The Webinar Blog

Webinato Pre-Announces FLOW Webinar Platform

As I have mentioned before, 2018 marks the big technology switch to HTML5 and WebRTC for web-based web conferencing platforms that previously relied on Adobe Flash Player. All Flash-based products should have shifted to the new technology by the end of the year.

Webinato is one of the web conferencing vendors that is faced with a big rewrite of their Flash-reliant code. They just announced that they are taking advantage of the obligatory update to restructure functionality for presenters. The company sent out an email last week, seeking participants to beta test the upcoming new version of the webinar software, which will be called FLOW.

I am working purely off the announcement letter, as there are no operational sneak peeks available yet. The big change is that FLOW is designed for a highly planned and structured webinar presentation, where the webinar administrator or lead presenter sets up a storyboard of content items to be displayed in a fixed sequence. By "content items," I mean things such as PowerPoint slides, interactive polls, video clips, and other features currently available in Webinato through selectable "modules" that show up as tabs in the presentation interface.

The announcement web page says you assign each storyboard step to a presenter. That makes me a little nervous, as I have had too many webinars where presenters are swapped out or change roles at the last minute (or even meet each other and decide who's doing what at the last minute!). I hope the presenter assignment is not a mandatory setup choice.

An interesting paragraph on the announcement page says that you can pre-record audio, video, and the progression of each step of the presentation. Then during the live webinar, you can run some or all steps in your storyboard as automatic playback. Attendees can interact with the software and you can switch to live mode at any time. The big question is how well this works with recording of the event as it goes out to the attendees. Many webinar technologies have a problem recording content that is being played back from previously-recorded clips. Webinato will need to make sure that everything can be captured exactly as it is seen in the live webinar.

The announcement letter states that FLOW is being designed specifically to support marketing webinars. The letter says that "a FLOW version geared toward Training webinars may be in the works in the future." It also says that "FLOW may not fit all of your current needs, in which case, you will continue to rely on the present Webinato platform." Hmmm… it sounds like the company has decided to really focus on the single-use case of lead generation in much the same way that ON24 did a couple of years ago.

The FLOW web page mentions "advanced analytics" on registrants and attendees - which is extremely important in a marketing-focused product. They'll want to make it easy for marketers to track and share performance of invitation channels, registration page versions, lead prioritization, and so on. I'll be interested to see what they come up with.

The announced release date for Webinato FLOW is by the end of March. That's very near future, so the beta period should be starting soon. I hope to get a look at the beta, but to be fair to the vendor, I won't share details or concerns publicly until the company has had a chance to fix and finalize things. After all, that's the whole point of a beta program.

I'm looking forward to seeing what Webinato comes up with. Hopefully it will expand on and enhance the flexibility and functionality I have enjoyed in their webinar product for many years.

Technorati Tags: Webinato,Webinato FLOW,webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,webcast,webcasting,online seminar,lead generation,demand generation

Free Tips For B2B Marketing Webinars

Are you planning your marketing webinars for 2018? Will they be better than they were last year? Perhaps it's time to brush up on best practices and practical considerations. Why not join me this Thursday for a free online session covering webinar guidelines for B2B marketers.

You can register at http://bit.ly/B2Bjan25

I'll be covering the entire webinar planning, production, and delivery cycle. You'll have a chance to learn how to better promote your webinar, how to encourage registration and attendance, ways to drive action, and what to think about when considering adding live video, video clips, and product demos to your content.

LogMeIn UK has invited me to be their guest speaker, so the time is more convenient than usual for my readers in the UK and continental Europe:

2pm London / 3pm Paris (that's 9am New York)

As always, I plan to answer your questions live on the air during the session. I look forward to seeing you online!

 

Technorati Tags: LogMeIn,webinar,marketing,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,webcast,webcasting,online seminar,web meetings

Webinar vs Webcast - 2018 Update

Every so often, I take a look at terminology preferences in our industry. A great way to get a quick macro-level feel for usage is to track Google searches for "webinar" and "webcast" using the Google Trends analytic tool. Here are my results as of January 15, 2018. I set my timespan for 5 years, so as to smooth out any temporary anomalies.

As you can see from the overall comparison graph, "webinar" continues to grow in common usage, while fewer and fewer searches look for "webcast."

The webinar line is in red and the webcast line is in blue. The sharp drops correspond to Christmas each year… a common result for business-related search terms.

The worldwide usage map shows a fascinating regional distinction:

If you want to do business in China, "webcast" is the term to use.

And finally, I did a quick listing of the top five geographies performing searches for each term:

I'm not sure what's going on with webcasts in Sri Lanka, but if you want to ponder a real head-scratcher, take a look at what happens if you shorten the timeline to look for top regions searching for these terms over the last 12 months:

Nigeria, Sri Lanka, and the tiny remote island of St. Helena?!? I invite you to add a comment with your theories and speculation as to why these locations are using these search terms more than the US or Canada. I have no idea.

 

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

Webinar Technology Shift Means Retraining Presenters

2018 is a year of transition for many webinar technology vendors. Products that previously used Adobe Flash Player to handle two-way communications between webinar participants are being rewritten and re-released to use HTML5 and WebRTC as the underlying enabling platform. By the end of the year, you should not find any remaining Flash-based web collaboration products.

Webinar products that install a program on each participant's computer ("client software" in programming parlance) are mostly immune from this transition. Examples of those include GoToWebinar, Zoom, and the desktop-installed version of WebEx.

Products that run entirely in web browsers - with no download and install step - include names like Adobe Connect, Webinato, and ON24.

The single biggest difference in operation as browser-based products move to HTML5/WebRTC is in the "call and response" nature of two-way collaboration. Current implementations of WebRTC-based data/video/voice buffer the feed from the presentation side and then send it out to the consumers of the stream (webinar attendees). Attendees might hear a presenter's comments 5, 10, 15, or even 30 seconds after the presenter said them.*

Vendors typically shrug and say:

"As long as the audio and visual information stays in sync, who cares if it shows up a few seconds later as opposed to immediately?"

I care. And your guest speakers who don't do web presentations for a living are going to care. Because suddenly the way you interact with your audience changes.

As a webinar moderator or facilitator, I often start events by saying "I just want to check to make sure our audio is working properly. Would you type your first name to let me know you can hear me?" I wait a second until I see the first name or two come in, and then I know it's safe to jump into the content. But what if attendees receive a buffered stream? I ask my question and they don't hear it for 10 seconds or even 30 seconds. I see no responses in the chat window because my attendees don't even know I've asked a question yet.

Do I wait for a response until I know that people can actually hear me? Or do I plow ahead and if I don't see something within 30 seconds I know something is going wrong?

What happens when you get a good, experienced speaker who likes "working the room" and encouraging feedback and response from the audience? They keep asking for quick inputs and responses…

• "How would you deal with this?"
• "Is this making sense so far?"
• "Should I move on, or go into more detail?"
• "Click the 'raise-hand' icon if this has ever happened to you."

They naturally expect to get something back. They are ready to create a sense of interplay to show that they value the contributions and impressions of their attendees. But instead, they sit there, wondering what is happening. They don't know how to proceed, because the next thing they were going to say was dependent on the responses they saw. It's the dreaded "dead air" syndrome.

The effect then intensifies. Attendees were hearing a good presentation with things clipping along nicely. They heard a question and quickly typed in a response. Then nothing… complete silence after they responded. What has happened? Has the audio gone dead? Did their submission not go through? Maybe they should type another message. "Is something wrong with the audio?"

The presenter has finally seen the responses and starts talking again, but 30 seconds later, he sees a bunch of messages indicating there might be a problem with audio. He asks, "Uh oh… Can you hear me?" And again sees nothing for a while. Now panic sets in. "It looks like we have a problem… Oh wait. I see a bunch of responses now. Okay, it looks like audio is still working. Where were we?"

Of course this can all be avoided with proper training and expectation-setting. Presenters must be taught about the delay in seeing responses. They should learn to keep talking - to fill the gap until they get the feedback they were looking for. In many cases, it is best to let attendees know when you ask a question that you will come back to it in a minute to discuss the submissions once everyone has had a chance to contribute.

That small amount of presenter training is easy enough to imagine and easy enough to convey. But it's not natural. For many people, it stunts their natural speaking style and makes them even more uneasy about this artificial presentation environment where they can't see the people listening to them. "Now you're telling me that not only can't I see them, but I can't even ask them a quick question on the fly?!?" It's going to increase the tendency for people to speak "at" their audience rather than "with" their audience, killing the conversational nature of good communication.

If you work with guest presenters, you will need to let them know how "live" their live session actually is. You'll need to go over techniques with them to deal with question/response situations. If you are a webinar presenter, you'll need to know which technology you are using and what you should expect in terms of interactive latency. Then you'll need to actively practice this technique.

* I believe this is a temporary problem that WILL get a technical solution. People in the industry are already working on ways to reduce stream buffering and reception latency for large audiences. I recently read an interesting blog post from a vendor working on a plug-in designed to all but eliminate the lag and get it back to what we were used to from Flash. But it will take time to pivot and time to roll out new implementations. In the meantime, best practices for presentation style and technique are going to be dependent on the presentation technology being employed. Don't overlook this consideration.

 

Technorati Tags: presentation tips,presentation training,presenter training,speaker training,WebRTC,HTML5,webinar,web seminar,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing,web collaboration,online collaboration

The LEGO Approach To Webinar Presentations

What can LEGO® building bricks teach us about crafting and promoting webinar presentations? Consider the following webinar titles:

• New Features in Release 4.0
• Changes to State Law in 2018
• Status of November Committee Proceedings
• Latest Industry Trends and Benchmarks

The topics are clearly stated. They have meaning for whatever audience is targeted. The information has value. But they are not as effective as they could be. The presentations hold the same promise that a big box of random LEGO bricks holds. They tell a prospective attendee:

"We're going to dump a whole bunch of bricks (facts) on the table. You might enjoy sifting through them and maybe finding some that you can put to use if you are clever and imaginative enough, and if we happened to give you the bricks you needed."

When The LEGO Group first started selling their famous bricks in 1949, that's what they gave their audience… collections of bricks to be used as desired.

By 1964, the company was looking for a way to stimulate additional sales and keep growing. They hit on the idea of creating kits with exactly the pieces and instructions necessary to build a single, specific item pictured on the box lid. Just as model cars and airplanes had been sold for years.

Today you can get a good sense of sales popularity by looking at Amazon.com's hourly updates on bestselling items in their LEGO Store. Individual model kits make up the overwhelming majority of the items. You really have to search to find generic collections of bricks in the bestseller list.

If you want to generate demand, improve attendee satisfaction, and keep your audience coming back for more, try the LEGO approach. Don't just dump a laundry list of facts on your listeners.

1. Tell them the specific goal you are going to help them achieve… That's your "picture on the box lid."
2. Promise that they are going to get the facts they need in order to achieve the goal… That's your "specifically-curated set of building blocks."
3. Tell them that they will gain an understanding of how to use and apply the information in their own business… That's your "instruction list."

Using this approach, you will notice some changes from the way you are used to thinking about your webinars.

As your webinars concentrate on one promised goal at a time, the number of registrants and attendees for any given webinar will be smaller than for generic topic titles. You will need to edit the information you present to ONLY include things that directly contribute to the stated objective. And you will need to spend more time framing and explaining the utility and value of the information you present.

Let's make it concrete by moving back to the first sample title in my list at the beginning of this article.

"New Features in Release 4.0" might get executives, business users, and IT professionals to attend your webinar. But all three demographics emerge with a sense that part of their time was wasted, as you had to present features that did not interest them or address their priorities.

What if you craft three webinars instead?

• Using Release 4.0 to Improve Development Speed
• Improving Your Bottom Line With Release 4.0
• Installation and Support of Release 4.0: What you need to know to support your users

Each webinar uses only a subset of the total information, facts, and features you have at your disposal as a spokesperson. Each webinar shows smaller registration and attendance numbers. But each webinar has a greater chance of stimulating goodwill and action responses from its target audience, as you lead them towards the goal you have promised in the title. They no longer feel like you took a generic "information-dump" approach, leaving them with the responsibility for deciding which features have value. Instead, you have shown them HOW to use specific new features to generate value as THEY perceive it.

Much of the material in your previous generic webinar is repeated and repurposed in the topic-specific webinars. Just as you might find the same green, 4-stud, square LEGO brick in different model kits. You don't need different underlying facts for each webinar… You just need to decide which ones deserve inclusion and how they can be assembled to get to your "picture on the box lid" that attendees are expecting.

 

Technorati Tags: presentation tips,presentations,webinar,web seminar,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing,onlne presentation,web presentation