The Webinar Blog

Are Your Webinar Attendees Satisfied?

Blog reader Emma wrote me today to ask if there was a way to compare the webinar satisfaction ratings her organization collects on their educational/informational webinars with those of a larger cross-segment of the population. After all, you aren't going to please all the people all the time, but how do you know whether your approval ratings are good, bad, or average compared to industry norms?

I couldn't think of any easy way to accomplish what Emma wanted. Industry benchmark reporting from companies like ON24 and BrightTALK typically don't include cumulative satisfaction ratings on their clients' content. It's not really fair to their clientele to share that kind of information and since there is no standardization in satisfaction scales, it's difficult to make comparisons between results.

But Emma's question opened a much bigger bag of worms related to surveys. First of all, a general question about "Satisfaction" doesn't tell you much. Sure, it's a number you can report and show to your manager, but what if it's low? What are you going to fix? I try very hard to ask for separate ratings on technology, content, and presentation skills.

You might give a fantastic webinar with a wonderful speaker, perfect technology, and a clearly presented topic. Some attendee will respond as "Very Dissatisfied" because they didn't read the invitation closely enough and expected different information. Or they were at a different level of expertise than the information was targeted for. Should you change anything about the webinar because of their rating? It probably means you need to change your marketing materials and description copy writing. But could you figure out that's where your problem lies?

Another big problem with webinar feedback surveys is that they are often skewed towards positive results. If attendees are dissatisfied enough to leave the session early, they will never see the survey if it only pops up at the end of the session time. Some webinar technologies (usually the ones that require local download and installation of the client software, such as WebEx and GoToWebinar) are able to display the survey when an attendee shuts the conference window. But if an attendee feels you have wasted their time with your awful webinar, they often don't want to give you even more of their time by completing survey questions for your benefit.

If you really want to see how people feel about your webinars compared to others, maybe that's what you should ask them. In addition to finding out whether they thought yours was good, you could ask "How did this webinar compare on average to webinars you have attended from other companies?" -- Much better, Somewhat better, Average, Somewhat worse, Much worse.

If you have some suggestions for Emma, I would welcome your comments. Or if you know of industry satisfaction benchmarks for webinars, I'd love to see a link! If you are reading this offline or in an RSS feed, you can comment on the original blog post at the following link:

http://wsuccess.typepad.com/webinarblog/2016/03/are-your-webinar-attendees-satisfied.html 

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ReadyTalk Concentrates On Lead Gen Webinars

Last week I saw a press release from ReadyTalk announcing webinar integration with Act-On for lead tracking and qualification. I thought to myself, "Wait a minute… Didn't they just announce something like this recently?" A quick Google search later, and I saw that two months ago they announced expanded webinar integration with Marketo. A month and a half before that, they announced an extension of their integration with HubSpot.

I spoke with Beth Toeniskoetter, Product Strategist at ReadyTalk, to get a clearer idea of what was going on with all these announcements. She said it was all part of a conscious effort to invest in lead generation value for companies that host webinars. While ReadyTalk has its own built-in front-end and back-end functionality for webinar registration and reporting, it is understandably less comprehensive than the dedicated offerings of marketing automation providers who devote all their development efforts to lead nurturing software. Why should ReadyTalk try to compete with those fully developed and supported technologies when they can simply partner with them and allow customers to take advantage of the best aspects of web collaboration and marketing automation?

Beth told me that lead generation and marketing is the most prominent use case for ReadyTalk's webinar customers (employee training seems to be the second most common application area). The company is seeing rapid growth in both their managed services and self-service webinar activity, so they wanted a path to assist customers in achieving lead generation goals without having to wait for additional development/release cycles from ReadyTalk. By using well-known partner offerings, customers get a shorter time-to-value from their lead generation webinar programs.

We didn't talk about it on our phone call, but I see this philosophy tying in with ReadyTalk's Webinar ROI Calculator that I wrote about last fall. That version of ROI was clearly associated with lead-to-sale conversions as a measure of webinar success.

I asked Beth where ReadyTalk's own internal development was concentrated these days. She said that they continue to invest heavily in transitioning from Adobe Flash to HTML 5 / WebRTC for the underlying operational platform. They also want to expand the use of their Simulive automated playback of recorded content for live audiences. Currently, Simulive is intended as a managed services offering, and the company wants to make it easier for self-serve users to run their own automated events.

As a point of personal curiosity, I asked about ReadyTalk's integrated telephone audio. ReadyTalk is one of the providers that allows webinar attendees to choose to listen via streaming computer audio or telephone audio. The problem with phone audio from many vendors is a lack of dial-in numbers for countries that have been associated with phone fraud or that are seen as having insufficient use to warrant setting up connections. This can be problematic for companies with global prospects or customers. Beth sent me the list of countries with local phone access to webinar audio and I was impressed to see 84 countries including traditional "problem spots" from South and Central America, Africa, and Eastern Europe. You are still likely to have trouble with telephone connections to countries such as Pakistan, Iraq, and Iran… But the US State Department might want to have a chat with you before such webinars anyway.

I like seeing a steady stream of product announcements from webinar companies. It indicates continued dedication to development and customer support that is necessary to remain in contention as a complete webinar solution. ReadyTalk seems to be taking the right steps to keep themselves in the short list, particularly for lead generation webinars.

 

Technorati Tags: ReadyTalk,Beth Toeniskoetter,webinar,web seminar,online seminar,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing,web meetings,lead generation,marketing automation,Act-On,Marketo,HubSpot

Video Clips Are Still A Web Conferencing Headache

Exactly ten years ago, I wrote a blog post entitled "The Problem With Video Clips." A full decade of technological advances later and the problematic elements I mentioned then remain a problem today.

If you use a web conferencing technology that relies on screen sharing to display content to attendees, you don't want to rely on that for showing a full-motion video clip. It is impractical to believe that the software can scan your screen frequently enough, ship all the pixels over the many pathways of the internet, and reassemble them on attendee computers with enough speed to create a smooth and unbroken audio/video playback experience for attendees.

So let's turn our attention to technologies that let you upload or pre-cache video files to show during your webinar. The two big problems remain:

1) Local Buffering. AKA: "When do I start talking again?"

Imagine you are talking to your audience. You set up your video and say, "Okay - Let's watch this together, then we can discuss what you saw." You hit the play button. When do you start talking again? When the video finishes? Just because it finished for you, it hasn't necessarily finished for all attendees. They might have had a slower network and the video may have paused for buffering. So you start talking, assuming the video is done, but they hear you speaking over the end of the video. If you sit there and wait after the video has finished, you have dead air for viewers with faster networks. And you still don't know how long to wait.

A corollary to this problem is 1a) Synchronous Pausing. AKA: "Look at this!"

I have worked with lots of presenters who want to pause the video at a certain point and talk about the frozen image on the screen before continuing the video. If the software doesn't pause on the same frame for all attendees, it can lead to confusion and misunderstandings.

One solution approach comes from the old "outbound webcasting" school of thought. The vendor buffers up all content and concentrates on making sure that all attendees see and hear it as the presenter delivered it, but without regard to keeping synchronization between different attendees. It's akin to everybody watching a "tape delayed" broadcast of the live content… Each person sees and hears a nice, unbroken stream of content, but user 1 may be a few seconds ahead of or behind user 2, and neither is in sync with the presenter. That works fine as long as your content is outbound only. But as soon as you want to make your session more interactive - asking your participants for responses to questions or polls - you have a problem. You ask a question… You wait for the question to arrive on the consumption side… You wait for responses… You see the responses and reply… There is another delay while your response goes out to the audience. It's like carrying on a conversation with astronauts on the moon. Very unnatural and a real conversation killer.

2) Telephone Audio. AKA: "Please turn on your speakers."

I always prefer web conferencing technologies that give participants a choice of using computer audio or telephone audio. You will never satisfy all members of an audience by forcing one or the other listening method. Unfortunately you run into the same problems of synchronization that we mentioned above. If the software picks up the audio from the video as it is transmitted, will that match up with the video stream on each attendee's computer as it is received and played? Probably not. For phone audio to work properly for all attendees, they must be in perfect sync with each other and with a lock-step playback of the visual content. I can't think of a technology that can guarantee that kind of synchronization. So most vendors throw up their hands and tell telephone users to turn on their computer speakers once a video starts playing.

Ten years ago I asked vendors to write in with comments about how they coordinate video playback with telephone audio. None did (although KRM was nice enough to suggest a workaround they use). Are there any takers now?

 

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Webinar Danger Time Starts This Weekend

On Sunday, March 13, most of the USA, Canada, and Mexico's northern border cities will begin Daylight Saving Time, moving clocks forward one hour. The majority of Europe and the UK will not follow suit for another two weeks, moving forward on March 27.

This means that you have two weeks of trans-Atlantic time offsets different from your normal expectations. I do enough webinars in the UK that I have become used to automatically adding five hours from my US Eastern time to calculate what time it is in London. But for two weeks, I'll be wrong.

There is nothing universal or "standard" about local time standards. Any locality can declare the local time to be anything they want. Here in the USA, we have some states that choose not to make Daylight Saving Time adjustments, so the offsets between them and other states varies during the year. This month the southern Russian Astrakhan Oblast will change its local time zone on March 27. Russia seems to create time zone changes with astonishing frequency. In 2014, the entire country changed from using a summer time adjustment and there are at least 5 proposals up for voting on additional time zone changes within the country.

All of this serves to underline the critical importance of giving your webinar attendees clear and unambiguous information on when your webinar will start. Never assume they can calculate the offset from some arbitrary time zone you pick. Never use a shorthand such as "Central Time" or "Eastern Time" -- Those have local meanings in many different continents.

Never assume your attendees will know what a full, official time zone abbreviation means either. For instance, here are some common abbreviations with surprising ambiguity and significantly different local times:

• BST - British Summer Time, Bougainville Standard Time, Bangladesh Standard Time
• CDT - Central Daylight Time, Cuba Daylight Time
• CST - Central Standard Time, China Standard Time, Cuba Standard Time

I recommend stating your starting time using a major city as a reference: "10am Los Angeles / 1pm New York."  Better yet, supply your registrants with a conversion link so they can see your starting time already converted to their location. There are several online utilities you can use, but my longtime favorite is www.timeanddate.com - This site really takes the business of time seriously. They follow the latest time zone changes and Daylight Saving Time inconsistencies for locations around the world.

Use their Event Time Announcer to create a page with your event date and time converted for easy lookup and publish a link to the conversion page on your invitation, on your registration page, and in your confirmation/reminder emails.

Another great tool on their site is the World Clock Meeting Planner, which lets you put in cities and see a cross-reference table of time equivalents that makes it easy to pick a convenient time for all participants.

The onus is on you as the event organizer or marketer to get people to your webinar at the right time. Don't play a guessing game and don't make assumptions.

 

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Finding Comments From A Single Webinar Attendee

Loyal blog reader Frank wrote in with an interesting question about managing typed chat or questions from attendees. He wanted to know if I could name a web conferencing platform or aftermarket app that lets a webinar presenter or moderator filter the chat stream in real time during a webinar to show only the comments from a single attendee. Failing that, maybe the software could highlight a user's comments in a color for more quickly and easily locating them in the message log.

I can't think of a technology that allows this functionality. If you only work with small audiences or your webinars have limited interactivity you might not see the value of such a feature. I moderate large webinars for my clients all the time, and as soon as Frank asked the question I slapped my forehead and said "Of course! We need that!"

A moderated or private chat/Q&A stream (where attendees don't see what other attendees type) makes each attendee feel that their inputs are the only conversation taking place. They often reference past comments or add information to a previous question. This can get confusing and difficult to follow as a moderator when you have hundreds of comments coming in. Your chat log can look like this:

Andy A: How much is it?
Dorene D: I'm having trouble hearing clear audio.
Clarence C: This is great stuff!
Belinda B: The answer is 13
Felicity F: The answer is 13
Harry H: The answer is 14
Irene I: The answer is 13
Andy A: I mean the widget option.
Clarence C: Keep it coming
Harry H: I meant 13
Dorene D: Can you help me?

Imagine dozens of additional comments strung in the middle of that and past comments scrolled off the screen. When you see "Can you help me?" how fast can you go back and find what the problem was? When you see "I mean the widget option" how easy is it to find what Andy was referring to? Being able to focus on consecutive messages from a single user would be a huge help. Once you get the context, you can go back to looking at the full raw feed.

This is different from running post-webinar reports. Moderators need the filtering capabilities while the webinar is running, with an easy interface for switching between unfiltered view and comments from any given participant.

I would love to see this capability added to a webinar product. If you are a vendor and already allow this functionality, please add a comment to let us all know about it.

You can find additional ideas about Managing Webinar Chat in a post I wrote several years ago (http://j.mp/twbchat). This is still a feature area with vast differences in implementation and functionality from vendor to vendor.

Thanks for the idea, Frank!

 

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