The Webinar Blog

Webinar Strategies vs. People Strategies

Seth Godin likes to blog deceptively simple little thought pieces designed to make you consider how to apply his high-level concepts to your business. Today he posted a piece entitled “Do you have a people strategy?” The summary takeaway was this:

All of these media are conduits, they are tools that human beings use to waste time or communicate or calculate or engage or learn. Behind each of the tools is a person. Do you have a story to tell that person? An engagement or a benefit to offer them?

Figure out the people part and the technology gets a whole lot simpler.

This caught my eye because I run into this concentration on technology and tactics all the time in the webinar industry. When working with guest presenters before a webinar, the emphasis is almost always on features:

• Here is how you draw an annotation on a slide
• Here is how you send private messages
• Here is how you run a poll

Don’t get me wrong… These are useful things to know. Making good use of those features can indeed improve a webinar. But I wish more presenters and organizers would spend time on the fundamentals of relating to audience interests, making people want to listen to you, and driving people to new knowledge, beliefs, or actions.

Because as Seth says, thinking only about the tools can too easily distract from the real concern of relating to people on the other end of a rather impersonal communication channel. Your job as a webinar presenter is to look beyond the technology to the people you are trying to educate, influence, or collaborate with. Using the technology well can aid you in your task, but it isn’t the thing that is going to make or break your presentation.

I work with many different web conferencing products. Some have more features than others. Some implement them in different ways. Some have fascinating bugs that prevent me from accomplishing a communication goal in the way I intended. For instance, one well-known product gives me problems when I attempt to use its annotation tools to draw a box or line on my slide while displaying it. The screen tends to go black for me and my attendees. Does this mean I can never highlight a particular point on a slide? No, it just means I think harder about how to verbally communicate to my audience what is important, rather than relying on a tool feature to do it for me.

But even that is a minor tactical detail. Much more important is what I do before the audience ever arrives. I look at the marketing materials that have driven them to attend. I think about their selfish self interests. I plan ways to quickly and explicitly address those priorities in my presentation. The presentation is about the audience… Not about the facts I want to deliver or the tools I use to deliver it.

Are your presentation priorities in order? Are you thinking about the people first and the technology/tactics second? A good presenter and a good presentation do not rely on the tools used to transmit the information. They have a fundamental understanding of and empathy with the people listening. Figure out that people part and the technology may not get simpler, but it becomes far less stressful and critical to your success.

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

How Much Webinar Testing Is Enough?

The answer: Exactly one more test than you did.

Consider the following scenarios:

1) Near the end of your webinar, you plan to display a survey that you created in a third-party application such as SurveyMonkey. You have tested your survey, made sure you have the right link, and checked that it is operational from within the conferencing software. At the end of your webinar, you display the link and nothing comes up. SurveyMonkey’s servers crashed right at that moment.

2) You ran a webinar last week, displaying web content in a co-browser window inside the conference. This week you rerun the exact same webinar using the exact same conferencing software and the exact same content. It fails to display correctly. The vendor put in a version upgrade over the weekend and it introduced a bug that only shows up under your specific conditions.

3) You direct your attendees to a web link during the webinar. To make their lives easier, you use a redirect from a short, easy to remember domain name that you bought (like www.mydomain.info). You have tested the redirect and you know it brings up the correct destination site. But during your webinar, the web page fails to load for the attendees. Your domain host’s forwarding service has crashed and won’t redirect to destination sites.

4) You are bridging streaming audio between live presenters, a telephone conference, and a prerecorded audio clip during your webinar. You tested everything in a trial run to make sure the audio content fed into both the computer and telephone audio streams. When your webinar starts, the sound is unusable, fading in and out. With more lines open, the extra feedback and input sources overloaded the simple echo cancelation that worked during your testing. You needed to change the playback setup in order to prevent feedback.

Cute but improbable hypotheticals? I wish! Every one of these has happened to me personally. The internet is a scary place. Things go wrong in the most unlikely ways at the most unlikely times.

Your plan for reducing the possibility of a catastrophic failure has four parts:

A) Test everything during pre-production and setup. If you leave ANYTHING to an assumption that it will work as expected, that’s the piece that will give you a nasty surprise.

B) Retest critical links and content display immediately before your live webinar. Don’t rely on the fact that it worked last week when you tested it. Depending on the complexity of your webinar, you should be fully devoted to its administration anywhere from 30-60 minutes before show time.

C) Have as many backups in place as you can think of. If you are using a redirect with a short name, also have the long version handy with the full destination URL. If you are linking to ANYTHING on the web, have a plan for how to deal with a situation where it does not come up. Often this is as easy as making a simple Word document available for attendees with all links and resources. With the document in hand, they can visit your sites later when they are hopefully working again.

D) Script some emergency verbiage. Have sentences you can copy and paste into the attendee chat area to let them know you are working on the problem. Have some standard lines written down that you can say to your audience if something goes wrong. Your brain is going to be overloaded when it happens. You’ll be trying to diagnose, fix, figure out workarounds, and deal with confused or angry attendee chat messages. Your ability to improvise a calm and coherent statement will vanish.

Webinars are a great way to interact with many people, live and in the moment. That means that what used to be private frustrations with sporadic little internet glitches can easily escalate into image-crushing disasters that make you and your company look unprofessional. Plan, test, retest, and create backups. It’s the best you can do.

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

SalesCrunch/WebEx Smack Talk Gets More Entertaining

Have you been following the highly enjoyable marketing game that SalesCrunch started last month? They issued a press release announcing “an unsolicited bid of $1 plus 15% equity in SalesCrunch to the shareholders of Cisco Systems, Inc. to acquire WebEx.”

Of course Cisco ignored this marketing ploy, but it got a lot of coverage on major media sites. The audacious plan paid off marvelously in publicity.

SalesCrunch also created a slide show touted as a “Support Document” for their tender offer. It has some fairly nasty direct attacks on WebEx and features some anti-WebEx rants gathered from a web forum. And surprise, surprise -- it seems to promote the use of SalesCrunch as a preferable web conferencing solution (although the slide show certainly couldn’t be a piece of sales/marketing collateral… After all, the contact email is given as pr@salescrunch, not sales@salescrunch!)

SalesCrunch kept the ball rolling with another press release yesterday. In this one, they say they “may have inadvertently started a feud with the networking giant.” They highlight a screen shot showing that if you type “SalesCrunch” into a Google search, you see a paid ad for WebEx. I just tried it myself, and did not see the ad, so I can’t tell whether Cisco cancelled the keyword, hit a daily spending limit, or the screen shot was doctored.

But the little guy isn’t done with its jabs. They registered a domain name that redirects to their web site. That domain name? www.webexsucks.com

I wonder if this will all eventually build to the level of the Informix/Oracle billboard wars that I used to enjoy while driving along Highway 101 in the San Francisco Bay Area? There is an interesting summary in author Steve W. Martin’s telling of the story from the viewpoint of the smaller competitor: “By now, many at Informix wished the billboard wars had never started. It seemed we had awakened the eight-hundred pound gorilla and it was coming directly at us.”

 

Technorati Tags: SalesCrunch,WebEx,Cisco,web conference,web conferencing,web meeting,online conferencing,online meeting

Top 10 Web Conferencing Support Questions

In my last post I mentioned a few things you should ask your web conferencing vendor (or your prospective supplier). I thought I would expand on that topic today.

The last time I broached this subject was all the way back in 2006 in a post entitled “How To Grill A Web Conferencing Vendor.” That article concentrated on product features and the process of formulating an RFP. Now I want to concentrate on the thorny issue of support.

You should have a clear and unambiguous understanding of your vendor’s resources and policies when it comes to support. Do not accept vague reassurances or promises that “they’ll be there when you need them.” Know what is in place before you sign a contract rather than being surprised later.

Here are some specifics to ask:

1) What hours is live support offered? If you offer webinars to global audiences or find yourself racing at night to set up a next-morning event, your vendor’s local 9-5 hours may prove to be a problem.

2) How can you contact support? Will they take a phone call? Do they have a live chat option online? Or do you have to email them? What is the promised response time? Vendors prefer email, then online chat, with phone as a last resort. Users have the opposite preference order. It is much easier to talk through a problem than to type it out.

3) Do they use outsourced support reps or do you get to speak with an internal support/engineering employee? Outsourced support is not necessarily a bad thing. This is often the only reasonable way to offer after-hours support or support for larger communities. But there should be a clear way to escalate a problem situation that is outside the first-level representative’s expertise. How fast can they get you to an internal specialist if needed?

4) Does the vendor offer attendee-level support for people having troubles joining your webinar? This can be a HUGE benefit for webinar hosts. Make sure attendees have a ready and manned live chat or phone option for troubleshooting login problems. Make sure attendees aren’t asked for a support ID or other irrelevant information. They should be processed as quickly as possible to handle volume peaks right at the start of an event.

5) Do you have an account manager or other designated representative who can help escalate your issues or respond to catastrophic problems? A good ombudsman in the web conferencing company can be invaluable (or at least give you the warm fuzzy feeling that somebody cares about your problem and is giving it attention).

6) Is there a way for you to check status of reported bugs? Can you see whether an issue is slated for fix, is pending review, has been verified, has been fixed in production?

7) What is the average historical release cycle for product updates? Let’s say you find a true bug and the company validates it and knows how to fix it. What’s the earliest you could expect to have relief as a user? Companies that put out one release a year will be problematic.

8) Do you get notification of product fixes and new changes placed into production? A company that incrementally upgrades their product all the time but doesn’t alert you to changes can throw off your scripted instructions to hosts and attendees or invalidate workarounds you have put into place to accommodate past bugs.

9) Is support offered for various geographies? Can attendees or users access a local support office staffed during their business hours in a common language for their region? If your US-based corporation does a lot of business in Europe, the Middle East, or Asia this can be a serious consideration.

10) Is support standardized for all customers, or are there support tiers at different price points? It’s amazing how some vendors don’t even mention support options during initial negotiations. They may offer some of the features mentioned above for an increased annual support fee or even a single-event premium. Find out if this is an option.

 

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

Web Conferencing Collaboration News

Two press releases from web conferencing vendors caught my eye today. They are part of the growing trend for web conferencing to be thought of as a normal part of business team collaboration.

AnyMeeting announced a new initiative to give a year of ad-free web conferencing accounts to all employees at seven “incubators and accelerators” in the Los Angeles area. These appear to be companies that support other startups in getting funding and developing their business.

Citrix announced acquisition of Podio, a collaborative work platform company that manages business processes and workflows. The companies say they will integrate the software under the Citrix Online family of GoTo products.

Collaborative web meetings are just part of the daily work fabric now as people engage remotely and while traveling. You will continue to see more acquisitions and bundling arrangements between vendors of collaboration products, while independent vendors keep pushing to establish their products as common office tools and to gain mindshare with workers.

Interestingly, I see more and more of a divide between these team collaboration products and products specifically intended for group presentations in webinars or webcasts. Cisco’s WebEx family has long differentiated its products for specific application purposes (e.g. WebEx Event Center vs. WebEx Meeting Center). Microsoft recently stepped out of the webinar market by sunsetting Microsoft Office Live Meeting in favor of their collaborative web meeting product, Lync.

Often it is possible to make use of a product intended for one use scenario in the alternate setting. For example, Adobe Connect and omNovia both choose to market their products as being equally applicable to collaborative and presentation use. Using a single product for all needs has advantages in cost savings, single vendor support, and ease of user training. But there are tradeoffs as well.

Webinar/webcast products usually include advanced features for registration, reporting, attendee communications, and question management. These may be overwhelming and unnecessary for the casual team collaboration user. Conversely, giving a large audience web presentation on a collaborative platform may restrict your choices for login security and administration of the web event.

Think carefully about your web conferencing needs throughout the entire business when selecting a vendor. It is easy to get caught up in a single department’s short-term requirements and overlook how others in the organization might benefit from the software. Grill your vendor on how they approach the two different kinds of use cases. And find out how pricing is affected by large numbers of small meetings versus a smaller number of large audience events.

 

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

KRM Switches To omNovia Platform

I saw a press release today announcing that KRM has selected omNovia as its technology platform of choice for client webinars. I asked KRM’s chief technology officer, Neal Sipress, if he would be willing to share some background with us on what went into the decision process. He kindly agreed.

KRM is a full services turnkey support organization for clients putting on public webinars and webcasts. They provide the web technology, phone bridges, payment processing, operators, moderators, and other prerequisites so that their clients can focus purely on content.

Neal told me that KRM had enjoyed a good technology partnership with WebEx until Cisco purchased the company and the technology back in 2007. Many of the close contacts and two-way communications KRM had enjoyed with WebEx personnel got lost in the new organizational structure. So KRM moved to Microsoft Live Meeting as its primary webinar platform. Live Meeting was being offered for “next to nothing,” but KRM felt frustrated that they had no sense of participation in a two-way business relationship between users and the technology provider. When Microsoft made it clear that support for webinars on Live Meeting would be dropped in favor of collaborative web meetings with Lync, KRM went looking for a new webinar platform and vendor that was willing and able to work with them on a more interactive partnership basis.

They whittled their choices down to three or four major contenders, with internal team members evaluating different aspects of functionality. omNovia passed their functionality tests for things such as slide display, polling, chat, and multi-platform support, but Neal says that much more importantly, omNovia was eager to establish the kind of ongoing dialog and responsiveness KRM was looking for.

KRM made suggestions to omNovia about additional question management functionality that would make it easier to moderate client events and omNovia incorporated those ideas into a new feature in the software. Neal says they were impressed by omNovia’s business and technical management team getting personally involved to make sure the software supported the real world use cases KRM put forth.

KRM did not run “beta webinars” with their clients on the new platform as a test case. They wanted to make sure there would be no surprises in production use. So the company used internal teams to stage mock webinars designed to stress test all the features. Once the decision was made to start using omNovia, client webinars began in earnest. They have been using the software successfully since the start of 2012.

I asked Neal whether KRM had thought about becoming a channel reseller of the web conferencing software or private-labeling another vendor’s product to make it look like their own proprietary offering. Neal said that neither of these were part of their business objectives. They wanted a true partnership that would benefit both parties, so they are happy to make it clear that omNovia provides the web conferencing technology while KRM provides the audio and production services. If a client decides that they want an enterprise license to support ongoing webinars themselves, Neal is delighted to pass the business along to omNovia.

I asked whether KRM was concerned that omNovia is not as well known a name in the marketplace as other larger web conferencing companies. Did clients express any hesitation about using it? Neal said that KRM’s customers trust them to provide quality events as an entire package. As Neal put it, “Execution competency is more important than marketing muscle.” They have seen no trepidation from their clients in using the software.

And there you have it… A brief glimpse into some of the things that happen behind the scenes when service providers go technology shopping!

 

Technorati Tags: KRM Information Services,KRM,omNovia,Neal Sipress,webinar,web seminar,online seminar,web conference,web conferencing,webcast,webcasting

Enhanced Web Conferencing Comparison From Publicare

Robert Harnischmacher, the managing director at Publicare Marketing Communications, sent me a note letting me know about major updates to their web conferencing evaluation and reviews site – www.webconferencing-test.com (also known as Online Meeting Tools Review).

More features and criteria have been added to the web conferencing testing and review write ups. The site also added a grid showing which web conferencing solutions offer live video capabilities, reflecting a growing interest in video conferencing.

But for me, the most important and impressive addition is the ability to see how products compare on detailed criteria. I have long warned readers to be cautious of comparisons or ranked lists that simply rate one technology product as “better” than another. The priorities of the reviewer almost certainly do not match your own. For instance, you may have budget at the top of your mind, with price playing the major factor in your decision process. Whereas another user may require a specialized capability such as closed captioning or integrated payment processing and is willing to pay a premium for it. Which product is better? The one that matches your requirements.

The updated site adds two versions of user-selectable comparisons. They let you try out the concept with Compare Tools FREE. It lets you choose up to four products and displays a side-by-side quick glance at general category rankings on a five-point scale. These fall under broad terms such as “Functionality”, “Usability”, “Installation”, and “Cost Transparency.” You still need to read the individual reviews to see the details.

More detail is available in Compare Tools PRO. There is a sliding scale for pricing based on how many products you want to compare. Prices are very reasonable… $19 for the first four and $4 per additional product added to the comparison. You select your desired products, pay, and get a download link on screen and in an email. The download is valid for ten days. You also get an invoice sent by email.

The report (referred to as a dossier) is provided in PDF format. I picked four sample products as a test and got a 22-page document. The first 8 pages contain overview and background information about Publicare’s methodology, web conferencing terminology, and general recommendations for thinking about how you plan to use your web conferencing software. The comparisons start on page 9, with the same general overview chart you see in the free version.

The value-add really starts on page 10. Now you get to see the individual features that feed into the high-level rankings. These are listed in a table format with checkmarks indicating whether a feature is present or not in each compared product. Obviously a simple Yes/No checkmark does not tell you the full story, but it gets you started and gives you a good reminder list for the things that are important to you that will need more personal attention and evaluation.

After the tables, you get Publicare’s text review of each selected product. This fills in their observations of key strengths and weaknesses, as well as giving you some indication of pricing. Each review is dated so you can see when it was last modified.

My wish list for future enhancements would include a spreadsheet version of the comparison table. This would make it easy to sort and hide line items to help you prioritize your own ranking chart (they might even include a column where you could input your own weighting units for features. The weights would be multiplied by checkmarks to give you a custom score of which product best meets your priorities).

Obviously, simple checkmark tables can’t and won’t tell you everything you need to know when making a purchase decision. Publicare knows that and says so up front. But you have to start somewhere, and this is a great way to narrow down the wide field of web conferencing offerings into a more manageable short list for your own evaluation. And as I have pointed out in the past, the products in Publicare’s list are graded primarily with an eye towards peer-level collaboration (web meetings) rather than online education or large public presentations (webinars), so you should keep your use case in mind.

Publicare’s Online Meeting Tools Review has come a loooong way since I initially greeted it with cynicism and negativity in its first iteration. I heartily recommend it now as an excellent resource to help users whittle down an overwhelming number of options in the marketplace.

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