth and switches to an audio-only stream if video performance is unacceptable.

I was also mildly amused to read this quote on the product web page: “Developed from the ground up by InterCall’s webcasting software development division…”  I’m sure that’s in there to highlight the fact that it’s their own software code and not a white-labeled third-party OEM platform underneath, but it gives kind of short shrift to a lot of previous independent development work by Unisfair and Stream57, each of which was acquired by InterCall and provided most of the framework for the integrated solution. Oh well, I guess it’s factual enough in that those developers are now part of InterCall’s webcasting software development division.

InterCall has an interesting and somewhat confusing product catalog when it comes to web-based collaboration. They will sell you Webcast Studio for big streaming events or their own InterCall Unified Meeting for smaller interactive web meetings. But they also resell WebEx web conferencing products, IBM LotusLive, and Adobe Connect. It would be fun to have one of their sales reps do a comparison of the offerings and tell you why you should pick one over another!

 

Technorati Tags: InterCall,InterCall Webcast Studio,Stream57,webcast,webcasting,webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing

Learn Best Practices For Marketing Webinars

This Thursday, February 23, you have the chance to hear me speak on the topic of best practices for marketing webinars. MediaPlatform is sponsoring the webcast as part of a series of presentations on web presentation topics.

We’re keeping it short and to the point… about 30 minutes of presentation followed by 15 minutes of live Q&A. So you can attend the entire thing and still have time to organize your notes before your next meeting.

Even though I am speaking about webinars for marketing, I won’t be marketing anything myself. MediaPlatform told me that they are going to give me the entire session time to dedicate to real value delivery. No fluff.

You can register at http://j.mp/mpfeb23

The webcast begins at 11am California time / 2pm New York time. If you want to see a conversion to your time zone, visit http://j.mp/feb23time

Please add a comment to this post if there is a particular topic point or question you would like me to address during my webcast. If you are reading this in an email or feed reader, you’ll need to click through to the original post on my blog.

Oh, and for my readers who complain that I seldom appear on camera… This is one of those rare times when you’ll be able to bask in the glow of my video image! Hope to see you online on Thursday.

Technorati Tags: MediaPlatform,webinar,webcast,webcasting,marketing,lead generation,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing

The High Cost Of Webinar Security

Do you ask your webinar registrants for contact information such as name, email, fax and telephone number? I’ll bet you try to keep that information secure. At least I hope you do. Imagine how badly your reputation would be tarnished if hackers and spammers could suddenly start contacting your past registrants via those channels.

But you aren’t the only one with that information… It lives on the servers of your web conferencing software vendor. Where do you think you got the reports from? Do you know how long the data stays there? Do you know how the vendor safeguards the data? After all, they are a juicier target than you. They store data for thousands of clients and webinars. Potentially millions of records.

It’s getting more common now for webinar vendors or service-supplying OEMs to accept payments on your behalf for fee-based webinars. If they hand off to a third party payment processor, you should verify that the financial data is completely transparent to the web conferencing vendor and that they never have a chance to intercept the information. But if they actually perform the payment processing themselves, you need to get seriously concerned.

Rick Olson is President and CEO of KRM Information Services. KRM is a services supplier that uses third party web conferencing software and also handles payment processing for attendee funded webinars. Rick shared with me some very interesting documents that they produced for their clients. One is a short 3-page whitepaper with seven key questions to ask your web conferencing provider about their security arrangements. You can download a copy from the KRM website by providing your contact information on www.krm.com/security. Of course KRM assures you that your contact information is safe because they adhere to proper security practices on all seven points!

The second document is not available to you. Rick gave me an insider’s look at an answer guide they produced for their own employees to use in answering prospect or client questions about security. An eye-opening statistic was just what it costs KRM to test and verify financial data security on an ongoing basis.

KRM has to pass two separate audits of their data security. Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standards specify monthly vulnerability scans of externally accessible components. Then there is an annual external penetration test and an internal penetration test to see what damage could be done by someone who gets inside the company’s own firewall.

KRM spends $13,000 a year on those tests by a certified security firm and Rick estimates that it uses another $7,000 of internal staff time.

But that’s the cheap certification! A more stringent security verification is known as SSAE 16. This auditing standard for service organizations handling financial information is filled with confusing acronyms such as SOC 1, which covers internal controls. Rick says that they spend $50,000 a year on SSAE 16 audits and use up another $20,000 of KRM staff time.

So the cost of simply verifying the operation of KRM’s security arrangements is around $90,000 a year. And remember, that doesn’t count the systems, software, and staff time necessary to implement the security levels!

I had no idea the burden of proof was so high for companies handling financial data. Now I see why most vendors simply turn your registrants over to an external payment processor such as PayPal. If they don’t, you should definitely check on them to make sure they aren’t cutting corners to save a buck on security.

Even if they don’t handle financial data, it’s worth asking about the security of your registrant contact information. If you think it’s a low-probability concern, read this article from InformationWeek on data breaches in 2011. A conservative estimate of last year’s data breaches is 535 breaches involving 30.4 million sensitive records. Scary.

 

Technorati Tags: data security,data breaches,KRM,KRM Information Services,Rick Olson,PCI,SSAE 16,webinar,web seminar,web conferencing,web conference,webcast,webcasting

Presentation Style: Perception Is Reality

Do you look at your webinar feedback results? Do you REALLY look at them? Do you read individual comments and use them to refine your techniques?

This introspective topic is spurred by feedback I received last week after presenting on a public webinar as a guest speaker. My hosts shared the feedback comments with me at my request. If you act as a presenter on a webinar, you should ask for your survey as well.

It was gratifying to see numerous positive comments about my presentation technique and hear that people found the content valuable. Don’t overlook those… I find it easy to gloss over the good stuff and go searching for criticisms, which remain in my mind disproportionally. Positive reinforcement is a good thing… Part of your technique refinement is learning what to keep doing because it goes over well!

But then I read two comments that surprised me:

One person said they felt the learning points could have been presented more quickly and compactly or that I could have introduced more material in the allotted time. Another person said that my “nervous laughter” became distracting.

Now, both of those statements fly in the face of my self perception. I actually worried that I was racing through slides and topic points at a pace that might be too fast for some attendees in an attempt to cover a lot of value within a short time. And honestly, the last time I felt nervous speaking on a webinar was back in 2001. I thought my laughter was pleasant and engaging!

So are those two commenters wrong? No, not at all. They told me the way they perceived the presentation. And as the title of this post says, their perception is their reality. It doesn’t matter if I can rationalize the way I did things. They told me the truth, with specifics. If that is the way it came across to them, there is a good chance that others perceived it the same way but did not write it out.

Am I going to instantly change my style? Not dramatically. A single comment by a single person is not a mandate for emergency change. But I’m going to be focusing my concentration and awareness on those areas. I may include some specific questions in feedback surveys asking about such things as “Amount of content” and “Speaker comfort and confidence.”

I’m going to ask my hosts/moderators to tell me what they thought as well (although hosts are usually overeager to reassure and compliment guest speakers). And I welcome and encourage your comments on this post if you are willing to share your perception from a recent webinar of mine.

The goal is to see if the same perception is shared by others. If so, I need to adjust my performance style to create a different perception and a different reality for my audience. What I think I’m doing is interesting to me. But what you think I’m doing is what matters.

Think about it after your next presentation!

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

Gartner’s Take On Web Conferencing

A big thank you to Sierra Peoples from InterCall for posting a link on LinkedIn to Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant report on Web Conferencing. Those can be hard to get if you aren’t a Gartner client, but it looks like InterCall got permission for distribution. You can view the report through this link: http://j.mp/xg89JG (hopefully that works even if you are not a LinkedIn user).

Analyst David Mario Smith published the report last December. He points to continued acquisitions and consolidation in the marketplace (not news to any of us who follow the industry!). He also calls out the growth in integration of web conferencing with unified communications and social media.

Gartner’s trademarked Magic Quadrant view of providers has always been a tricky thing to interpret. Their criteria might not match yours for something like “Completeness of vision” or “Ability to execute.” Gartner says they look at business aspects of the company just as much as product features. So a vendor with less marketing or clearly articulated sales strategy could be rated lower. This often gives prominence to larger, more established corporate entities.

And as we all know, “web conferencing” can include a lot of different niche uses. Gartner includes “webinars, online meetings, messaging and audio communications.” So a product that is perfect for a large-audience one-to-many webinar might not be as good for peer-level team meetings (and vice versa). Gartner also says that they specifically looked at enterprise use products, not those tailored for general consumer use. The quadrant only includes vendors with at least $7 million annual revenue from web conferencing products.

That gave them 12 products in their evaluation list. I was a bit surprised to see Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007 in the list, since that is a sunsetted product in favor of Lync. But it would be silly to leave out Microsoft as a vendor, so might as well continue to include the older product as long as it exists.

iLinc was also included under its previous independent corporate entity. The report mentions the announcement of acquisition by BroadSoft, and says that this could affect the vision and road map for the product going forward.

The final section of the report is a very brief summary of each vendor’s strengths and weaknesses. I won’t quote from that, as I don’t feel like getting sued. But it’s interesting reading.

Check it out!

Technorati Tags: Sierra Peoples,InterCall,Gartner,web conferencing,web conference,online conferencing,web meeting,online meeting,webinar,web seminar,online seminar,webcast,webcasting,David Mario Smith

Evolving Your 2012 Webinar Strategy

This Wednesday, February 8, I will be giving a free talk on ways to enhance your webinar strategies for 2012. Brainshark is the gracious host for this live webinar. As always, I solemnly promise not to do any marketing or try to sell you anything. This is true educational value.

We’ll look at ways to get people to register and attend your events, how to deal with multi-regional/multi-cultural audiences, build engagement, and use social media more effectively.

This is a compact session… Just 30 minutes of presentation time and 15 minutes of live Q&A to address your concerns. So you’ll still have time to get a cup of coffee before your next meeting.

The webinar starts at 2pm US Eastern time. To see a conversion to your local time zone, click this link: http://j.mp/zeulNq

We have lots of registration already, so I anticipate a rocking webinar! Come join us. Just click on the following link to register: http://j.mp/feb8register

Help spread the word… Forward this link to your colleagues who produce or deliver webinars.

By the way… I am accepting questions ahead of time to help steer my content. Feel free to email me or add a comment to this post if there is something you would like me to cover.

 

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

AnyMeeting Giving Away A Kindle

AnyMeeting just announced a new promotion for users of their web conferencing platform. During the month of February, each time you hold an AnyMeeting web conference of at least 10 minutes with 2 or more people, you get an entry into a drawing for a Kindle Fire. Not a bad deal, considering that the basic product is free!

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

MediaPlatform Puts Webcasts On Facebook

MediaPlatform is a webcasting software vendor that sells their product direct (MediaPlatform WebCaster) as well as letting other webcast service providers OEM and relabel the technology.

The company put out a press release today announcing a new capability for WebCaster. Companies can now embed the webcast viewing window on a Facebook page or a SharePoint Online team site.

This is a nice feature for companies taking advantage of those social collaboration platforms. For enterprise clients who use SharePoint as their main work portal, employees can stay inside the corporate firewall and within the approved work environment, without being redirected to an external site for viewing the webcast content.

For companies using Facebook to reach the public, the rewards may be even greater. Once you actually manage to pull a person onto your fan page, you don’t want to lose them to another web page or popup window, letting them close or ignore the rest of your information. So keeping them on the Facebook page while they watch the webcast improves the “stickiness” of your site (a term that online marketers love to bandy about).

Another feature of the Facebook integration is that MediaPlatform has built ties through Facebook’s APIs to automatically pass a visitor’s identifying information through to the WebCaster registration system. So you don’t have to ask people to register with additional type-in fields. If they are signed in through their Facebook account, they can be automatically registered for your webcast and tracked on their viewing activity. (There’s no use getting hot and bothered about this… If you use any third-party apps on Facebook, you’re already having it happen time and time again.)

The first real demonstration of the new capability came yesterday, when Chrysler’s Mopar entity webcast a 75th anniversary celebration event.The technical services provider, TVS Communication Solutions out of Michigan (where else?), decided to stream the webcast live on its Facebook page. Here you can see the webcast running inside Facebook (click to expand).

 

Running embedded video on a corporate website is now fairly common for pre-recorded clips. Embedding live video streams on websites is growing in popularity for events such as sports, fashion shows, and occasions ranging from weddings to funerals. But embedding a live video webcast in a public or enterprise social media portal is a new growth opportunity. MediaPlatform seems to have an excellent competitive position with this introduction.

Technorati Tags: MediaPlatform,WebCaster,webcast,webcasting,videocasting,streaming video,TVS Communication Solutions,SharePoint,Facebook