The Webinar Blog

15 Differences In Web Conference Polling

My last post talked about interactive polling in web conferences from the viewpoint of best practices and conceptual integration into your presentation flow. Now it is time to turn our attention to the technical aspects of web conference polls and how you should evaluate differences in implementation between vendors and products. Once again, for this particular post I am not making a distinction between web meetings, webinars, or webcasts when I talk about web conferencing.

If you ask a vendor whether they support interactive polls in web conferences, the answer is always "YES." But that doesn't mean they are all equivalent. It is worth your time to dig into the specifics of their functionality and see if it matches your needs. Here are some areas of differentiation to investigate:

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1) Maximum Number of Answer Choices. Does your vendor limit the number of selection choices you can present to your attendees? No matter what the limit is, it is likely to be a problem for you at some point. As a best practice, I don't like presenting audiences with more than 7 choices (5 is a better practical limit), as it takes attendees too much time to read and evaluate them. But someday you will feel the need to have a poll with 8 choices and you'll be angry if your vendor prevents it. Never accept a limit below 5.

2) Multiple Selection Polls. Does your vendor limit you to polls requiring attendees to pick one and only one answer? There are many cases where it makes more sense to structure a poll as "Select all that apply." You should look for this capability.

3) Display/Suppress Vote Counts. If you are gathering votes among committee members, it might be important to show the number of raw votes each option received. If you are running a marketing or lead gen webinar and only got eight attendees, you probably don't want to advertise that fact. You should be able to display results with vote counts and/or percentages as appropriate to your needs.

4) Prepare Ahead of Time. Can you create your polls ahead of time and have them ready to use when you start your session? A few vendors require you to create your polls inside an active web session and they are only active for the length of that one session. This is now uncommon, thank goodness!

5) Create During a Session. The flip-side of the previous capability is the option to create or edit a poll on the fly inside an active web meeting. A few vendors mandate that polls can only be managed ahead of time in the administrative console. Once the session starts, your polls are locked in. This can be frustrating if you notice a typo or someone decides they want to change an option at the last minute.

6) Display on Demand. I know of at least one vendor that displays all created polls in a tab that is accessible to attendees throughout the webinar. You can't keep a poll hidden and then show it when you are ready to bring it into your presentation flow. This makes it tricky to introduce the poll in proper context.

7) Allow Vote Changes. Some vendors require attendees to submit or lock-in their vote on each poll. Once a choice is selected, it cannot be changed. I'm not a fan of that restriction, as people sometimes react too quickly and then want to change their selection once they hear a longer explanation or get more context from the presenter. Even worse are implementations where clicking on an answer choice immediately locks it in as the vote. People sometimes click without thinking as they read the answer choices. They are frustrated when they find out their first click registers as an unchangeable vote!

8) Allow Continuously Running Polls. A very few products (Adobe Connect is one) allow you to keep a poll open and accessible next to your presentation content. Attendees can continuously change their votes and presenters can always see the current totals. This is sometimes useful for status checks such as "How is my pace?" or "Go into more detail / Move on to next topic." You can use the poll as a running feedback loop between the audience and the presenter.

9) Offer Results Display Options. A few products allow you to change the graphical display of poll results between bars and pie slices. It's nice to have the added flexibility, but is probably not a critical piece of functionality.

10) Integrate Polls Into Presentation Flow. I know of at least one vendor that requires you to stop showing your slide presentation, switch to a separate polls management functionality, then switch back to your presentation (which restarts at the first slide, requiring you to find and redisplay the next slide you wanted to show). You want to be able to smoothly continue your presentation after your poll.

11) Choose When to End or Display Voting. This is a special condemnation for WebEx. When the presenter chooses to end the voting and wants to show the results, the software checks to see if everyone has submitted a vote. If not, it creates a 20-second countdown to allow final votes to come in, which cannot be overridden. I can't believe that a vendor feels they have the right to delay my presentation at their discretion.

12) Report Individual and Cumulative Votes. Post-webinar reporting should include cumulative summaries of the raw votes and percentages for each answer choice on each poll. There should also be a way to track each attendee's individual responses for each poll. Note that this gets problematic when looking at polls allowing more than one selection. The vendor should have a way to make post-webinar analysis effective and easy.

13) Allow Specialized Interactions. A very few vendors allow polls that go beyond single or multiple selection choices. Some examples I have covered in the past:

• ReadyTalk with Agree/Disagree, Ranking, and Comments
• PresenterNet with InterActor controls
• Adobe Connect with custom pod extensions for points distribution (see post comments)
• TalkPoint with mobile device interaction for in-room attendees

14) Redisplay Results. Some vendors only display poll results immediately after voting concludes. You can't come back later and redisplay the results. There are times when you want to come back to poll results to make another point or to remind people of the voting. It's a nice capability to look for.

15) Poll Placement. You will see lots of differentiation in how and where polls and results are shown in the conferencing window. WebEx uses a small panel in the corner of the screen, where long questions and answer choices can be difficult to read. Adobe Connect allows the presenter to show the poll in a "pod" that can be resized and positioned at the presenter's discretion. ON24 allows each user to resize and reposition the poll within the conference's "virtual desktop." GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar make the poll take up the entire display area. You should verify the user interface in terms of presenter control and how it appears to attendees as a part of your evaluation process.

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If you have made it this deep in the post, you may be wondering why I have not mentioned options involved with scored answers or game playing based on responses. I think these cross into different areas of functionality that are worth considering separately from polling. They are more properly classified as quizzes or tests, which offer additional nuances and implementation details.

I am interested in hearing your opinions on this type of blog post. Is it helpful? Would you like me to address other web conferencing features in a similar comparison fashion? Or is it unnecessary detail given that you have a conferencing solution in place and don't need to cross-shop feature differences between products? Please feel free to respond with your thoughts and suggestions.

 

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Web Conferencing And The Use Of Polls

Let's talk about interactive polls in web meetings. I'm including webinars, webcasts, and peer-level web conferences equally in this discussion.

The basic functionality of audience polling has been around since the very early days of web conferencing. It is still probably the first thing most people think of when looking for ways to encourage audience engagement, interaction, and participation in a web session.

I can't tell you how many times I have been a guest speaker for a web conference vendor who tells me up front, "You should put some polls in your presentation." What bothers me is that they aren't reacting to the content I have developed, or to my presentation style, or to audience preferences. They haven't seen any of those things yet. They don't ask me if I think I might be able to bring more benefits to the audience's understanding and involvement in the subject by using a poll to stimulate additional insight or discussion. No, it's just an automatic request to use a technology feature because it's there. This is the kind of thinking that leads to valueless polls that break the flow of a presentation, take time out of the session, and provide no benefits. The presenter says, "Let's do a poll… Okay, here is the way you voted. Thanks for participating. Now, moving on…"

If you view polls as an obligatory interaction where the results don't really matter, you will quickly lose audience goodwill and further participation. Once they find out that their efforts aren't valued, they will stop making the effort to join in.

Every poll in your session must have a clear and explicit value proposition for the audience. You should be able to introduce your poll with a statement of what the attendees will gain by participating and seeing the results. You want to tell them why it is worth taking the time to think about the question and submit their answer. Common phrases include:

• "Here's your chance to see how you compare to your peers in this area."
• "You can help guide the next part of the discussion with your response. That will tell me what I should concentrate on (or how much background I need to give, etc, etc.)"
• "Let's find out how common this knowledge is. We'll do a little test and see if you and your peers know this information already."

In your preparation as a presenter, you should decide how you will address different types of results when you show the responses. A poll should always be a jumping-off point to your next bit of presentation. It needs to be integral to and a part of your content flow.

I have additional guidelines for best practices in an older blog post: "Tips For Webinar Polls." In my next post, I'll take a look at differences in technical implementation of polling between web conferencing products.

 

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Web Conferencing Feature: What's In A Name?

It gets harder and harder to find true differences in functional capabilities between web conferencing products. But I know of one feature that is still not commonly implemented across different platforms… The ability to change display names inside a session.

Most collaboration products have the ability to show some or all of the participants in a webinar, webcast, or web meeting. They might offer different display options, such as letting attendees only see the names of presenters, or letting attendees see first names only, or only letting presenters see the participant list. Whatever the case, there are times when you want to change the way a name shows up.

You certainly don't want the professional nature of your webinar ruined by having to display questions and comments coming in from audience members who registered as "Monkeybutt Pinkcheeks" or "Your Product Sucks." But more commonly, you might want a way to accommodate a presenter's request on the fly to show their professional credentials as "Dr. So-and-so" or to use a different form of address such as William instead of Billy. And sometimes you don't notice a typo in the spelling of the name until show time.

I can think of three potential authority classes that a meeting host (and conferencing product) might want to allow for:

1) Let the host update displayed names for presenters and attendees.

2) Let presenter-level participants adjust their own display name.

3) Let all participants update their own display name.

Each level of functionality is appropriate for certain events and not for others. So this is something that works best as an optional setting under a host's control.

If your web conferencing product doesn't have the ability to change displayed names inside a session, you should suggest it as a potential enhancement to add to the development roadmap.

 

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Webinars With Assistive Access Technology

Recently I watched an interesting webinar given by Darren Gabbert as part of an ongoing webinar series hosted by the Assistive Technology Industry Association (ATIA). The webinar had good content, was delivered competently, and presented no technical issues. Why bother mentioning it? Because Mr. Gabbert has an advanced form of spinal muscular atrophy with no use of his limbs. He uses single-switch scanning, where menu selections are made by tensing a cheek muscle. He also speaks through the aid of a text-to-speech synthesizer. The easiest visualization touchpoint for the layman is to think of Stephen Hawking.

I was interested in learning more about special considerations in planning, preparing, and delivering webinars involving assistive access technology. I spoke to Mr. Gabbert and representatives of the ATIA, who kindly shared their experiences and insights.

Mr. Gabbert has many years of experience presenting in person at conferences, but this was his first time presenting on a webinar. He wanted to make it as engaging as possible, with the ability to keep attendees' interest and interact with them during the session.

One of the things he did was to ask registrants for questions in advance (via a link from the webinar registration form). This gave him a chance to craft directed content relevant to their interests, but also to create "abbreviation expansions" in his scanning selector that would let him more easily give answers live during the webinar.

To ensure that his delivery flowed smoothly, he created his presentation as a collection of video segments. Each segment used PowerPoint slides with animations to highlight key points (such as underlining or circling keywords). Mr. Gabbert was able to coordinate his speaking script with the animations and slide movements, as well as embedding special text-to-speech tags to fine-tune the pacing of the rendered speech output. This helped make listening to his presentation feel more natural, while also giving the proper support to jokes and humorous asides that Mr. Gabbert sprinkled throughout. You don't realize how exacting an art it is to deliver a simple joke until you try to explicitly orchestrate the necessary pauses and speed cues that influence your audience's perception of the humor.

The use of interactive polls in the webinar gave Mr. Gabbert a chance to communicate directly with participants in the typed Chat area. While the poll was being displayed and managed by the webinar moderator, Mr. Gabbert could concentrate on composing his replies in real time.

During live Q&A after the scripted presentation, Mr. Gabbert shared his screen and showed his use of EZ Keys SideTalk. This add-on to the basic scanning system lets a user create sub-branches of words and phrases under topic headers. So instead of having to type out words letter by letter, you can navigate to pre-planned phrases that are useful in a given context. I was astonished by the speed Mr. Gabbert demonstrated in scanning through the selection choices on his screen. It was quite impossible for my eyes to find the targets as quickly as he did. Instead, I just watched the completed sentences appear in the Chat area.

To get the ATIA's perspective, I spoke with David Dikter, the CEO of the organization. I also spoke with Julia Bobo, who worked on the setup and planning of the session as well as moderating the webinar.

Mr. Dikter said the ATIA's webinars often deal with visual or auditory impairment issues that can be addressed with closed captioning or auditory control cues. But this was their first time inviting a speaker with severe physical access limitations combined with synthesized speech. Even though the ATIA has offered webinars for the last six years, it is only recently that they have felt comfortable enough with screen sharing and video sharing performance from the conferencing technologies and from a bandwidth and internet speed expectation for audience members to rely on those features for an entire webinar.

ATIA uses Adobe Connect as their webinar platform and are generally happy with its capabilities for attendees with access limitations. They use a third-party captioning service that can deliver typed captioning in real time into a dedicated content pod in the Adobe Connect console. Audiences have been happy with the offerings, and the ATIA has gradually built up a large library of recorded content that people can watch on demand. Mr. Dikter told me that the archives get far more views than the live sessions.

Ms. Bobo said she usually plans on around one month of preparation with a guest speaker before a live webinar. But with Mr. Gabbert's need for more extensive preparation and planning, she started work with him a full four months in advance of the scheduled date. Her biggest concern as a moderator/host was having back up plans for every contingency she could imagine. Although Mr. Gabbert ran his presentations as shared videos during the live webinar, Ms. Bobo had the source PowerPoints uploaded and ready to switch to if necessary. She also had Mr. Gabbert's audio files ready to play if his system developed problems. She was delighted to report that none of the backups were needed, but felt more secure knowing that she had insurance against problems.

It can also be hard for hosts to think of and test every interaction between content and attendee access configurations. Mr. Gabbert used his speech synthesizer to read the presentation materials while he showed his presentation. That worked great. But then he switched to showing video clips that included voice narration and text captioning in the video. His speech synthesizer dutifully read and spoke the text captions on the video, resulting in duplicated audio coming through to attendees listening via streaming audio on Adobe Connect. We heard the video audio track and the synthesizer reading the captions to us. Ms. Bobo quickly suggested that attendees switch to telephone audio, but an alert attendee also pointed out that we could just temporarily mute the presenter's audio while the video was showing. Once you knew where to find the right icon, it was trivially simple to toggle the audio on and off for echo-free listening.

Mr. Dikter and Mr. Gabbert shared similar views on the web conferencing technology itself… They were happy it worked as well as it did, and they felt that it successfully supported the communications and collaboration between speaker and audience that they were looking for. But there are definitely things that vendors can do to improve special accessibility. Vendors will tell you that they have built in Section 508 ADA Compliance, but the implementations may not be practical in real-world use. And very few vendors test their products for compatibility with assistive access technologies. For instance, Mr. Gabbert reported a problem using Adobe Connect's built-in keyboard shortcuts and when switching cursor focus to different content pods when he used his switch scanning system.

Mr. Dikter said it is incumbent upon all companies who deliver webinars to think about offering access to all possible audiences. "You never know who your attendees may be." You need to plan on delivering visual information for those who cannot hear or choose not to listen to your audio stream. You need to plan for audio-only access for those without the ability to watch the visual content. And you need to look for technologies that will practically and pragmatically support participants using assistive technology.

Ms. Bobo says that working on this webinar with Mr. Gabbert "opened my eyes as to what's possible on a webinar. He is the poster child for how preparation really makes a difference."

And to finish off with a quote from Mr. Gabbert on his experience as a presenter: "Overall, I feel that the webinar medium offered me far more tools and opportunities for engagement than I have doing in-room presentations."

That is a great testament to web conferencing technology and its usefulness in expanding communication and access to all members of our society.

If you want to watch the recording of Mr. Gabbert's webinar presentation, it is available on the ATIA site at a cost of USD $49. Follow this link for details and registration:
https://www.atia.org/webinar/productive-single-switch-scanning-make-call/

 

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AnyMeeting Allows Anyone Adhoc Access Anytime

A new press release from web conferencing vendor AnyMeeting touts an interesting strategy the company is employing to enable "quick and dirty" use of its product for small group screen share and video collaboration.

AnyMeeting has created an automated email account - [email protected]. All you do is include that email address as an attendee in the online calendar invitation you send to your desired list of meeting participants (via Outlook, Google Calendar, etc). You as host, and each of your attendees receive an email with login information for an AnyMeeting web conference scheduled at the same time as your meeting.

The cool part is that you don't need to be a current customer or sign up for an account. When you include the AnyMeeting "virtual attendee" address, AnyMeeting checks to see if the email address associated with the calendar inviter matches an existing account in their system. If so, your meeting is set up under your account with access to whatever features and capacities are enabled under your plan.

If you are sending the invite from an email account AnyMeeting doesn't recognize, it creates a free bare-bones account for that email address. Capabilities are limited… You can only have up to 4 total people in a meeting. You can use full-screen desktop sharing, video conferencing, typed chat, and bridged computer/phone audio. But you can't record the meeting or do any file or content uploads/downloads. Obviously AnyMeeting hopes you will like the basic service and will want to upgrade to a less restrictive paid account model.

I admire the "no hurdles" approach to enabling small-group basic web conferencing. It's fast and easy, with zero proactive tasks needed from a potential user. The host just adds the AnyMeeting address in the invite and receives an email with a big green button to "Join Meeting Online." One click and they're in a web session. Nice implementation, AnyMeeting.

 

UPDATE 10/13/16: I just got clarification from AnyMeeting that the automatic web session scheduled through this method does not include the extra features of AnyMeeting Webinar Pro. So current customers with a Webinar Pro account shouldn't use this method for scheduling webinars... It is designed for web meetings of up to 30 people maximum. The 4-person capacity limit still applies to non-customers.

 

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Colorado Clarifies Web Conferencing Sales Taxes

I just saw a press release issued by Ryan tax services firm. The release highlights a guidance letter made public by the Colorado Department of Revenue. You can click here to download the official letter (GIL-16-009), but the press release sums up the key points.

Apparently a company operating in Colorado wrote to the state Revenue Department to get clarification on whether they had to pay sales taxes on income generated through fee-based web seminars. They charged customers for three different types of offerings: Attending live webinars, watching recorded webinars, and accessing online self-study materials.

The Department of Revenue responded with the following guidance…

1. Fees charged for attending a live webinar are NOT subject to sales tax
2. Fees charged for watching a recorded webinar ARE subject to sales tax
3. Fees charged for accessing electronic materials online ARE subject to sales tax

Obviously this letter applies only to companies paying taxes in the state of Colorado. But this could easily become precedent that gets considered or duplicated in other states.

The distinction between types of content is important, as I see an unambiguous trend in webinar consumption habits. The percentage of registrants who elect to attend live webinars is shrinking, while the percentage of registrants who choose to watch recordings on their own time is growing. Most webinar hosts view the two options as equivalent… As long as you capture the registration and fees and deliver the content, who cares how the audience consumes it? But now hosts in Colorado have a clear financial incentive to encourage more attendance at the live webinar.

Actually, the more I think about this, the more complex it gets. If you sell your webinar as an opportunity to participate live, but also offer the recording as an additional benefit, do you have to track which participants come to the live session? Or can you claim all income received before the live date as pertaining to access of the live session, and all income received after the live date as pertaining to access of the recording? This is going to impose a new burden on companies to segregate and identify those two revenue streams in ways that most companies don't track today. For companies with an ongoing webinar program that keeps adding live and archived offerings, the bookkeeping could get really nasty. Ugh.

If you derive income from online offerings, you may want to clarify the sales tax rules in your state. Sales tax legislation and technology definitions change all the time. You don't want to wait for an audit to find out you were supposed to be tracking different categories of revenue.

 

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A Better Way To Score Webinar Leads

If your company uses webinars to generate sales leads, you may want to sign up for my presentation on lead scoring techniques you can use in your marketing webinars. ClickMeeting is hosting me as a guest speaker on the topic. I'll be speaking this Tuesday, October 11 at 9am California time, 12pm New York time. You can get more details and register online at http://blog.clickmeeting.com/4-goals-can-achieve-sales-webinars

I'll demonstrate why reliance on registration form questions is insufficient and may even be counterproductive to your lead generation goals. You'll get practical tips on ways you can merge content, delivery, and webinar administration to get better insights into which participants are most likely to give you a return on your sales efforts.

I'll leave time to answer your questions during the session so this isn't just an abstract lecture. I hope to see you online!

Technorati Tags: ClickMeeting,lead generation,sales leads,webinar,web seminar,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing,marketing

INXPO Announces Benchmarks, Services, And HTML5

I attended an announcement webinar today from INXPO. The company has been around since 2004. I first knew them mainly as a provider of technology for online events such as virtual trade fairs and conferences. As a part of this, they always supported webcast presentations that would play in virtual auditoriums in the online event space. The company then branched out to support webinars and webcasts as a standalone technology offering (XPOCAST) for customers who didn't need all the trappings of a full online virtual show environment.

The announcements today focused on three key areas. The first was availability of new benchmark comparisons for webinar/webcast hosts. Once you run your web session, you can compare your key metrics on registration, attendance, and attendee interactions with figures culled from INXPO's cumulative averages based on customer webcasts. If your organization runs lots of INXPO webcasts, you can also choose to compare metrics against your own in-house averages. Unfortunately there is not yet any capability for comparing against filtered subsets of INXPO customer data. So you can't look for webcasts in the same industry segment, company size, or number of attendees as yours.

I was able to download a copy of their 2016 webinar benchmarks summary report, which covered both standalone webcasts and virtual event setups. I don't think there were any shocking new insights, but it's great to have another major vendor helping to supply data to the user community so we don't have to rely on anecdotal evidence of behavioral trends. You might be interested in the fact that from March 2015 to March 2016, INXPO found that 77% of live webcasts included at least one attendee on a mobile device. And that the use of video content continues to rise (29% in 2014, 38% in 2015, and 43% in 2016).

The second part of their announcement was really just an emphasis on full-service support for customers. They referred to this as EaaS (Event as a Service), and said they were ready to help with event strategy, audience acquisition, video production (capturing and streaming), speaker training, and technical support.

The third part was a pre-announcement of a new HTML5 webcasting product expected to become available in 2017. It will be called AXIOM and features an emphasis on live presenter video. We saw a prerecorded demonstration featuring split screen with multiple presenters on camera. One of the presenters was streaming her audio and video from a handheld mobile device at an outdoor location. The software is designed to automatically identify which person is speaking and enlarges their video window to give them emphasis. The announcement feature sheet also mentions "closed captioning and multilingual audio tracks for global audiences." I'll be interested in seeing their implementation.

The overall graphic design layout for AXIOM (inferred from the feature sheet) seems similar to the current XPOCAST design. This uses an approach I previously had only seen (and praised) in ON24's webcast technology. The entire screen becomes a windowed graphical environment that is under the control of each attendee. Individuals can open and close content windows (called widgets) while moving and resizing them to suit the attendee's own preferences. I love the combination of simplicity, familiarity, and power this provides. I'd be perfectly happy to see it replicated throughout the entire webcasting industry!

I will definitely be tracking INXPO over the coming year and looking for full production availability of AXIOM.

 

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