The Webinar Blog

Web Conference Annotation Tools (Part 2)

In part one of this topic, I looked at some special cases and described why I don't like laser pointers. Today I will cover considerations when dealing with the more common annotation tools.

Revisiting my previous list, the capabilities you are most likely to encounter in a web conferencing product include:

• Draw a line (straight or freehand)
• Draw a box
• Draw a circle
• Draw an arrow
• Draw a semi-transparent highlight
• Type text

I think it is most natural for first-time users to start out in freehand drawing mode. The cursor acts as a pencil and you can draw anything you like on the screen. Straight lines, arrows, boxes, and circles are just ways to accomplish the same things you could do with freehand drawing, but with cleaner and smoother lines.

Vendors immediately run into a conflict between making tools that are intuitive and easy to use without training, and offering added power and flexibility for more experienced users. As a power-user myself, I like the ability to change my pen color and line thickness. It is just too easy to lose visibility on top of colored content. Here is one example of a fairly simple and compact annotation tools menu. This one comes from Webinato:

Fig 1: Webinato annotation tools menu. The first row indicates the drawing mode, while the second row lets you adjust line width and color.

One unnecessary complexity that vendors often add is the ability to draw filled boxes and circles. I have never used a filled object as an annotation, and I can't even think of a circumstance where it would answer a need.

Highlighters that place a translucent color on top of content are sometimes convenient, and I know presenters who really like them when working with text-oriented documents. But in the final analysis, they don't do a lot that you couldn't do by outlining the item of interest.

Being able to type text on top of the content serves a very infrequent need. I am never disappointed when I find the capability missing, although I have used it from time to time. I find it most useful when the rest of the conferencing product suffers from a design flaw and the only way to make a general announcement or direct attention to a chat window is to type a note on the displayed content.

The shared feature of these tools as opposed to pointers is that they remain on the screen after you draw them. Which gives rise to a convenience tool I have never seen in any product implementation. Allow power users to toggle between "add annotation mode" and "replace annotation mode." In the first case, new annotations are added to the screen. In the second case, starting to draw a new line or box automatically clears any previous annotation. This could really cut down on clutter, while reducing the number of interim steps needed to manually delete the previously drawn highlighting annotation.

I will close out with one more infrequently seen implementation option. I seem to recall that in Placeware (later Microsoft Live Meeting), you could select an annotation and drag it to a new location on the screen. This was occasionally useful as a way to focus the audience's attention in a consistent manner. You draw a big, thick rectangle around something and then instead of deleting it and redrawing another rectangle somewhere else, you drag the existing rectangle to encompass the next item of interest. The movement of the "look here" box on the screen helps shepherd the audience's eyes from one item to the next. I don't think this is crucial functionality, but it's rather nice to have (especially if you are just a little off with your initial drawing and can nudge it into place instead of having to erase and redraw).

I hope vendors will continue to refine the annotation functionality in their products with an eye towards making them more convenient and practical for presentation use. Properly applied, highlighting tools can have far greater utility than the simple laser pointer we are stuck with in room-based slideshows.

 

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A Look At Web Conference Annotation Tools (Part 1)

Just about every web conferencing product includes some form of annotation functionality. I am referring to the ability to "mark up" visual content in a live webinar or webcast by drawing on the screen. The idea seems so simple. And yet, I have never come across an implementation that completely satisfies me. Let's take a look at specifics, with some humble suggestions for ways to improve usability.

The first thing to understand is the difference between "screen share" and "slide share" approaches to content display. Some conferencing products (ex: ReadyTalk, Adobe Connect, Cisco WebEx, Webinato) give the presenter the ability to upload slides and access each slide as an individual content item. In these products, annotations may be associated with the slide they are drawn on. So when you move to a new slide, the previous slide's annotations automatically disappear. That's very convenient. And even better, if you revisit a previously shown slide, the product may "remember" and redisplay the annotations you had placed on that slide.

When using screen share to display content, the conferencing product doesn't "know" what content is being shown. Whether it is slides, browser content, or pages in a PDF, the meeting software is just displaying a continuous stream of pixels from your screen. This means that annotations don't "belong" to a piece of content. You are responsible for continually erasing and redrawing on top of the latest visuals.

We also need to differentiate between use cases. I work primarily in the "presentation" world, where one presenter at a time delivers information to an audience. There are other applications that are more geared towards group participation… For instance, allowing students to complete an exercise on screen, or holding brainstorming sessions with team members. In these cases, the leader or facilitator might wish to give annotation control to other attendees. But even in these situations, giving multiple people simultaneous control of annotation markers is likely to result in chaos. It usually makes more sense to grant one person at a time control of annotations, effectively making them a temporary "presenter" or "explicator" who needs to point something out.

Understanding these differences in web conferencing lets us examine the first two areas of annotation functionality:

1) Clearing all slide-based annotations. If the web conferencing product associates annotations with individual slides and redisplays them when the slide is revisited, the software needs a way to remove all annotations throughout the entire slide deck with a single command. If I give a webinar or hold a rehearsal and mark up my slides, then need to give the same webinar the next day, I don't want to have to go through the entire presentation deck, slide by slide, finding and erasing my previous annotations.

2) Clearing all displayed annotations. Presenters should have a quick and obvious way to remove all currently displayed markups. This is particularly important for screen sharing situations, where you have to update your annotations to match the new underlying content being shown. Some products (I'm looking at you, WebEx), hide the clear option under a sub-menu, which takes too much selection time and fine mouse control. WebEx always assumes you are working in a shared annotation world, so it has separate subcommands for clearing your own annotations or all annotations on the screen:

FIG 1: In WebEx, clicking the big, obvious eraser icon doesn't do anything. It puts you into "erase mode" that allows you to select and remove annotations one at a time. To erase all annotations, you must place your cursor on the tiny arrow to the side of the eraser, display a submenu, and choose whether you mean to delete your annotations or all annotations (the same result in most meetings).

While I'm talking about WebEx, I'll mention another unique frustration they implemented. Rather than drawing an annotation line or box, you can place a quick pointer arrow on the screen to highlight something. It moves to a new position every time you click on a new location. Very convenient, and a good idea. BUT… The pointer always displays the presenter's name (once again thinking in terms of multiple simultaneous annotators). This can be a distraction from the content you are highlighting and is unnecessary in most cases. WebEx also assigns you a color for your pointer, which cannot be overridden. In the example below, the light yellow color it arbitrarily chose for me is not prominent against the white slide background and is impossible to see on my yellow content boxes.

FIG 2: When I place a pointer on the screen in WebEx, I cannot suppress display of my name in the pointer or override the color (you can't even see the arrow head in this picture because it is on top of yellow slide content).

Adding to the frustration, pointers are treated as a different form of annotation. You cannot remove them by clearing your annotations… You have to clear your pointer as a separate step. Turning off pointer drawing mode does not make the pointer go away either. Every guest presenter I have ever worked with has been confused and annoyed by this.

 

But let us leave WebEx and move on to annotation features that are more common across multiple products. Although other, special forms of annotation exist, the most frequent choices are:

• Show a laser pointer
• Draw a line (straight or freehand)
• Draw a box
• Draw a circle
• Draw an arrow
• Draw a semi-transparent highlight
• Type text

The first item in that list is often the default mode, and is overwhelmingly the most popular choice for new online presenters. It is a direct analog to something we are familiar with in stage presentations… You point with your laser pointer and the audience follows the little red dot on the screen. In the immortal words of Admiral Ackbar:

The problem with using a laser pointer in a web conference is that it inspires bad habits. Presenters inevitably start "talking with their mouse." They circle or underline a phrase by waving the pointer back and forth. Or they flick the mouse randomly, without realizing it. It is very hard for web conferencing products to keep up with that kind of quick, continuous movement. Users may see the red dot appearing and disappearing in staccato jumps around the screen.

The other problem is that presenters may move between concepts very quickly, trusting the pointer to guide the audience: "This number is important, while this number is less important, leading to this result." If there is a disconnect between the audio stream and the video stream (for instance, with some people listening via computer and others listening via telephone), the audience can't be sure what the presenter was pointing at when she said "this number." If the pointer is a little out of sync, you could be talking about one thing while the audience sees you pointing at something else.

In tomorrow's post, I'll look at considerations related to the other common annotation tools.

 

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Slide Animations - Good Or Bad?

I would like to challenge an oft-heard tenet of "good slide design." This is the dictum that says "Animation is bad. Get rid of it on your presentation slides."

I know where the concept comes from... Overuse and misuse of PowerPoint effects can drive an audience stark raving mad. If you have ever sat through a presentation where every bullet point flies in and does a cute little bounce before settling in position, you know the frustration. And when every graphic enters the page by spinning around and around in an effect that takes five seconds to complete, you just want to give the designer a short course in subtlety, delivered with a cattle prod as your primary teaching aid.

But as with guns, box cutters, and movie production deals, it is unfair to condemn the entire concept because of the carnage and terror that some people cause with the basic instruments. There are appropriate and useful applications of PowerPoint animation.

Animation should be used for emphasis and to re-attract audience focus on a particular point. This means that it should be the exception in a slide deck, not the rule. If people are expecting animation on every slide, it ceases to have any power. But a simple wipe can help highlight the introduction of an arrow pointing to a key phrase. Or a simple overlay build can highlight a phrase that sums up or counterpoints the preceding text.

This is especially true in a remote presentation via a webinar or webcast. Your audience has many distractions while listening to you with an unchanging slide just sitting there on the screen. They quickly take in the image and then seek visual stimulation elsewhere... In their email messages or that never-ending game of solitaire. Throwing in a bit of animation can recapture their attention. They also become "conditioned" to staying focused on the slides, as they can't be sure their initial mental snapshot represents the total content for a slide. Something else might still be coming.

That is one of the reasons I get frustrated with web conferencing products that convert PowerPoint slides to static images. It removes a tool for holding audience attention. And we need all the tools we can muster.

Sure, you can often simulate an overlay build by creating multiple slides and flipping from one to the next. But this is an imperfect alternative. You can't introduce a directional aspect to the action (eg: the arrow is revealed from tail to head, automatically drawing the viewer's eye to the desired focal point). You can't use things that lend an air of subtlety and continuity to the information display, such as a fade in or fade out. And in many conferencing products, the display of a new slide is an obvious action. It feels to the viewer like two separate slides, not a continuation of information on a single slide.

Supporting PowerPoint animation is hard. Microsoft keeps adding effects in each new release of their product and forces new releases of the conferencing product to keep up. It uses extra bandwidth to transmit the additional information to the audience's screens. But I feel more comfortable when I know that I have the option.

The comments section is now open for what I'm sure will be an "animated" discussion.

 

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How To Boost Webinar Attendance

One of my clients sells a "webinar pass" to their target audience. A single payment lets you attend a series of webinars on a topic of professional interest. The webinars are scheduled without a registration page… Anybody with the login link is allowed to enter. Before each webinar, the company sends out an email to everyone who has paid for the webinar series, letting them know the date and time for the next webinar and the link to use for attendance. Then at webinar start time, they sit and wait to see if anybody shows up.

When the series started, we used to get a good number of live attendees. But over time, that number dropped lower and lower. Now there are many sessions with no live attendees at all.

It's not a case of bad content… Sales of the program remain strong. It's just that purchasers realized they could watch the content on demand, so they don't bother to show up for the live session. I see this same phenomenon occurring for many webinars. It brings up quite a few issues.

The first question is: Should you care? If you are delivering good content and getting viewership, does it matter whether your audience attends the live session or watches the recording later? In some cases, the answer is no. Think carefully about this point, as you may be able to use that fact to your advantage.

If most of your viewing comes from on-demand access, perhaps you should forego the live event aspect entirely. You won't have to worry about trying to find an event time that fits with multiple schedules, and you won't have to spend time on instructions, pleasantries, and interaction breaks that just slow down information consumption on the recording. You can make the delivery more concise and not worry about fitting content to fill an arbitrary time slot on a calendar. I see far too many webinars that start planning with "We have to fill 60 minutes" instead of starting with "We have 37 minutes of content." Let the content determine the presentation length instead of vice versa.

You also may be able to spend additional time on recording and editing to create a more polished piece of content that shows off your organization and presenters in a better light.

But perhaps you SHOULD care more about getting live attendees. There is an undeniable difference in perception from participating in a shared experience than there is from watching a recording on your own. Watching a recording is a passive exercise. It is easier to be bored, easier to be distracted, and easier to feel frustrated by not having a voice in what is being discussed. A good webinar presenter invites feedback and active participation in the talk. Attendees may develop more of a sense of community - especially if you permit public "chat" or facilitate group exercises. And I believe that people are more likely to be influenced and driven to action by a live presenter than by a recording.

If you decide that having people attend is a worthwhile goal with benefits to both you and your audience, what can you do to get them to show up?

1) Make them register. Having a login link that they "can use if they feel like it" is no match for having them proactively sign up for a specific time and date. Once you have captured their name and email, you can use your webinar software to send confirmation and reminder emails, including a calendar appointment to block out the time on their calendar.

2) Give them a time conversion page. Never assume that people can do the math to figure out the difference between your stated start time and the local time in their location. Daylight Saving Time is notoriously inconsistent from place to place. Don't guess… Just post a link they can click to.

3) Emphasize the value of live attendance. You should always include an explicit phrase along the lines of "Don't miss your opportunity to ask questions and get answers from our expert speaker." Or tell them that they will have the opportunity to share and learn from their peers' experiences. Anything that promises extra value from the live experience.

4) Restate the key value proposition in reminders. Never send reminder emails that just say "Your webinar is tomorrow." Add a sentence that reinforces why they were interested in the first place: "Just a reminder that tomorrow is your chance to learn ways to improve the efficiency of your operations."

5) Consider rewarding live attendance. This isn't always appropriate, but you might think about offering a giveaway to all live attendees (such as a white paper or eBook), or holding a raffle for something more special (a signed copy of the speaker's book) to one live attendee. Make sure you promote this in the confirmation and reminder emails. It's not an attendance incentive if people don't know about it!

6) Start on time. Don't penalize the attendees who make the conscientious effort to log in on time by waiting for an unspecified additional length of time in case an unspecified number of people happen to show up later. People who are late know they are late. It's not your responsibility to coddle them. Get a reputation for respecting your attendees' time.

I'd love to read additional comments on techniques you have employed to help boost live attendance. Let's get those numbers back up!

 

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Using Web Conferencing To Stay Top Of Mind

Huh? What does "top of mind" mean? It's important, and it's very often overlooked.

In the outrageously competitive world of consumer advertising, most ads are not designed to produce an immediate action on the part of the consumer. How often do you see a cereal commercial and find yourself seized by an overwhelming urge to jump in the car, drive to your neighborhood grocery store, and buy a box of the cereal? Sure, it's POSSIBLE (particularly if you have been artificially enhancing your mellow while listening to Pink Floyd albums)… But in most cases, the ad produces no response whatsoever. Nor does it produce any action the next 12 times you ignore it. Then two weeks later, you find yourself in the store and remember you are low on cereal. "Hmmm… Might as well try this one that I heard about. It's supposed to taste good without being all jacked up with extra sugar. Worth a shot."

Now, how did you know it was supposed to taste good? Where did you get the information that it was low on sugar? Why did you even notice it on the shelf? You had been repeatedly supplied with key value propositions and product identification cues. Even though you didn't pay much attention to those commercials, they proved informative and made the product packaging more familiar and noticeable. When you were ready to buy, the advertised cereal was "top of mind."

In the world of B-to-B marketing and sales, this approach is commonly discarded. Every contact with a prospect or customer is designed to elicit an immediate action response. Even "content marketing" campaigns typically end with a call to action and a sales inducement. There's a place for that… I'm not telling you to stop providing strong CTAs. But in many cases you can gain extra leverage by sprinkling in some purely "altruistic" communications. Don't ask for anything in return. Don't finish with a request. Just provide repeated information drops that keep your offering "top of mind." Then when the prospect is eventually ready to make a decision, they think of you first.

Webinars, web meetings, and webcasts can be a wonderful way to deliver this "softer, gentler" kind of information sharing. As part of your customer nurturing process, why not hold a series of regularly scheduled short webinars? Each one can give a little bit of useful information without any of the surrounding marketing introduction, sales positioning, or set up and background that you would build into an introductory lead generation webinar. You assume that attendees have already heard the basic pitch. They know who you are and what your offering does. So you respect their time and just give them a little sumthin' extra. Because you're nice people.

Examples might include a spotlight on a feature of the week. Or a short case study looking at an interesting customer use example. Or news about recent pricing changes. Or limited time special offers and discounts. Or new version availability. Or changes to management. Or information about third-party integrations. Or options and add-ons that can be applied.

It gives sales representatives a justification and reason to reach out and stay in contact with their prospect lists without having to say "Just wanted to see if you're ready to make an order yet." The salesperson can invite the prospect to get additional information purely for their own benefit. The webinars can also be used to encourage upsells and additional usage from existing customers who have made an initial purchase.

Webinars can also be used as source material for sales and marketing touches to stay top of mind. Let's say you give a standard one-hour pitch-centric lead generation webinar to the public. Look for a short nugget of value that you can extract and use on its own. Maybe a definition of a technical term. Or a customer testimonial. Keep it short… 30-60 seconds works great. Produce that one small snippet as a video clip and provide it to your sales team to send out to their contact lists. The salespeople can be seen as offering value and doing the leg work of stripping away all the inessential surrounding material to give the prospect something that is worth a bit of time and a bit of attention.

Don't overlook the value of staying top of mind both before and after an initial sale. The form that will take is highly dependent on the way your product is structured and on the way you manage the customer relationship lifecycle. It will almost certainly NOT be the same as advertising breakfast cereals! But with a little introspection, I'll bet you can find a way to add additional touchpoints and improve goodwill and perception of value among your target populations.

 

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