The Webinar Blog

Time To Kill The Webinar?

"It's time to face the facts: The webinar is a tool that's just not effective. Let's put it out of its misery."

That is the provocative subhead of an article on www.inc.com written by Justin Bariso: "Why It Is Time to Kill the Webinar"

I happen to disagree with Mr. Bariso (no surprise, given the way I make a living!). But let's take a look at his arguments and see what has led him to such an extreme conclusion. I encourage you to read his entire article. I'm not going to lift much direct text, as I don't want to waste time or space, but I'll try to paraphrase his key evidentiary points succinctly.

1) Many presenters do not have good speaking technique, and instead just read their slides out loud. "In other words, a webinar."

>> Right problem analysis, wrong conclusion. Bad presentation is bad presentation, whether in a conference room, on a stage, or on the web. Reading slides aloud to your audience is NOT a webinar. It's just bad presentation technique.

2) Most webinars try to convey too much information. Attendees forget 90 percent of what you present within two days. So when they go back to try to find your main points again, they have to spend too much time searching through the recording for the few things they care about.

>> Right problem analysis, wrong conclusion. ALL informational presentations suffer from memory impermanence. If you were presenting a keynote on stage in an auditorium, the audience would remember the same limited number of facts. Maybe if there was an audio recording of the speech, they could scan through it linearly, trying to find the things they wanted to review. Same as a webinar.

The web-based medium is not the problem. The problem is supplying the right supporting materials for different uses. If you want your audience to have convenient and effective review materials, create them. They are separate from the presentation materials and serve a different need. Your supporting materials may be in the form of an e-book, a white paper, a quick review "cheat sheet", a data sheet, or a dedicated web page with FAQs and helpful links. Webinars are not the problem, poor support of your audience is the problem.

3) Filler words are distracting and there is nothing else to focus on during a webinar. Attendees can't see the presenter and sit and stare at the same slide for 10 minutes at a time.

>> Right analysis, wrong conclusion. Poor speaking habits, filler words, and static visual supports are as much a problem in local presentations as they are on the web. Almost every webinar technology available today has the ability to show an image of the presenter if desired. Certainly every one of them can display slides as fast as the presenter wants. The webinar medium is not the problem… The problem is presenters who don't care enough to work on speaking technique, effective materials, and proper use of video technology (if desired).

4) Webinars present distractions created by audience interruptions. Mr. Bariso cites a webinar where his line was open and his 2-week-old daughter interrupted the speaker. And the presenter didn't handle it as quickly and as smoothly as Mr. Bariso would have liked.

>> There would have been just as much distraction and far less ease of solving it if Mr. Bariso had brought his 2-week-old into a seminar hall to listen along with him. Webinars solve this situation much more easily than any other medium. The host or the presenter should have muted attendee lines while the main speaker was presenting. This is easily accomplished in most technologies. The same scenario applies to good old fashioned telephone conference calls. I don't know why Mr. Bariso chooses to give webinars the blame.

5) Slideshare recordings or in-person presentations like TED are the preferred way to reach mass audiences. "What about questions from the audience? That's what the comments section is for."

>> Really? Interactive questions where you get an immediate answer from a subject matter expert are less useful than going back and forth on website comments? Come on… This is provocation for the sake of it.

As for Slideshares... Text on slides is about the LEAST effective way of communicating written information. I notice that Mr. Bariso wrote a full article to make his points… Not a series of pithy slides with one sentence each.

Recording a presentation made in person (such as a TED talk) does not eliminate the problems of poor speaking habits, difficulty in reviewing specific points, or having poor visual materials. TED talks are effective because they are taken seriously, by professionals who treat their presentation as an important task worthy of serious construction, refinement, and practice - with consideration of how it comes across to the audience. A good webinar presenter does exactly the same thing. All that changes is the delivery mechanism.

The final point doesn't get a number, because Mr. Bariso never addresses it himself. The subhead of his article says the webinar is a tool that is not effective. How does Mr. Bariso define "effective?" He certainly addresses his own impressions and preferences as an attendee. But effectiveness also applies to the hosting company. Are they using webinars to be effective at lead generation? Customer education? Product/company awareness? Corporate communications? Delivering consulting, services, or knowledge transfer to a wider audience than they could reach in person, while charging for the content? Starting an engagement process and dialog that can be extended and expanded into further communication? Large numbers of businesses find webinars extremely effective for these needs and more.

I applaud Mr. Bariso for calling out bad presentations and trying to raise awareness of the negative effects caused by poor communication techniques and materials. He is spot on, and those are issues I have been battling for many years on this blog and through consulting and training services for companies. But trying to pin the blame on the medium of web communications is shortsighted and unjustified. The only thing a webinar does is make it easier to put your bad presentation in front of more people, more conveniently!

Technorati Tags: Justin Bariso,presentation technique,presentation tips,webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,webcast,webcasting,online presentations,online meeting

Failsafe Your Webinar Recording

I often talk about the importance of having failsafes and backup alternatives in place when presenting a live webinar. But how often do you think about failsafes for your webinar recording?

Most reputable webinar and webcast technologies include built-in recording capabilities. They create an archive version of your live event that can be watched later as desired. Each vendor approaches the task in their own way… Some record directly to their servers in a proprietary format. Some record locally to the host's computer disk. Some record in a standard format such as MP4 and some go through a conversion step to create a standard format file.

In many years of webinars with many different technologies, I have lost recordings in a bewildering variety of ways. WebEx created a recording that contained no audio. GoToWebinar crashed during a format conversion step, erasing the source file. omNovia had a server bug that erased audio from months-worth of previously usable recordings.

Even when your recording seems to be fine, it may only be accessible while your account is active. What happens if you switch to a new vendor or close your web conferencing account?  BrightTALK has a clause in its User Agreement that states: "Upon termination, suspension or expiration of this licence, You shall no longer have the right to use the Services or display, download or make available any Content from the Site. 'Content' means all webinars and other content that is published on the Site including, without limitation, content in Public Profiles, video, music, audio, photographs, images, text, trade mark, copyrighted work, any digital file, any live or recorded event." Does that mean you would not be allowed to reuse your own webinar recording in another format and host it elsewhere for display?

When I host a webinar where I know that the recorded archive version is important, I try to give myself the maximum number of opportunities to reconstruct the recording if something goes wrong. In addition to recording via the vendor's built-in functionality, I log into a second computer as an attendee. Then I use a screen capture program (Camtasia in my case) to record the presentation window exactly as the attendee sees and hears it.

If the webinar uses a third-party telephone conference call, I try to record the audio directly from the phone line as a separate audio recording. If the audio conference provider does not offer a downloadable recording from their service, I use my trusty old Dynametric hardware phone tap and bridge the phone to my computer for recording. The audio from the phone is usually higher quality than the compressed streaming audio captured by the web conference software. If the web conferencing vendor offers a conversion service from their proprietary format, I make sure to create a secondary recording file and host it in a separate location from the primary recording.

If something catastrophic happens to the main archive, I can switch to using the backup recording. In a worst case scenario, I can reconstruct the webinar from the audio track and the original slides, producing a recording file using Camtasia.

As with any failsafe, 99% of the time you will be adding effort (and possibly expense) for no benefit. Everything works as it should with the recording and your backup components go unused. But on the rare occasions when something does go wrong, you will certainly appreciate having the means to fix it or to implement a workaround.

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

Bye Bye Lync, Hello Skype For Business

Microsoft is at it again. Every so often things get a little slow in the Communications and Collaboration group and it looks like the employees might be called upon to do something that justifies their continued employment. At such dark moments, someone yells "NAME CHANGE!" and a mad scramble ensues.

Memos fly back and forth, all existing product copy gets rewritten, web pages and legal documents get updated, advertising gets produced, promotional videos get created, and speeches, blogs, and press articles get written explaining how the new name for the existing product represents a fundamental shift in the way companies do business. Hundreds (if not thousands) of employees and contractors find themselves banging away at busy work and money flows like water through the economy. The system works.

Over the years, I have watched Microsoft nomenclature change in a manner far too convoluted to allow tracing with any hope of chronological structure and lineage. Like the twinkling of fireflies at dusk, product names appear and disappear, leaving no evidence of their journeys. Whither the fate of Placeware, NetMeeting, Windows Meeting Space, SharedView, MSN Messenger, Office Communicator, Windows Live Messenger, Live Meeting, Office Live Meeting, Live Communications Server, Office Communications Server, Business Productivity Office Suite, and other forgotten markers along the trail?

Let us then raise a glass to Microsoft Lync, soon to be the latest victim of taxonomic obsolescence. This week Microsoft announced that in 2015 Lync will become "Skype for Business." According to the official Skype blog, this "will again transform the way people communicate." (Again!) Of course Lync Server will also become "Skype for Business Server" -- A name that flows trippingly off the tongue.

Early pointers indicate that Lync's functionality will remain mostly unchanged, but it will take on Skype's interface and make use of Skype contact names. If you can glean anything else from Microsoft's official announcement video, you're a better analyst than I.

 

By the way, can somebody tell me just what the heck Katie Jordan is holding at 0:27 in the video?

Technorati Tags: Microsoft Lync,Skype,web collaboration,Skype for Business

So, Do You Want To Annoy Your Listeners?

I am ready to call it. With just over one month left in the year, it is time to name the top annoying filler word for 2014. The title of this post should have given it away. Our winner this year is the word "so."

It started innocuously… Presenters would show a slide, followed by another slide continuing the same concept. They would link the two by using the connector word "so." That is proper conjunctive usage:

"I told you that so I can tell you this."

"You have now heard some facts. So what conclusions can we draw?"

But slowly, inexorably, usage got a little sloppier and a little more pervasive. Every slide became a continuation of the main presentation topic:

"So, the next thing to talk about is this agenda item."

"So" was beginning to lose an antecedent as a linking reference. Once that became commonplace, "so" started to become a generic noise used to signal the start of a concept. It allowed the speaker to move into a new section of the speech without having to think of a linguistic segue or introduction. Just say "so" and you automatically get permission to introduce anything as your next topic point.

Now things have gotten so bad that people start a new piece of writing with the word:

"So the other day I was out walking the dog and saw a car crash."

"So, has anyone seen the new Iron Man movie trailer?"

Stop it. Just stop it. Beginning a thought with "so" is unnecessary. It's a meaningless crutch that adds no value. Connectives and conjunctions belong between linked clauses (and sometimes between conceptually linked sentences or presentation slides). They are not springboards for new topic points.

I called out "so" for its newfound omnipresence in both spoken and written communication. It has moved ahead of last year's most annoying "sort of" and "kind of" qualifiers. But traditionalists in the audience should not despair… "so" is in no danger of edging out the all-time champs "ummm" and "you know."  Along with the abhorrent "like," they seem destined to live on like cockroaches after the rest of us have died.

 

Technorati Tags: presentation tips,speaking tips,webinar,web seminar,webcast,webcasting