The Webinar Blog

40 Tips For Webinar Success

AnyMeeting just sent out a newsletter including free download of an eBook: “40 Tips for Webinar Success.” At first I thought they were sending me a personalized email with 40 tips to help my business. Then I realized they weren’t customizing the tips for Webinar Success – my business name… They were using the term in the generic sense of ways to improve the performance of your webinars.

What is fun about the document is not the short reminders of steps to follow in planning, preparing, and producing a webinar. They are nice little encapsulations of best practices. It’s the fact that each of the 40 tips includes a link to an article, blog post, or recording going into more detail on that subject. I see that I am in there a couple of times with a best practices webinar I did with AnyMeeting. And there are a number of other articles I am looking forward to reading.

Since the document is free and requires no registration, I can’t think why you would not want to get a copy for yourself. If the link in the first paragraph of this post doesn’t work, you can copy out the full address and paste it into a web browser:

http://blog.anymeeting.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/40-Tips-for-Webinar-Success-final.pdf

Thanks for sharing, AnyMeeting!

 

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Objects That Can Mess Up Your Webinar Slides

Webinar technology vendors use different methods to display PowerPoint slides to attendees. One strategy is screen sharing. Citrix GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar are probably the best known examples, along with just about every low-cost solution intended for collaborative web meetings.

Another strategy is conversion of each slide to a simple image (JPG, GIF, or PNG). The vendor may create a call to PowerPoint on your computer through an API and use the “Save As” functionality from within PowerPoint itself to generate the image files. Or they may implement their own conversion algorithm.

A common strategy used by vendors who rely on the Adobe Flash platform for operation is conversion of the slide presentation to a Flash movie upon upload (I’m simplifying for brevity). This can preserve animations and slide transitions. Adobe Connect has built their own proprietary converter. Several other vendors use conversion processing supplied by a third party (usually iSpring).

And then there are a couple of outliers like Cisco WebEx, which convert the PowerPoint slides to the vendor’s own proprietary internal format for display in the webinar.

Each approach has benefits and drawbacks. True screen sharing gives you display of the PowerPoint content exactly as PowerPoint shows it natively. You never have to worry about conversion errors. But you may be susceptible to internet lag delays when redrawing large portions of a slide, and smooth movement animations seldom display smoothly for attendees. When using screen share, I recommend staying with simple appear/disappear builds and not using transition effects between slides.

Converting slides to images creates a nice crisp display, but it usually limits the presentation to one or two fixed sizes rather than allowing infinite scaling to fit attendee screens. Unfortunately, saving slides as static images eliminates animation effects such as builds, movements, and slide transitions in your presentation.

Attempts to convert from PowerPoint to another format while preserving all the functionality of PowerPoint’s slideshow presentation mode within the webinar environment are the most ambitious. These usually allow for infinite scaling of the image for attendees. And most of the vendors have covered standard PowerPoint content pretty well. But I don’t think anybody can guarantee perfect reproduction.

Adobe Connect is extremely good at the game (Heck, they should be… They own Flash!). But I have written about Connect’s inability to reproduce certain fonts due to licensing issues, which can mess up your presentation visuals.

WebEx frustrates me occasionally with seemingly random misconversion of slide objects. Today I loaded a client’s PowerPoint in a room and an embedded table object on one slide showed up with half the text reversed or reading vertically rather than horizontally. On a previous webinar, we had a slide with three “call out boxes” (the shapes that look like cartoon dialog bubbles). Two of them displayed fine. The third one was mangled beyond recognition in the webinar.

I have become very familiar with conversion problems in iSpring as used by several of the Flash-based vendors. iSpring has a terrible time dealing with PowerPoint’s equation symbols. Putting a single equation symbol on a slide can distort all the other normal text around it. I have also found that PowerPoint Smart Art usually comes out fuzzy or improperly bolded after conversion. The same is often true for embedded objects such as tables or graphs. For safety, you may want to convert embedded objects to graphic images and reinsert them on your slides before upload.

As a presenter or host, you must NEVER assume that your PowerPoint slides will look or act correctly in your web conferencing console. Give yourself plenty of time to test, make workarounds, and test again before your live event. And if you are a vendor I have mentioned in this post… Keep working. Your customers spend a lot of time on their presentation content. They don’t appreciate having to redo it to satisfy your limitations.

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing,iSpring,Adobe Connect,WebEx,GoToMeeting,GoToWebinar,PowerPoint conversion

Webinar Performance Statistics From ON24

ON24 just put out a press release announcing availability of their 2013 Webinar Benchmarks Report. The 15-page PDF is available for immediate download, without any registration required. Hurray and thank you for that easy access, ON24!

ON24 has been supporting webinars and webcasts for hundreds of clients over many years, and the report samples data from more than 2300 webcasts held in calendar 2012. It does not give statistics as to demographic information on the webcasts or hosting companies studied, such as country of origin, industry, or purpose (training, lead gen, corporate communications, etc). Honestly, the vendors running the technology seldom have any way of knowing or tracking these distinctions from webinar to webinar.

The report includes not only raw statistics, but recommended best practices for webinar hosts looking to improve the performance of their events. For instance, people register on Tuesdays more than twice as much as on Fridays. And you should always do a “day of event” promotion blast to get last-minute registrants.

Some of the statistics merely teased me and made me want more details. For instance, they show that 11am Pacific is the most common time for North American webinars, but they had no statistics comparing registration or attendance for events at different times. That would be the more useful piece of information. And they showed that 25% of event registrants can be expected to view an on-demand archive of a live webinar. But I want to know what percent of no-shows typically view the archive. That would give us more insight into live vs. on-demand popularity.

Nevertheless, this is great data to have available, and I heartily thank ON24 for making it free for all to see.

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Using Webinars To Spur Conference Attendance

Dear readers, can you help one of our peers by adding a comment to this post? I received an email from Glenn in The Netherlands. Glenn is working on an educational dissertation in the field of Hotel Management. He is looking for data, reports, and evidence supporting the use of webinars to drive paid attendance at a live, on-site conference.

I have plenty of anecdotes and general feel-good statements such as “Yes, webinars are a great way to build awareness of an upcoming conference, stimulate interest, and show people the value of paying a registration fee. Webinars can also drive attendees directly to the conference website or registration form.” As a matter of fact, I just did a rehearsal yesterday with a client giving exactly that sort of webinar in advance of their annual user conference.

But I do not know of any studies, reports, or hard data on the subject. Have you kept any results from your past efforts? Can you track conference registrations directly back to webinar attendees? Glenn needs actual citations for his dissertation.

If you prefer not to put your information on a public forum, shoot me an email or use my online Webinar Success contact form. Those go directly to me and I will either forward your information to Glenn or put the two of you in touch with each other.

If you are reading this post in a feed reader or email subscription, you will need to visit the blog online to leave a comment. You can do that by clicking here.

On behalf of Glenn, thank you for your help!

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing,marketing,meetings,conferences

WebinarListings Goes Away

WebinarListings.com just put an announcement on its LinkedIn group saying that “at the end of the month WebinarListings.com will be no longer actively promoting webinars.” Their web page has a similar announcement.

I first reported on WebinarListings with their beta test announcement in March of 2010. In July of 2011 the owner put the venture up for sale. And now the new owner has decided to cease operations.

WebinarListings.com joins a line of predecessors that have suffered the same sad fate. This blog has reported the launch of webinar listing and search services including my own WebEventSearch.com along with Finervista.com, Webinar-Directory.com, WebinarHero.com, and FreeWebinarDirectory.com. None of them has an active web presence anymore.

On the positive side, some webinar listing services continue to exist: WebinarExplorer.com, WebinarBase.com, EventSpan.com, and WebinarBucket.com all show current webinar listings that can come from any host. Specialty sites such as BusinessExpertWebinars.com and BrightTALK.com have listings of upcoming webinars produced on their own platform and infrastructure.

It is difficult to make a generic open-listing service work. I think the biggest problem is that the generic sites bill themselves as places to find webinars. And that’s not what people are looking for. They don’t want webinars, they want specific information of value to them. The delivery method is incidental. The type of container is not the selling point. This is the reason that grocery stores have aisles with signs saying “pasta”, “cat food”, and “baking goods.” They found that it didn’t work so well when they created aisles of “cans”, “boxes”, and “bags.”

If you promote your own webinars, heed the lesson. Don’t emphasize the webinar. Emphasize the information. Emphasize the value of being able to have two-way instantaneous communications with subject matter experts. Emphasize the value of communal learning and shared experiences. Think like your neighborhood liquor store… People don’t shop there because of the bottles. They shop there because of the booze.

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BrightTALK Presents 2012 Webinar Viewing Statistics

For the past few years, BrightTALK has done something unique and incredibly valuable for the webinar/webcast community. They present an annual summary of key trends, statistics, and viewing patterns collected from the library of client and internal web presentations hosted and delivered on their technology during the previous year. I don’t know of any other vendor who opens up their books in this way and gives such an insight into the real performance metrics of actual webinars.

This year’s look at 2012 data was presented on January 31. I couldn’t make the live event, but BrightTALK is heavily geared towards on-demand access of web events and I was able to easily view the archived presentation. If you want to watch it yourself, the viewing link is https://www.brighttalk.com/r/kCW

If you decide to watch the presentation, be forewarned… It’s fairly dry. Slide after slide of charts, with a very quick interpretation or summarization of the key points to take in on each one. The BrightTALK presenters (Brian Stark, VP of Corporate Development, and David Pitta, Director of Demand Generation) assume that they are speaking to an audience of their own customers who are familiar with BrightTALK’s webinar approach and capabilities.

They also make no apologies for being completely centered on their own company and the webinars actually produced by their client base. I don’t recommend extrapolating all their findings to a wider universe of webinars delivered on other technologies and for other purposes. BrightTALK is heavily focused on supporting demand-generation webinars, and their data almost certainly would not apply to peer-group web collaboration sessions, web training classes, and other types of applications.

BrightTALK uses an innovative approach to help customers not just deliver and record live webinars, but to help them organize content into libraries and communities of viewers, simplify cross-promotion of events, and deliver sessions through embeddable players that can live on multiple website pages, rather than needing a dedicated stand-alone player or console. That approach is reflected in the data and their presentation focus.

The 2012 data came from some 15,000 webinars and 870,000 unique user views (of live and recorded content). Roughly 25-30% of this content was produced as video presentations, which tend to run shorter (maybe 20 minutes on average). The rest were more traditional “slide and narration” webinars, with a mean average of 42 minutes duration.

There were dozens of graphs in the presentation, and I can’t possibly cover all their findings here. I jotted notes on some of the tidbits I found particularly interesting:

• On average, they found that live viewership at the official start time of a webinar was only 38% of the eventual max audience count. It rose in the middle and dropped to 45% by the official end time. The “full audience” sweet spot of at least 90% of the total number of viewers took place between minutes 9 and 40 of a 60 minute webinar.
• The ratio (mentioned above) of video presentations to traditional slide webinars on their system represented a significant increase from 2011 and a huge jump from 2010, when video presentations were negligible. But the video presentations were overwhelmingly used for on-demand playback rather than live webinars.
• Email and direct invitations/promotions still account for the lion’s share of registrants and attendees (58-64%). Social media and search have remained fairly steady for the past 3 years at delivering around 15% of the audience.
• The percentage of no-shows has grown steadily for the past five years. Their 2008 figures showed a 15% no-show rate. 2012 showed a 32% no-show rate (consistent with my findings, by the way).

It would be wonderful if other webinar vendors released this kind of summarized data on their hosted webinars. This is great info to mull over (especially in combination with the larger vendor-independent studies run by Wainhouse Research each year). I commend and thank BrightTALK for taking the time and effort to share their data with the public.

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