The Webinar Blog

AnyMeeting Moves To Installed Client Application

I recently received an email from AnyMeeting informing me of "a big change coming soon to AnyMeeting." The message said that beginning later in October, "all of our customers will access AnyMeeting directly from the AnyMeeting App and not through our website."

The change applies to presenters and hosts rather than attendees, who can still join via a download-free browser link. The AnyMeeting team points out the following set of advantages for presenters made possible after downloading and installing the client software on their computers:

• A smoother experience, with no more "Allow" prompts
• Improved audio quality
• A more streamlined screen sharing experience, with no need to install a screen sharing plugin
• Access the full Account Manager experience directly from your desktop

I understand the reasoning behind the decision. Security prompts are at a minimum distracting, and sometimes downright confusing (the Adobe Flash security popup includes several tabs and multiple controls, which can be overwhelming for a neophyte). Building software as a browser-based application leaves vendors vulnerable to changes in web browser versions, Java versions, and Flash versions -- All of which change more frequently than operating systems. Screen sharing almost always requires some form of local software code in order to run smoothly. And the Adobe Flash Player has come under fire for several years as a potential security threat vector, to the point where some organizations ban its use on employee computers.

But I find it informative that the once-trumpeted competitive differentiator from longtime industry stalwarts such as WebEx or GoToWebinar turned out not to be such a panacea after all. AnyMeeting is going to need to update their public FAQ page on their website, which as I compose this post still says:

It seems that "annoying downloads" may have been the lesser of evils after all when it comes to web conferencing!

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

Video Conferencing in the Workplace

Deneece Berg at technology consultancy Software Advice was kind enough to share the results of a survey they ran, focusing on certain specific aspects of conferencing in the workplace. Their sample base was 389 US-based business workers who indicated that they make some use of conferencing technology in their jobs. The report, including response summary graphs, is available at http://www.softwareadvice.com/voip/industryview/preferred-conferencing-solutions-2014/

To get to the sample size of 389, they started from a much larger initial screening set. The screening question was simply "What is your frequency of conferencing technology usage at work?" 3/4 of the responses were "Never" - those people were eliminated from further study. 9% of the initial set said "Frequently" and 15% said "Occasionally."

The next few questions were a little disappointing to me. They gave respondents a choice of what type of conferencing they used the most and what type they preferred the most. But the choices were only "conference calls" and "videoconferencing." This leaves out what I have to guess is a significant population segment that would identify with neither. If you run a web conference or webinar using slides and voice narration, or screen sharing without live video of the parties, I would call that "web conferencing" - And I wouldn't know how to identify my usage and preferences with the Sound Advice questionnaire. Perhaps this explains why the largest percentage group (43%) responded that they had "No preference" between audio and video conferencing… They might have been unable to select their true web conferencing preference.

The real fun for me was looking at two questions about the perceived advantages of video and audio conferencing. When asked why one would be preferable to the other, people responded in a very interesting manner. You can look at the report for the specifics (I don't want to steal Software Advice's data) but it can be summarized rather concisely… People want to SEE others, but they don't want to BE SEEN.

For instance, respondents said they liked video because it allowed them to read other participants' faces and body language. But they liked audio because it enabled them to hide facial expressions!  How's that for a perfect conflict?

This reinforces something I have written about many times on this blog. Technology (for the most part) is not the gating factor when determining whether to put your presenters on webcam or video camera in a remote presentation. Technology vendors market the heck out of their video capabilities. They will tell you how audiences express a preference for seeing presenters and how it builds engagement, empathy, understanding, and persuasiveness in your remote communications.

But what audiences think of when they express that preference is television presenters. They want someone with years of specialized training and experience in how to appear and behave on camera. They want carefully controlled lighting, background, clothing, and sound that creates a professional and comfortable context for the communication. They don't KNOW that's what they want, but that's what it works out to.

Meanwhile, your presenters want to be able to scratch their nose, swivel in their chair, and look down at their notes. They don't want to worry about whether their hair is mussed, they have a little sweat on their forehead, or their five o'clock shadow is a little pronounced. They don't want to get sabotaged by a coworker walking behind them or two dogs frolicking on the lawn outside the window suddenly seeming more interesting than the presentation.

Video is not a casual addition to a remote conference. It needs to be a carefully considered, trained, and supported activity that adds value and goodwill rather than detracting from the effectiveness of your message because of small perceived imperfections. Sticking a webcam on your computer is easy. Knowing what to do when you turn it on is the hard part.

Technorati Tags: Software Advice,videoconference,video conferencing,conferencing,audio conferencing,web conference,web conferencing,webinar,webcast,webcasting,online meeting,remote collaboration

WebEx Update: Some Hits, Some Misses

WebEx has been quietly rolling out an update to its web collaboration software. I'm not entirely sure of which versions it includes… I know it definitely impacts Meeting Center and Event Center, and my best guess is that it would spill over to Training Center and Support Center as well.

Rowan Trollope is Senior VP and General Manager of the Collaboration Technology Group at Cisco. He wrote a blog post about the new release yesterday, which seems to be the only official announcement from Cisco. There is no press release with details. The company obviously prepped certain industry journalists, as I saw several articles about the upgrade cross the wires yesterday. (You can find them on my Industry News Page in the lower section dedicated to "News Stories.")

The key addition to the WebEx product lineup is a new add-on option for Meeting Center users. You can set up "Collaboration Meeting Rooms" that are easy-access, always available, and dedicated to a single host for quick, ad hoc web meetings using a single link ID. There is no need to start a session and find out the random ID number WebEx has assigned you. I get the usefulness of that for personal collaboration, but it is not my area of focus. So I will go back to looking at the new release's impacts on the traditional Meeting Center and Event Center uses.

Some of the industry articles I have read refer to improvements in VoIP audio quality, which is welcome but hard to confirm or refute through just a few first-hand experiences. Other aspects are easier to see and objectively analyze. Here are some of my thoughts on the new interface:

1) The new interface is certainly more in line with current software interface design style. It will look better on mobile devices and small screens. Key operational buttons now get big and obvious icons (click the image to get a larger view of the new console. Observe the new bigger icons for "Participants", "Chat", and "Recorder" at upper right.)

 

2) The Chat window is no longer open by default when an attendee joins a session (both Event Center and Meeting Center). This seems trivial, but turns out to be a step backward in functionality. Attendees who are new to web conferencing (yes, they still exist and I work with them all the time) don't know where to look on that busy screen, filled with icons around every border. Even when the Chat icon turns a different color, they don't always think to click it. That means a host cannot greet new attendees with a welcome or instructional chat message and know that it has been seen. The Chat panel should be open upon startup, as it was previously.

3) The slide navigation arrows are now harder to use. This threw me at first, as the size of the arrows is exactly the same in the old and new interfaces. I'm talking about this icon area, centered above the slide display:

I couldn't figure out why I was having so much trouble quickly moving to a new slide in the updated interface. It turns out that the previous interface had an active area for clicking that surrounded the arrow in an invisible square. If you clicked anywhere generally in the area of the arrow, it moved the slide. In the new interface, the only active portion of the icon is the arrow itself. So you have to place your cursor precisely on the few tiny pixels that make up the small arrow icon. It is very difficult to rapidly switch your cursor position from elsewhere on the screen to hit the proper spot. Frustrating, and a significant step backwards in end user convenience and ease of use.

4) The meeting number is no longer displayed in a status bar at the bottom of the console window. I'm guessing that goes along with the new direction for Collaborative Meeting Rooms, where meetings don't have individual ID numbers. But in traditional meetings, it's just a touch less convenient for me as a host/moderator if I need to give someone the meeting ID to help them join when they have login difficulties. I have to open the Meeting Information submenu in the command bar to find the meeting number. This isn't a big deal and doesn't affect the average user very much.

My biggest complaint about the new release isn't what they changed, but what they DIDN'T address. I reviewed a post I wrote in June where I summarized six long-standing frustrations with WebEx feature quirks. Of the six, the only one updated in the current release is the addition of an in-session option for enabling/disabling entry and exit tones for attendees:

That is available in Meeting Center, but not in Event Center. In an Event, if you chose the wrong tone setting when you scheduled your event, you are stuck… There is still no way to change it in the session.

I am a bit disappointed in this upgrade. It feels like a quick re-skinning of the same old functionality, and a few of the re-skinning decisions have negative consequences. Cisco can and should do better.

 

Technorati Tags: Cisco WebEx,Meeting Center,Event Center,Collaboration Meeting Rooms,Rowan Trollope,web meeting,webinar,web conference,web conferencing,web seminar,web collaboration,online meeting

ReadyTalk Offers Webinar ROI Calculator

I don't know how I missed the announcement of this great new resource from ReadyTalk. In late August they created an online calculator for measuring the ROI of B2B marketing webinars. It is free on the web and you don't have to be a ReadyTalk customer or register in order to use it. You just fill in the blanks and get a calculated return on your investments in lead generation webinars.

Actually, I should amend one word in that last sentence… "Just fill in the blanks" trivializes the input process. You will want to go through the required inputs carefully and spend time gathering up data and making estimates that may not be obvious or easily approximated. ReadyTalk really tried to include all the components that can affect total invested capital. If you aren't in charge of your company's marketing campaign budget, you'll need to do some digging and call in some favors to get the information you need!

On the returns side, the calculation process is a bit more simplistic. The calculator multiplies out the approximate number of closed sales by a single "Average Deal Size" to get a net dollar revenue number attributable to your webinars. Finding one average deal size is going to throw some companies for a loop if sale sizes vary widely from customer to customer. But you can always compute your own total revenue figure attributable to webinars and use that for the final percentage calculation. It would be nice if ReadyTalk made that revenue field overridable for people who want to enter their own total revenue amount.

"Return" is calculated solely on the basis of generated revenue from sales. You could argue an even greater "Soft ROI" accruing from marketplace benefits such as goodwill, trust, and reduced customer attrition… But assigning values to those has always been a minefield, and I understand why ReadyTalk didn't want to open themselves up to the inevitable criticism that would come from valuations that users wanted to challenge.

This is a great tool for corporate marketers (especially as we get towards year-end and you have to make a case for 2015 webinar program budgets). If you do manage to get an ROI number and are willing to share, this post would be a marvelous place to put a comment with your result. We can compare and contrast, and maybe get an idea of how webinars are benefitting different companies. If you really want to do your peers a favor, add a comment about the industry you are in and the size of your company. If I get enough comment posts to be meaningful, I'll be happy to collate and compile them for easy reference.

If you are reading this in an RSS feed or elsewhere, you can comment on the original blog post at this address: http://j.mp/RTroi 

Technorati Tags: ReadyTalk,ROI,Return on Investment,marketing,webinar,web seminar,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing,lead generation

AnyMeeting Adds Conferencing Options

I have been fascinated by AnyMeeting ever since it began as "Freebinar" in 2010. It hasn't taken long to go from a small startup offering ad-supported free web conferencing to a legitimate player in the small-to-medium business (SMB) conferencing space.

Today the company put out a press release announcing a few new convenience options for users. The first improvement was provisioning for US toll-free teleconference numbers, priced at $0.06 per person/minute. Hosts can also offer local dial-in numbers from more than 40 countries. I spoke to AnyMeeting's David Gerken and Costin Tuculescu (COO and CEO, respectively) about the announcement.

My first question was whether the list of countries includes the Latin America market. This has been a tricky area for phone conference providers. Industry insiders have told me that phone fraud is rampant in many Central and South American countries, so providers are often leery about offering local numbers for meeting attendees "south of the border." AnyMeeting currently has access numbers in seven Latin American countries (including Mexico, which is part of North America but often faces the same anti-access bias). Scanning the list, I see good representation in Europe, but some big gaps in major population and technology centers elsewhere. Countries conspicuous in their absence include Turkey, India, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and Russia.

I next asked about teleconference features. The usual controls are available to mute all attendees, mute and unmute individuals, enable and disable entry/exit tones, etc. But there is no provision for separating presenters into a subconference or "green room" to chat in private while attendees hear music or silence. I tend to use this feature frequently when supporting larger meetings and formal webinars. David and Costin said that AnyMeeting will be adding additional capabilities in the future to better support formal webinars, so I am hoping this will be on their list.

On the web conferencing side of things, the big change in operation is "meeting start modes." AnyMeeting decided not to go the route taken by vendors such as Cisco WebEx or Citrix, offering different products for different conferencing needs. Instead, there is only one product version and hosts can enable and disable options during the scheduling or conference startup process.

To make things more quick and convenient, hosts can now choose a meeting type (video conference, phone conference, web meeting, webinar) and the product will be configured with the most appropriate options set for that use case. So a phone conference contains no superfluous web meeting link in the invitation email. Webinars start with attendees in listen-only mode. For video conferences, meeting attendees join the meeting with webcams turned on.

Whoa… That last sentence tripped me up when I read it in the press release. I challenged Costin and David in an incredulous voice: "You can't be serious!?! Turning on participant webcams by default? That's an invitation to disaster!"

It turns out that it's a matter of semantics. A video conference starts up with your webcam selected for use and showing you your preview image. But you still take a conscious action to enable the image for broadcast in the meeting. This just relieves the user of the responsibility of selecting to use video and selecting the connected device from a menu. Okay, I'm cool with that.

It's nice to see continued innovation and developments from conferencing vendors. I look forward to reading additional announcements as AnyMeeting continues its growth path.

 

Technorati Tags: AnyMeeting,teleconferencing,phone conferencing,web conference,web conferencing,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,video conferencing