The Webinar Blog

ON24 Releases 2014 Webinar Benchmarks

ON24 will publicly announce their latest Webinar Benchmarks Report next week. But they gave me a sneak preview and allowed me to write about it early, with a link so you can get a copy immediately.

I have been covering ON24's annual webinar benchmarks study since 2011. The 2011 report was a little hard to interpret on some of the data points and some of the information seemed more academic than actually useful as a guide to those trying to create more effective webinars.

The 2013 report (covering calendar year 2012) was more useful, adding things such as the most common times for webinars, but I wished for more comparative information on effectiveness of different tactics.

Someone at ON24 must have been listening, because the new 2014 report (covering calendar 2013) is a tremendous leap forward in practical utility for webinar hosts. The information captured and reported is a fantastic guide for those wanting to measure and improve the performance of their business webinars.

If you just want a quick "cheat sheet" version of the critical data, ON24 summarized it into the now obligatory infographic format. Here's just one small snippet to pique your interest:

Right there you have information to act on. 58% of live webinar registrations occur within one week of the live date, with more than ONE QUARTER of registrations pulled from the day of the event! Ready to adjust your marketing and promotion tactics? More tweets, more last-minute blasts. I would venture to guess (they didn't track this) that final-day registrants are also more likely to attend. So it could be a double-win if I'm right.

The report contains plenty of other great data for you to consider, but I don't want to steal all their thunder in this post. You'll find what days of the week get the most registrations and what days get the highest live attendance. You'll see some surprising figures on what kind of response rates are common for attendee interaction and contribution in webinars. And you'll get a sense of typical attendance to registration ratios (although this is more useful when filtered down for comparison against events similar to your own, accomplished with ON24's Benchmark Index tool).

I do want to call attention to a final combination of two separate statistics from the report. ON24 studied live and on-demand webcasts lasting 45-60 minutes. They found that viewing time for live webinars keeps increasing year to year. The latest report lists an average time in session of 56 minutes… Quite a leap from 2010's average of 38 minutes! But time in session when watching recorded webcasts is now at 26 minutes. Your audience will simply not sit still as long for recorded content. You need to recognize this and accommodate their preferences. Edit your recordings. Remove "fluff." Break them into shorter topic-specific segments. Your content will be much more effective. I wrote a post about this all the way back in 2008 and it hasn't aged a day. In fact, the importance is higher than ever.

I can't commend ON24 highly enough for tracking, analyzing, summarizing, and sharing this information for free. It is invaluable data that you should factor into preparation, promotion, and presentation of every webinar you host. Measurements and standards are hard to find in our industry. Take advantage of this gift.

 

Technorati Tags: ON24,webinar,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing,web seminar,online seminar,Webinar Benchmarks Report

Amazon Deals On Logitech Accessories

The Amazon "Gold Box Deal of the Day" (Tuesday, May 13) features Logitech input devices. If you need a headset or a webcam for your webinars/webcasts, today would be a good day to buy one.

I saw that they have the Logitech HD Pro Webcam C920 for half price (USD $49.99). I use that webcam myself and I have been happy with its performance and clarity.

You can also pick up a Logitech ClearChat Comfort/USB Headset H390 for USD $22.99. I don't have that model, but I have used other Logitech USB headsets in the past and generally find them to be good price performers.

So there you have it. This blog has turned into a shill for The Man. All credibility gone. No doubt tomorrow I'll be trying to get you to buy partial ownership of a timeshare condominium.

 

Technorati Tags: Amazon,Logitech,webcam,headset,webinar,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing

Improving Information Delivery In Webinars

My last post was something of a personal tirade about how recorded videos are inefficient for delivering information to a web audience. I promised to relate that to webinars, so here is the follow-up.

The first thing to acknowledge is that live presentations have a different dynamic and expectation than prerecorded presentations. Audiences listening to a presenter in real-time are more willing to "build a relationship" with the story and the storyteller. They will give up time in exchange for rapport.

Web viewers looking for available information on a subject are much less patient. There is no illusion that they are engaged in a two-way relationship with the storyteller. They want what they came for, they want it fast, and they want to move on to their next interest.

How do those facts impact your webinars?

1) Don't make a live webinar sound prerecorded. Your audience's gift of extra time and attention is only given to speakers who engage with them. If you sound like you are reading a script or giving a recitation to the open air, you might as well be a recording. If you don't acknowledge and interact with your listeners, you might as well be a recording. If you merely read bullet points off your slides, you might as well be a recorded Slideshare.  As soon as your audience recognizes one of these behaviors towards them, they switch their response and expectations to "recording mode." You don't want that… Recording mode is a LOT less tolerant!

2) Add non-linearity to your live webinars. Instead of going from slide 1 to slide 40 in sequence, separate your information into subtopics. Ask your attendees to vote on which is most important to them and what you should cover first, next, last. You can still get through everything you wanted to say, but you give your viewers the illusion of control. They feel in charge of the content they receive.

3) Edit your archive recordings. If you don't get much traffic on your webinar recordings, this isn't cost- or time-justified. But if you do get a lot of recording views, it is worth spending extra time and effort on them. Edit the recording. Remove pauses. Remove instructions only useful to the live audience. Remove waits for poll voting. Clean up areas where the presenter had to fumble for the right words. Make the recording play back smoothly and with respect for the viewer's time.

4) Subdivide your archive recordings. If at all possible, look for opportunities to break long webinars into shorter topic-specific recordings. If the original presenter did not set up each subtopic in a way that sounds natural for it to stand on its own, record a separate introduction and closing (this can be another voice acting as an emcee) and then transition to the section of the webinar concentrating on that piece. This lets people find the recorded content of interest more quickly and easily and lets you build links between different recordings giving you more available web content and more opportunities to collect clicks.

5) Add bookmarks to your recordings. If turning your long webinar into mini-recordings is too difficult, see if you can create bookmarks allowing viewers to jump to an area of interest. Some webinar technologies have this functionality built in, with others you will have to use third-party video editing software such as Camtasia.

6) Create recordings as separate content from live webinars. This is the least efficient approach from the viewpoint of the hosting company, but the most effective and welcomed approach from the audience's perspective. If the majority of your traffic comes from views of recorded content, design that recorded content specifically for on-demand use. If you can afford it, use applications built to provide extra on-demand functionality. Brainshark lets on-demand viewers branch to different sections of content or to different recordings while tracking their behaviors. Articulate lets you create graphic-driven interactors such as hotspots, tabs, and rollover callouts. Prezi lets you create nonlinear presentations allowing the viewer to zoom into and out of detail. Adobe Captivate lets you build multi-level tables of contents to organize navigation. There are plenty of other tools as well. The goal is to give the viewer the power to quickly find, consume, and supplement information in small, easily digestible chunks.

Yes, all of these suggestions take extra time and effort. But the result is something that sets your content apart from all the other presentations just thrown onto the internet with an attitude of "sit back and take it!"

 

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

Video Is Killing Information Delivery

My name is Ken Molay. I write a blog about webinar technology, news, and best practices. In this post I am going to talk about the reasons online video is lowering the effectiveness of communication. The internet started as a place where people could share information with others interested in the same subject. It was comprised of things like interest groups, bulletin boards, email lists, and subnets dedicated to specific topics. Then the World Wide Web came along and shattered the initial concept by creating a mass distribution and broadcast paradigm, where you could just post information on publicly accessible web pages without worrying about whether it was reaching a specific audience. People went "surfing" to see if maybe there was something interesting to capture their attention. Sometimes there was, and sometimes there wasn't. It took a while for the mass media industry to catch up with what private individuals and then corporate entities were doing with brand awareness and the revenue potential of large viewership impressions, but by this point in 2014, the communications industry has caught up with a vengeance, ruthlessly competing for clicks and "time on page" by teasing the most salacious and hyperbolic headlines and photos possible to encourage additional clickthroughs.

Which brings me to the point about why video sucks

Did you read that whole first paragraph? Really paying attention? In most cases, the answer is no. I worked hard to create an awful introduction to my topic. Long, rambling, filled with background and history that is only tangentially related to the headline that got you to click on this post.

But you didn't have to give up on the entire article. You could quickly scan past the introduction block and spot a sentence that related to the subject line. "Maybe this is the spot where the information starts." I even gave you a helpful visual cue by bolding a subhead to help organize the structure.

Video for information delivery is a time waster

Video kills our ability to be efficient learners because it is ruthlessly sequential. You cannot ignore the introductory material or visually scan to a spot where your interests are being served.

A video presentation usually focuses first on the presenter - even though your interest in the story was not based on who was presenting it. Then it has to supply some background and context - because some members of the viewing audience might not be familiar with it and we have to bring everyone up to a minimum common denominator of understanding. Then it introduces evidentiary information - some of which might be new to the viewer while other pieces are already known. And if we are lucky, it makes a point at the end and provides new insight for the viewer.

Web text avoids video's problems

The structure of text on the Web makes this process ridiculously easy. Don't know the background? Click a hyperlink to read previous stories that introduce the topic, then come back to this story. Want to know more about the presenter? Click a hyperlink to read the biography or swoon over pictures of the gorgeous hunk/bombshell. Interested in one particular piece of information? If your author is nice, s/he organizes subheads to help you quickly find your way to specific topics. Need a visual to help understand something better? It can be embedded inline with the verbiage to highlight and enhance understanding directed to that one point.

Slideshare is as bad as video shoots

I am using Slideshare as shorthand for an entire class of online presentation products. Apologies to them, but kudos for getting big enough to immediately embody the concept of a whole category of software! I'm talking here about products that let the viewer click sequentially through slide after slide of information. Yes, it's nice that viewers control their own pacing. But they still have to see every slide, often reduced to a single sentence or even a portion of a sentence and requiring multiple clicks just to complete an analogy or thought.

Take a look at this presentation on Digg. Click on the animation to advance it.

The author, Daniella Urdinlaiz, has put a lot of work into gathering up useful information and illustrating it with engaging graphics. Nice job and I don't mean to malign her in any way.

It's the delivery mechanics that bug me. After the first 20 clicks to see portions of sentences appear in sequence, I simply lose interest. I have no idea how long it is going to go on and I feel like I can't jump to information about a particular fruit of interest.

Compare Daniella's presentation to this similar article: "Seriously, Stop Refrigerating These Foods" by Christopher Snow on Reviewed.com. Christopher uses sub-heads so you can immediately scan to a type of food and get the desired information of interest. Even though it is a long article, your eyes can take in a complete concept or useful tip at a single glance.

The information is good information in both places. Daniella's looks more engaging and has a higher "content density" of information versus screen space. But I argue that Christopher's has a higher "content density" of information versus time needed to absorb it.

Daniella's is preferred by providers… They can embed more of these little title-slide snapshots on a single page and encourage more clicks, building value for advertising and site engagement scores. It is undoubtedly better suited to mobile viewing. But as a busy professional, I value my time over screen space, so I prefer Christopher's version.

How does this relate to webinars?

I admit that this post is partially just a personal rant railing ineffectually about how I hate change and how "life was better when I was a kid and bread cost a nickel and we knew how to respect our elders." So sue me.

But I feel a responsibility to keep at least somewhat on topic, so in part two (now online... click here) I will discuss how to think about the way your audience takes in your information in both live and recorded formats so you can make your webinars more effective and less frustrating for your viewers. 

 

Technorati Tags: online video,Slideshare,web presentation,Daniella Urdinlaiz,Christopher Snow