The Webinar Blog

Win Stock Photos For A Year

Kozzi Images is attempting to make a mark in the competitive field of stock photograph accessibility. They boast that all their images are exclusive to their own site… They don’t carry standard images that are uploaded to other sites. They also have pricing that is significantly lower than the more well-known 800-pound gorillas in the field. As a matter of fact, they let you download 30 photos per month for free, which is enough for most casual usage needs.

And now they are running a drawing that will award three lucky winners a one-year Designers Plus subscription allowing 25 images per day. You can enter via this link:

http://fanpagewiz.com/kozziimages/~cd4fc7d1ed43c6a

The contest ends on June 15, so get your entry in now!

For more information about stock photography, see the series of posts I wrote starting with “Stock Photography Sites.”

 

Technorati Tags: stock photography,stock photo,stock images,Kozzi,Kozzi Images

Web Conferencing Wednesday

Web conferencing vendors must have been saving up their news announcements over the Memorial Day holiday! Today I saw three new announcements:

1) omNovia announced support for Hebrew in their platform. Yes, the entire display changes to a right-to-left direction. Even the controls and time markings in the chat area get flipped from their “Western language” positions. You can see from the following picture that omNovia sticks with the more universal Arabic digits for numbers, which is common practice in Israel for business. The traditional Hebrew numbering system relies on values assigned to letters and would be a nightmare to use in place of standard time codes and so on.

Support for Hebrew is still rare in the web conferencing industry, so if you do a lot of business in Israel, omNovia could be a big help.

2) PGi released a new version of their GlobalMeet conferencing software. GlobalMeet 3.0 adds an iPad app, desktop software to simplify working with meetings and content, VoIP audio, full screen desktop sharing, and cloud-based content management for meeting materials.

3) PresenterNet sent out an email communication letting users know that they can embed live web presentations on their Facebook pages with a new “PresenterNet for Facebook” app. The software is available at http://apps.facebook.com/presenternet

 

And as long as we’re here, I’ll throw in one more article even though the news isn’t quite as fresh as the other three. Tim Siglin wrote up a nice little summary of new features in TalkPoint’s “Convey” webcasting platform.

Convey was announced two weeks ago, and I didn’t give it the mention it deserved at the time. I like the customizable tabs that let attendees see various pieces of information during a conference, such as bios or other web sites. I like the fact that recorded playback allows inclusion of bookmarks to positions in the playback stream so you don’t have to guess at a minute and second mark to find content of interest. And I like the customizability of emails and landing pages.

Technorati Tags: omNovia,PGi,GlobalMeet,PresenterNet,Facebook,TalkPoint,TalkPoint Convey,Tim Siglin,webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,webcast,webcasting

Adobe Leaks New Connect Preview

I don’t think it’s giving away any secrets to say that Adobe has been working on the next release of Adobe Connect web conferencing for some time now. They invited some lucky users to beta test the product, and I got in the program so I could see what is coming.

The terms of the beta program do not allow me to divulge features or functionality before Adobe makes them public. All I can say is that there are some VERY welcome additions coming up that are going to make structured webinars much more effective on the Adobe platform.

Why bring all this up now? Because Adobe just posted their first publicly-accessible sneak peek at new functionality. Alistair Lee added a post today to the Adobe Connect blog. The post contains a video showing enhanced functionality when editing Connect recordings.

It is easier to work with the timeline index that lets users jump to a spot in the playback, you can select certain audience-oriented content pieces that should be visible or hidden in the playback, and you can show attendee contributions such as chat and Q&A while hiding their individual names.

The index feature was always a little arbitrary, but in the new release you will be able to edit the index titles, delete ones you don’t want, and add your own bookmarks at any point in the timeline.

As far as I know, Adobe has not formally announced a target date for general availability of the next release. We’ll just have to keep waiting. I’m hoping they will give out more advance peeks at new functionality like this one.

Technorati Tags: Adobe Connect,webinar,web seminar,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing,web meeting,online seminar,online meeting,Alistair Lee

Citrix Adds Large Scale Webcasting

Citrix put out a press release today announcing availability of a new product called GoToWebinar Premier Event. The new webcasting product fills a former gap in the types of web events that could be handled by the GoTo line of collaboration products.

GoToMeeting has served Citrix well for peer-level web meetings and small group presentations. It also allows live video communication between participants. It handles participant groups of up to 15 (or 25 with special arrangements). GoToWebinar is intended for more lecture-oriented webinars, accommodating up to 1,000 participants. Unfortunately Citrix has not yet enabled their HDFaces video streaming capability for GoToWebinar (although hope springs eternal that it will eventually arrive).

Those products satisfy the needs of individual users, small and medium businesses, and many departmental uses in corporate situations. But they don’t give Citrix entry to the big money events put on at the full enterprise level. How do you handle public announcements from a CEO to all employees? How do you support streaming video out to shareholders and investors of a large company? How do you run educational events for thousands of association members? There is money to be made for a web conferencing vendor willing to support those types of application scenarios.

I got on the line with Bernardo de Albergaria (Citrix Online VP and General Manager of Collaboration) and Lisa Littlefield (Product Marketing Manager for GoToWebinar). I had quite a few questions based on the press release. I was interested in specific operation of some webcasting functions, but mainly I wanted to know how Citrix had suddenly enabled a variety of capabilities that the GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar products could not boast.

The new Premier Event version of GoToWebinar allows attendees to join via web browser access, with no software download. It has payment processing for fee-based events. It supports full streaming video to large audiences. It supports access from iOS, Android, and Blackberry mobile devices. It allows inclusion of prerecorded video clips. It seemed to me that these were significant departures from the GoTo base platform I was familiar with. Had Citrix really been developing a new technology base?

My confusion cleared up when I saw screen shots (and later some sample event recordings) from the product. Although it uses the GoToWebinar name for family continuity and brand identity purposes, it really has nothing to do with GoToWebinar. It is a completely separate product. As a matter of fact, a sharp-eyed person conversant with other webcast products currently on the market might detect a certain familiarity in the look and feel of GoToWebinar Premier Event.

There’s nothing wrong with that. I’m a fan of products that are designed to fit their intended use cases. Just don’t think that because you know how to drive GoToWebinar today, you can pay a little more and instantly move up to a larger audience size. It’s a different technology.

Different as well is the fact that Premier Event is only available bundled with professional services. You don’t just license the software and schedule your own web events when you feel like it, as is the case with GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar. You are assigned a production supervisor who configures your account, sets up registration page customizations, determines whether you need support with extra services such as camera operators and real-time caption transcribers, and monitors the live event.

Citrix has also moved away from its policy of clearly stated up-front pricing neatly laid out on web pages. Standardized price sheets were a disruptive – and welcome -feature when GoToMeeting first came to market. They took away much of the “car salesman” approach to webinar price negotiations that turned off many potential users. You could accurately budget an event just by looking at the web page. This forced many other vendors to follow suit, allowing price comparison shopping.

I’ll miss that transparency with Premier Event, but I have to say I understand it. I don’t post a rate sheet for my webinar support services either! It is hard to put standard pricing out there that matches the wide variations from event to event in required level of services, event duration, and expected audience size.

All in all, I would feel very comfortable using GoToWebinar Premier Event for large scale webcasts. It is more battle-tested than you might think for a new product and I am confident that you don’t have to worry about the “Release 1.0 Curse.” It is use-case specific, with the right features for big webcasts. And if your company already uses other GoTo products for smaller levels of web collaboration, the single-vendor supply line might make your life easier from a billing and support standpoint.

Technorati Tags: Citrix,GoToWebinar,Premier Event,GoToMeeting,web event,online event,webcast,webcasting,web meeting,web conference,web conferencing,webinar,web seminar

Do You Know Of Webinars Done Right?

Loyal readers, can we help one of our own? Ashleigh is looking for examples of companies who regularly host engaging, well-done webinars that are not only interesting to watch but positively impact the organization’s revenue stream (either through direct registration fees or by encouraging donations/purchases/customer conversion).

Feel free to sing your own praises if your company does it well. If you are a technology or service provider, feel free to promote a client who uses you. Or if you have been particularly impressed as an attendee at someone else’s web event, tell us who we should be watching!

I don’t have the bandwidth to watch everybody’s webinars out there, so let’s use some community power to acknowledge webinars the rest of us can use as role models.

Please add your recommendation as a comment to this post. Company names are good, website links are even better. If you read my posts by email, just visit the blog online to add your comment. The direct access to this post is:

http://wsuccess.typepad.com/webinarblog/2012/05/do-you-know-of-webinars-done-right.html

Thanks for your help!

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

Webinar Integration With Marketing Automation

Two press releases crossed the wires yesterday, each touting a similar capability. eTrigue announced new event management features in their DemandCenter marketing automation suite, calling out integrations with WebEx and GoToWebinar. Constant Contact announced a new integration with MeetingBurner.

In both cases, the idea is to make it easier to tie together webinar planning, production, and reporting with trackable and accountable marketing programs. That is a huge need in the industry and I hope the coincidence in press release timing signals a growing trend.

I have seen studies and anecdotal user self-reporting indicating that marketing is the number two use for webinars and webcasts (behind training/instruction). I am purposely omitting peer-level web meetings from this discussion. Training needs are often covered by specialized product versions with features to support those needs in the webinar. And several products pursuing that strategy have integrations with third-party Learning Management Systems software.

But I am not aware of any similar specialized versions of webinar software intended specifically for marketing applications. So these integrations with external marketing automation programs are particularly important and beneficial.

What are some specific capabilities that marketers need and seldom get in their webinar software?

1) Registration page customization. I’m not talking about adding a few custom fields to the webinar vendor’s fixed format. I’m talking about extensive control over formatting, colors, field position, dynamic fields, pre-populated dropdowns, and many other things influencing the effectiveness of a registration page. You can read a longer discussion in a blog post from February 2010 that is still criminally valid two years later.

2) Registration page analytics. I don’t know of a single webinar vendor that reports on completion versus abandonment of registration pages. They wouldn’t want you to see those numbers until you could do something about it. And you can’t. ARGGHHH!

3) Email customization. Webinar vendors often give far too little control over the emails that get sent to registrants. Sophisticated users should be able to override the source and reply-to addresses, internal formatting, headers/footers, and should be able to work with multi-part formats for text and HTML recipients.

4) Lead source tracking. Different marketing campaigns should report where visitors came from to track the effectiveness of different content and channels. That information needs to be associated with registration, attendance, and post-webinar lead quality, ideally all the way up to customer conversion.

5) External registration. The biggest webinar vendor/product in the market still doesn’t let you upload registrants into an event from an external CSV or TXT file. How is that possible?

6) Follow-up link integration. If the webinar software records an event to a server location, the viewing link should be automatically accessible as a field in follow-up emails.

These are just a few of the most obvious examples. The basics of webinar usage are well-understood by now. It’s time to step up the game and give more support for that significant segment of the webinar user population – the marketer. If the webinar vendors can’t or won’t support their customers’ needs, I’m happy to see more work being done by the marketing automation vendors. Keep ‘em coming, guys!

 

Technorati Tags: marketing,marketing automation,eTrigue,DemandCenter,WebEx,GoToWebinar,event management,Constant Contact,MeetingBurner,webinar,web seminar,webcast,webcasting,online seminar,web conference,web conferencing

Come See Me At The Presentation Summit

Get your tickets now! It’s a long time to October, but you can save $100 if you register this month for the annual Presentation Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona. From October 7-10, you have the opportunity to learn and refine presentation skills, led by a bevy of experts sharing practical advice.

I was honored to accept an invitation to present twice during the conference. I’m not entirely sure, but this may be the first time they have included sessions devoted to presenting to remote audiences as opposed to general presentation skills for in-room presenters. The extra focus on web presentations shows how important it has become to include web-specific skills in your repertoire.

On October 8, I will present a session on audience engagement in web presentations… How do you work the room when you can’t see the room? And on October 10, I will give tips for appearing on video in a webcast or video conference.

The Summit includes keynote addresses for all participants and “select your interest” tracks where you can choose between talks oriented towards designing, building, and delivering presentations in a variety of contexts. Many meals are provided, and if you have never visited Scottsdale, it is a lovely suburb of Phoenix.

I’m looking forward to spending time with presentation experts I have only met online. And I can’t wait to see Chris Bliss do the opening keynote live and in person. I wrote about Chris on this blog a full six years ago and now I get to meet the guy!

Check out the schedule, the speakers, the venue, and the topics online at www.PresentationSummit.com. I hope to see you in Scottsdale!

 

Technorati Tags: Presentation Summit,presentation tips,speaking tips,presenter training,speaker training

omNovia Adds Webinar Features

omNovia doesn’t put out formal software releases with version numbers. Instead, they just slip new features into production every so often, which means I always seem to be playing catch-up with new functionality. They announced three new enhancements this week.

AV Remote Control gives a webinar moderator control over the webcam and microphone of other presenters. The moderator can adjust video quality or microphone volume, and can instantly kill the video or audio feed from a given presenter. I like this for two reasons. The more dramatic and entertaining scenario is the classic one where a presenter does not realize s/he is broadcasting live. As they start trash talking someone or walk out of their hotel bathroom with their robe hanging open, the moderator can act quickly and unilaterally. Fortunately that doesn’t happen too often. Far more commonly, the moderator may want to balance volumes across several presenters. Being able to adjust their microphone controls yourself is easier than teaching them where to look and having them try different settings while you tell them “A bit more, no… a bit less.”

In a similar vein, they made it a little easier to grant presentation controls to attendees in a web meeting. The moderator can choose whether to broadcast an attendee’s microphone, webcam, or give them presenter utilities such as showing their desktop or uploading documents.

And finally, they added an ability to associate a biography with a registered user. When setting up accounts for your presenters (or afterwards), you can type in biographical text or link to an existing web page with their information. Attendees can click on the presenter’s name in the participants list and choose to see that person’s biography. Moderators can also choose to show the biography to all attendees within the session.

I’m all for features that make my life easier as a webinar moderator, so these additions are very welcome!

 

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

Active vs Passive Webinars

You can make your webinar descriptions, invitations, and presentations more effective. Engage your audience with active terminology.

Don’t run away yet… I am not going to turn this post into a rehash of that long-ago grammar class in school that made you permanently hate the English language in general and writing in particular. You can look up detailed descriptions of transitive vs. intransitive verbs somewhere else. In fact, some of what I will recommend doesn’t match up with formal definitions of active vs. passive sentence construction at all. So you grammar jocks can put away your well-thumbed copies of “Elements of Style.”

My use of “active” and “passive” is more generic and high level in this particular context. Are you inviting your audience at all times to take part in thinking about your topic and take an active part in the webinar process? Or are you just “putting things out there” in the hopes that someone will see the value?

Let me use some examples to illustrate the difference.

Do your webinar descriptions or invitations include a section like this?

This webinar will cover the following points: 
    - Recent changes to the law
    - Things to look out for
    - Best practices

Your audience is not involved in that description. They are passive observers of the fact that a webinar including certain subjects is going to take place. Yawn. Why not make them a part of the process instead?

Attend this webinar to gain the following benefits:
    - Discover recent changes to the law and how they affect you
    - Learn what you should look out for in your business
    - Review best practices and how to apply them in daily operations

The same distinction occurs during your presentation. You can present slide after slide of data points, facts, and best practices. All your audience can do is sit back and let the data wash over them. Or you can invite them to be active members in a conversation about the information.

- “What do you think is the single most important thing you can do in this situation?”
- “Think about how you can apply this in your business.”
- “This circles back to what I introduced at the start… Do you remember our first principle?”

Now you are reaching out to the audience and letting them know that you expect them to interact (at least intellectually) with the information.

When you invite attendees to participate, give them a command. Instead of:

- “I wonder if anybody out there has run into this situation?”

Change it to:

- “Have you run into this situation? Type in the chat area and let me know.”

Review your promotional copy, your slides, and your presentation speech. Would you have to alter them if nobody was listening and you were just listing descriptive information for data archival purposes? If the answer is no, then you are doing a disservice to your audience. Bring them in to the game. Make them believe you care whether they are there or not. Invite them to be active in the sharing of information, not part of a passive, unseen audience that doesn’t matter.

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

Should Webinar Presenters Split Up?

Let’s examine a common scenario… You plan to give a webinar presentation with another person, each of you taking some time as co-presenters. Is it better to be in the same room or in separate physical locations?

My preference is for the latter. But I recognize and want to go over the arguments for both approaches.

Presenters who prefer to stay with each other in a room typically like the following aspects:

• You can run the presentation from a single computer. There is no fumbling around as you try to pass presentation control back and forth from one person to another.
• It is easier to maintain energy when you can see someone listening as you speak.
• You can interact more naturally with your colleague, talking conversationally to each other. You can pick up nonverbal cues that tell you when they have finished a statement or need help with an answer.
• You can signal each other when looking at typed audience questions to decide which one to address next and who should take it.
• It is easier to reserve one quiet room in the office than to find two!

I like keeping the speakers separated for the following reasons:

• Sound quality is better when each person has his/her own microphone or telephone.
• Using separate computers and logins lets each speaker participate in typed chat and private messaging while the other person is presenting.
• It forces each speaker to concentrate on and connect with the audience rather than the co-presenter.
• It gives you equipment redundancy in the event of a computer or phone malfunction.
• It helps to eliminate background noises as the non-speaker shuffles papers, moves a chair, types, etc.

Looking over the five bullets on each side of the discussion, it seems to me that the majority of the arguments in favor of staying together are that it feels more familiar, natural, and convenient. Undoubtedly true! But sometimes in order to create a quality experience for the listener, presenters need to take on the burden of adapting to the needs of the medium.

TV presenters know to hold their hands up unnaturally high when gesturing to keep them in frame. Radio personalities learn how to maintain a vocal connection with their unseen audience. Webinar presenters can (and easily do) adapt to presenting with remote colleagues when given extra time to plan and rehearse the presentation before the live event. I help people through their unfamiliarity with this style all the time.

I simply have found over many different web events that people adapt much more readily than electronics do. I can help a person speak more naturally in “solitary confinement” with a little extra practice time and hints. But I can’t help a speakerphone transmit better sound when two people are hunched over a single computer, facing each other instead of the mike!

What do you think?

 

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