The Webinar Blog

Cordless Phones Are Not Your Friend

Today I moderated a webinar where the primary presenter was working from home. We were logged in well ahead of time, verified the slides, went through the usual pre-flight checklist, and ran a sound check. Everything was in good shape. Right before I pushed the button to take us live to the audience, I asked her: "Ready to go?"

"Y-mmphrbl-bzz"

"Uh oh. Wait a minute. Talk to me again."

"Why? What's the m-zzr-brbl?"

"What kind of phone are you on?"

"My cordless phone at home."

Ugh. An old enemy, back to torment me. We tried going live anyway, and for a minute or two she sounded fine. And then the warbling, garbling, and interference started again. Eventually she disappeared altogether. I wrote her a note in the webinar chat and told her she had to find another phone. She did, while I kept the audience entertained with some tap dancing and a poetry recitation.

Let's see… What's the most subtle way I can put this? NEVER USE A CORDLESS HANDSET ON A WEBINAR!!!!

I'm not talking about cellular phones or smart phones. I'm talking about home phones that sit and recharge in a tabletop cradle. The cradle is connected to the telephone wall jack and the handset can be lifted out of the cradle and carried around for convenience.

These things are evil. EVIL I TELL YOU! Older units communicate between handset and base unit using an unlicensed (in the USA) wireless frequency shared by all kinds of other consumer goods, from baby monitors to pacemakers to microwave ovens. You can get interference at any time from a signal suddenly slopping over into your reception range. There is no way to predict it, track it, or solve it.

Newer cordless phones have adopted a different operating frequency, specified by the acronym DECT. The United States uses a different version of DECT than almost every other country in the world, because of course we do. Reading from the infinite wisdom of Wikipedia, I find this delightful nugget of information:

In North America, DECT suffers from major deficits, especially in comparison to DECT elsewhere, since the UPCS band (1920–1930 MHz) used for DECT in North America is not free from heavy interference and only half as wide as that used in Europe (1880–1900 MHz), the 4 mW average transmission power limits the range to far less than the 10 mW permitted in Europe, and the commonplace lack of GAP compatibility among US vendors binds companies to a single vendor.

Interestingly, I was once told by a phone company tech rep that cordless base stations can mess up the call quality and clarity across other hardwired phones in your house, even if the cordless phone is not in use!

Please, if you are presenting from your home… Unplug any cordless phones from their phone jacks and present from a good old fashioned desk phone. Your moderator and your attendees will thank you.

 

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,online seminar,online presentations,web presentation,presentation tips,webcast,webcasting,web meetings,online meeting,web conference,web conferencing,DECT,cordless phones

Free Tips! What To Do After Your Webinar Is Over

I hope you'll join me this Tuesday for a free online session covering ways to extend the utility and value of your webinar beyond the live event. I was asked to be a guest speaker on this subject, which is sponsored by Adobe Connect and the American Marketing Association. I have a lot of tips and tricks lined up, and you should find it worth your time.

UPDATE: The recording of the live webinar is now online at http://onlineevents.adobeconnect.com/px8kd6pj18i2/

The live webinar is scheduled for Tuesday, May 23 at 10am California / 1pm New York. You can see a time zone conversion table here.

I'll be answering questions throughout the session, so come prepared to play "Stump the Expert!"

Looking forward to seeing you online.

Is WebRTC Another Flash Debacle Waiting To Happen?

I just came across the following web page from the "OVPN" site:

If you can't read the graphic clearly, it says "Disable WebRTC if you are using Chrome, Firefox or Opera … It has been revealed that it's possible to get hold of the IP address of users running WebRTC even if they are connected to a VPN or proxy service."

Now let's not all jump screaming off the nearest cliff. First, there is no date attached to the notice and in my quick searches around the web I saw that most posts on this topic seemed to be from around 2015. Maybe things are better now. Second, this notice is specifically targeted at users of a specific piece of software (OVPN) designed to provide secure internet access and additional privacy. So they are referring to a very specific audience concerned with security in a way that most home users are not.

- BUT -

One of the primary reasons that Flash has fallen out of favor as an underlying technology for web collaboration is that it opened too many avenues for malicious misuse by evildoers. It initially worked so well for web conferencing exactly because it provided easy access to communications protocols and device peripherals such as webcams and microphones without needing a rewrite for every operating system and manufacturer.

Bad guys kept finding new ways to exploit those access methods to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting user. Which meant Adobe had to keep patching Flash. Which meant vendors reliant on Flash had to keep updating their software and instructions to deal with the latest version. Which meant users had to keep updating their systems to stay current with the latest versions of both Flash and the software using it. And finally, many corporate IT security personnel got tired of the vulnerabilities and banned Flash Player from users' computers.

So now HTML5 and WebRTC are the great new hope and web collaboration vendors are furiously rewriting to eliminate Flash dependence in favor of the new underlying platform. We're in for a very rough ride if this just opens us up to a new round of security concerns and banned use in corporate venues. Many companies use Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to provide additional security for their employees. If they decide that WebRTC exposes them to security vulnerabilities, they will prohibit its use, just as they did with Flash. And we'll be right back to square one in the web conferencing arena, with individual participants or entire companies unable to access our webinars and webcasts.

By the way, if you are interested in testing your own browser to see what is discoverable through the WebRTC API set, you can navigate to https://browserleaks.com/webrtc

 

Technorati Tags: VPN,IP Security,WebRTC,web conferencing,web conference,web collaboration,online conferencing,online collaboration,webinar,web seminar,webcast,webcasting

Stop Calling Your Presentation Confidential

The vast majority of client webinars I moderate feature PowerPoint slides with a footer or disclaimer slide declaring the materials to be confidential. They usually aren't. And there is a real, legal reason you shouldn't label them that way.

Confidential has a legal meaning. When parties sign a business confidentiality or non-disclosure agreement, there is a clause that covers materials designated as confidential. There are penalties for disclosing or distributing those designated materials.

Consider a situation where your company has to go to court, claiming that someone has violated your confidentiality agreement and has disclosed your private materials. If that party can demonstrate that you just slap "confidential" on all your public presentations, they could claim reasonable precedent for believing that the term has no validity or distinctive power in identifying what information is truly private.

A public webinar NEVER features confidential information. Always assume that everything you display and say in a public webinar instantly becomes part of the public domain and is discoverable by competitors. Confidential materials are materials you only show to people who have signed a nondisclosure or confidentiality agreement with you. Internal employee presentations, partner training, and some customer communications may fall under this label. Marketing, lead generation, and public outreach webinars never do.

What should you write on your slides instead? You can (and should) claim copyright ownership so others can't legally reuse your work. You can throw in standard terminology that attempts to discourage redistribution, but you should keep in mind that it has no actual legal weight. An attendee who comes to your webinar is not bound by any statements you might unilaterally make about how the material "is intended for the recipient only and is not to be redistributed." But at least it won't get you in legal trouble later.

Take the time to make the distinction. Most of your webinars and presentations are not confidential. Make sure you can clearly identify  the ones that are!

 

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A Practical Example Of Content Design

The link that follows will take you to a single long web page from a site called TheOatmeal.com. Scroll through it to learn something about the way your brain processes things that you might not have known before.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

Interesting, isn't it? Or perhaps you already knew this information. That doesn't matter, as I am NOT going to talk about the information itself. Instead, I would like to focus on it as a remarkably clear and straightforward example of how to think about presentation content design (onstage or via webinar).

The web page as written makes an engaging reference work that is easy for you to take in and understand on your own. Short sentences present the key concepts in brief, easily separable chunks. You get concrete examples, backed up by source annotations (that you probably didn't bother to click on). Images break up the text with visual representations of some of the key concepts. When there is not a good image available, a nice big keyword acts as a visual eye-catcher on its own ("WHAT", "NOW", "THE POINT"). That's a technique most famously employed by Lawrence Lessig, whom you can look up on your own.

Most presenters would look at this and say, "Great! I've got my handout. All I need to do is put each framed rectangle on its own slide and I have my slide show presentation done!"

But you would be doing yourself and your audience a huge disfavor. The beautifully simple, conversational style of the text is written as a script that could be read out loud to an audience. It speaks to the reader or listener in the singular, challenging that one person to take specific mental actions and to reflect on the information being presented. As any politician, news anchor, or keynote speaker will tell you - You NEVER show your Teleprompter script to the audience! Why on Earth would you print it all out on your slides?

To make the slide show version that would support your presentation of this material, you would remove almost all the sentences from the slides. You would be left with some images and some keywords that wouldn't make much sense on their own. And then you would SAY the rest of the text as your hidden script, giving you the role of the expert and leading the audience on their path of discovery. The slides would SUPPORT your presentation, rather than duplicate it.

"But what about the handout? I can't just give people a slide deck with a bunch of pictures that don't mean anything by themselves!" Easy. Instead of just deleting the script text from the slides, you cut it from the slide and paste it into the Notes section (or preferably never write it on the slide at all, and type it directly into the Notes panel). Then you create a handout PDF of your Notes Pages, acting as a complete reference with pictures and text.

There's one more thing to notice in our study example. Did you observe how panels do not follow a rigid design template? There are some unifying design decisions (graphics are comic drawings rather than photographs, there is a single font style). But one panel uses full color artwork, another is monochrome, and some use just a highlight color here and there. Some panels have full color backgrounds from the art, most use a white background, and a few use a black background. Most include artwork, but a few are text-only. Don't be a slave to a single PowerPoint layout template, repeated on every slide of your presentation. You can introduce variance in the visual layout of your slides while keeping them within the general framework of an overall aesthetic. Viewers appreciate some visual changes and surprises. It makes them want to see what will show up next.

Oh my… There is yet another take-away from this deceptively simple example. I almost skipped over it in my third paragraph. Don't focus on your sources when telling a story. There are exceptions to this rule, but not as many as people think. In general, you don't want listeners to get sidetracked into running down background details while you are trying to give them the big picture and influence their perceptions and attitudes. Let them know that your assertions have citations and that they will get a document or a supporting web page so that interested parties can investigate and get more in-depth background later if desired. But keep moving forward while making your points. Leave the source citations as backup reference material (and have them handy in case someone challenges you during Q&A).

Those are a lot of practical guidelines from one short comic. Apply them to your next speech and you'll have a happier audience and a more effective presentation.

 

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