The Webinar Blog

Is Your Presentation A Commercial Work?

One of the most visited posts on this blog is my layman’s analysis of Fair Use considerations in US Copyright Law. If you liked that one, then buckle up… It’s time to revisit the tortuous and inconclusive aspects of copyrights in a new discussion focusing on Creative Commons licensing.

As always, I have to start by saying that I have no legal training, standing, or background (aside from a Business Law course in college that surprised me when I found it enjoyable). Don’t take anything I say as legal advice. I’m just fascinated by how hard it is for the average user to figure out whether he or she is operating legally.

I was spurred to look into the Creative Commons license when I saw a tweet from Tony Ramos (@TonyRamos – “The Presentationist”). He was helping to spread the word about a new stock photo library using a self-declared inclusive spectrum of gender models. This is a great addition to the most commonly used stock photo resources, which are overwhelmingly Euro-centric, White, and traditionally “Western Business Conservative.”

On the Broadly Gender Spectrum Collection website, guidelines say that all images are made available under the terms of the Creative Commons license. The website points to only two main restrictions… “you may not create derivative work from the images or use the images for commercial purposes.”

The Creative Commons license is now widely used by content creators who want to make their work available, but not lose potential value from it. All the legal jargon is standardized and worked out so that each supplier doesn’t need a team of lawyers to craft their own version.

In the version of the license quoted by Broadly, users must give attribution to the original content creator, and may not use it to create derivative material. That effectively means you can’t do something like use Photoshop to change a model’s hair color, save the picture, and call it your own. In a music sense, you can’t overlay a new track on top of the source track and call the new piece your own. But it does not stop you from creating presentations incorporating the stock photographs.

As promised in this post’s title, the tricky use restriction is in figuring out whether your use of the material is “for commercial purposes.” This simple phrase has been the source of contention and discussion for well over a decade.

The Creative Commons website attempts a three-paragraph clarification of intent (wait for the site to load… It’s on the world’s slowest web server). It says the purpose of the phrase is to prohibit uses that are “primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or monetary compensation.”

So if you record your presentation, place it online, and charge people to view it – uh uh… Your primary intention is to get monetary compensation.

If you build a sales presentation with a call to action at the end asking your audience to place an order for something, I’d say that counts as trying to get a commercial advantage and intended to get monetary compensation.

Interestingly, the Creative Commons folk make a clear statement that the phrase applies to the individual use case in which the material is included. It is NOT dependent on the type of user. So a school, community organization, or non-profit association can be just as guilty of creating a commercial work as a business enterprise. If you have to pay to see it, or if the work is primarily created to stimulate an exchange of money, that’s a prohibited use case.

Now we come to the tricky part. What if you get asked to give a presentation at a conference, trade show, or public gathering? Your topic might be purely educational and altruistic. But are you getting a speaker’s fee? Do people have to pay to attend the event overall? In those cases, even though your topic is educational and the presentation does not urge viewers to exchange further money, can the presentation be seen as part of a commercial venture? Even if no money changes hands at all, can the promotional value for the presenter (which could manifest itself later and indirectly) be deemed a commercial advantage?

It turns out there is no clear-cut answer. You probably have an opinion and are even now yelling it out as you read this. But as obvious as it seems to you, there is someone out there with the opposite viewpoint.

Back in 2009, the Creative Commons Corporation employed Netpop Research to conduct an extensive study on opinions about this specific issue. The entire study was designed to elicit a consensus on what exactly determines a “commercial” versus “noncommercial” work under the terms of the standard license agreement. The research team started with an examination of US Copyright Law and found that it gave no useful definitions, even though it uses the same terminology.

Around 1000 users of source materials and several thousand creators of such materials were asked to fill out an online survey. A smaller subset was invited to participate in physical presence focus groups.

The researchers found differences in interpretation not just between individuals, but between people belonging to different use-case groups. For instance, internet technology professionals tended to be more liberal in their interpretation of noncommercial than educators or art professionals. In a summary of the findings, the report authors wrote that “no participant could provide a definition of noncommercial use that worked for everyone in their particular group.”

Later, the report emphasized this same point: “Perceptions of the many use cases measured in this study suggests there is more uncertainty than clarity around whether uses of online content are commercial or noncommercial in nature.”

After skimming 141 pages of the report’s Word document and looking at 119 additional PowerPoint slides with graphs of the survey responses, I’m no nearer a definitive answer. For something you are implicitly agreeing to, with legal ramifications, by the mere use of a CC-licensed work, you have no idea whether you would win or lose in a legal battle or arbitration.

I would guess that the ambiguity in definition would make it hard to successfully prosecute and claim damages in a “fringe case” like the ones I called out as examples. The remedy in most cases would likely be a cease and desist letter. Given the limited resources of both creators and users of stock photography likely to be classified under a CC license, it’s probably not worth the financial risk of hiring lawyers and going to court. It would be a veritable coin toss on who would win or lose the case.

As always, you can avoid the entire issue if you use your own self-created photographs and illustrations, or explicitly license work for commercial use from a professional stock photography site. If you think you might be in a commercial use situation and still want to use a photo from the Broadly Gender Spectrum Collection, their “Guidelines” page gives an email address you can write to with licensing questions.

I sure do wish this was more straightforward. I can’t even figure out whether I would be legally allowed to attach one of those Broadly photos to this blog post… After all, even though the blog is free and there is no commerce being promoted in the post, the blog is associated with my commercial Webinar Success business and indirectly brings awareness to it, which could result in indirect commercial advantage. Sigh…

Technorati Tags: stock photo,stock photography,copyright law,Creative Commons,business law,Broadly

State Of The Web Conferencing Industry - March 2019

It feels like the time is right for another of my infrequent and unscheduled reflections on what is going on in the web conferencing industry. Everything expressed here is my personal opinion only.

In no particular order of priority, here are some of the things I have been thinking about of late:

1) The “web conferencing” umbrella term has swung back towards peer-to-peer meetings as its primary public face. Webinars and webcasts still exist and are still powerful tools for business. But media articles, press releases, and vendor awareness campaigns are currently focused on group participation more than presentation use cases.

A few vendors are bucking this trend:

ON24 is still strongly committed to promoting the presentation and marketing “web events” view of web collaboration. Their recent Webinar World conference had a strong orientation towards online events.

As I recently reported, omNovia Technologies just released FLOW, which is explicitly stated as NOT supporting peer-level web meetings.

Adobe Connect has moved to the Digital Learning Solutions portion of the Adobe website. I was told that they don’t really see themselves in the ad hoc meeting space anymore and have decided to concentrate on increasing their strong foothold in educational use cases.

PGi, Cisco, and LogMeIn are coasting along with their suites of products covering both presentation/event use cases and peer meeting use cases, but I am seeing more press emphasis on the latter at the moment.

 

2) Vendors are pushing the use of web conferencing as a replacement or adjunct to dedicated video room or huddle room remote meeting spaces for enterprises. Any enterprise that has already sunk money into a connected meeting room is a well-qualified prospect with both interest and budget for meeting solutions. So it makes sense to market aggressively towards that demographic. Zoom, LogMeIn, Webex Meetings, and other meeting-oriented web solutions have been ramping up the video collaboration aspects of their solutions and have introduced features designed to supplement point-to-point videoconferencing hardware solutions.

Right now, this is tied in very firmly with observation #1… The dedicated meeting room is seen as a space primarily for in-house collaboration. Someone is eventually going to recognize the value in promoting the use of that same space as a “mini broadcast studio” for presentation use cases as well. This will enable vendors to rebalance or expand how they promote their web conferencing products to get marketing, training, and outbound communication experiences back into the mix. So far, I haven’t seen any public mention of this scenario.

 

3) UCC and UCaaS are back with a vengeance. If you aren’t familiar with those abbreviations, just focus on “UC” as the important part. Vendors have been pushing “Unified Communications” for the past 20 years as a silver bullet that will make business more efficient and show huge ROI for adopters. It’s a gleaming vision of riches for any supplier who can make it stick… Imagine entire employee populations running your various connected applications on phone, desktop, and mobile devices while being locked into your integration of voice, data, email, calendaring, meeting, and text.

I remain cynical of anything that requires 20 years of trying to convince prospects that they have a problem that needs solving. The truth is that most employees don’t WANT to be that connected, 24-hours a day, without a break. The ability to transition their work smoothly from device to device and application to application is not as much of a draw for them as users as it is for the vendors trying to push it. But recent press releases, conferences, and media articles show a renewed marketing emphasis on positioning web conferencing products as part of an integrated UC solution strategy. This is part of the reason for observation #1… Web meetings fit the UC story while web events don’t fit into that framework.

 

4) Vendor concentration on universal access to web meetings will temporarily reduce solution quality, flexibility, and capability. I have written quite a bit about the transition from Flash to HTML5 that many vendors have been forced into. HTML5 simply doesn’t have the flexibility and capabilities that Flash had (which were exactly what opened it to security vulnerabilities). So some web conferencing functionality will be lost for power users. Hopefully that will be temporary as the HTML5 standard continues to develop and clever coding teams find new approaches.

A second problem is that nobody uses a hardwired internet connection anymore. Mobile devices and many laptops now don’t even have Ethernet ports. When the device does have the capability, it’s getting hard to find a cable drop in anything other than a commercial enterprise office. Everyone expects to be able to enjoy the convenience and universal access of wireless internet. But the state of that technology is not universally stable or powerful enough to handle the needs of high speed two-way voice, data, and video integration that modern web conferences want to deliver. The result is audio dropouts, video buffering and stuttering, temporary freezes, and even forced reconnects for meeting participants. Not for all of them, and not all at once. But someone out there is sure to have network congestion or speed issues that result in a bad experience.

In the short term, the only practical way for vendors to get around this issue is to buffer the communications stream, which removes the goal of real-time two-way communication and collaboration. In the long term, this is going to require fundamental changes to the transport infrastructure - such as mesh networks in big cities and general widespread adoption of 5G networks. Neither is going to be common this year.

The third problem is not going to be soluble. We are just starting to see the effects, but it may lead to the sharpest drop in power and functionality over the long term. As vendors race to support smooth UC integration and universal access from mobile devices, they have to simplify operation of their applications. Controls need to be visible on small screens and accessible with big fat finger presses instead of fine-grained mouse movements. Screen space is at a premium for content. Power users want access to multiple pieces of content at once… Slides, chat streams, participant video, Twitter feeds, and so on. Presenters and hosts want even more, with private chat windows, analytics, muting controls, etc. How do you allow for all that on a smartphone display? Users will have to choose which piece to bring up at any given time. This will necessarily result in less power and flexibility than product designs that assumed meeting participants would be chained to their office desks, looking at nice big desktop monitors.

 

5) Web conferencing should get a short-term public perception boost this year. This is the most tenuous of my crystal ball guesses, as it is not based on a current trend. If Zoom goes public as is generally expected in the financial press (perhaps as early as March/April?), I think it could be a high profile IPO with the potential for short term rapid growth. That would reflect well on the entire industry and could make users and potential customers feel more comfortable with increased use or adoption. It would also generate more mentions in the media outside of our usual technology channels. We’ll see if any of that actually plays out.

 

As always, I encourage you to contribute in the comments section with your own impressions of the marketplace, technology trends, or guesses about where things might be going. Considering different perspectives benefits all of us!

 

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

Question Management In Webinars

Today I am integrating a collection of opinions and suggestions that I have sprinkled through various blog posts over the years. The topic is the way that webinar or webcast products handle typed questions (or audience chat) in their products.

The most recent design trend I have seen is for vendors to emulate the look and feel of mobile device instant messaging in their web conferencing products.

This does a disservice to participants, hosts, and administrators. The design is functional for a two-person conversation, but add more participants and you quickly lose track of conversational threads while wasting lots of screen space.

One of the Chat implementations I currently like is in Webinato. Each message line is treated as a controllable entity, with a checkbox next to it that allows for functions that presenters and hosts can carry out.

It is important to have control over individual submissions in this way. If we start with this basic concept of checkbox actions for each message, I can think of the following pieces of potential functionality that might be accessed by clicking a box and getting an action menu.

FOR ATTENDEES

1. Delete my selected submission (attendees cannot delete entries from other participants)
2. Place a “Me Too” marker on a selected message (anybody’s) – The original message shows the cumulative number of “Me Too’s” associated with it
3. Click “Thread” to submit a message as a follow-on in the same thread as the selected original message. The software assigns a Thread Number to messages: “T01, T02…”
4. Change Chat display order:
• By time
• By person, then time
• By thread, then time
• By number of Me Too votes, then time

Maybe something along these lines (I just mocked this up as a rough concept picture in PowerPoint.):

 

FOR PRESENTERS/HOSTS

1. Delete a selected submission (may delete anybody’s)
2. Place a “Me Too” marker on a message
3. Click “Thread” to submit a message as a follow-on in the same thread as the original message
4. Display to everyone (only useful in privatized/moderated Chat windows)
5. Respond privately to original submitter
6. Mark for handling:
• Red
• Yellow
• Green
• Blue
• Remove color
7. Change Chat display order:
• By time
• By person, then time
• By thread, then time
• By number of Me Too votes, then time
• By color, then time

The use of colors is something that Webinato currently supports, and I like the flexibility. We on the presentation team can decide if we want colors to stand for priority or for who should take the question, needs follow up later, or some other administrative aid. We are not constrained by a text label that the vendor thought we should use. Presenters/hosts can change colors on the fly, so I can change a green “ask this question” to blue to indicate that we have answered it in session, as an example. Attendees do not see assigned colors… They are for use only by the presentation team.

Of course, standard group selection controls should work on sets of messages. So I can SHIFT-select a range of messages for a block delete (great for early “Can you hear me?” or “Type your name” interaction exercises) or I can CTRL-select arbitrary messages that should all get the same handling. I also need to be able to copy messages for pasting into another window or document.

Maybe presenter/host controls would operate something like this:

Being able to change sort order on the fly inside a session gives a level of convenience that is currently missing from most products. I can easily accept that you might not want to enable it for attendees, just to make the display easier and to reduce their learning curve. But for hosts, it gives a great way to easily see sub-threaded conversations by attendees, or see successive thoughts from one person, or see common problems to address in conversation, or see everything you have marked for action.

 

POST-WEBINAR REPORTING

The chat log or question log should be available in spreadsheet format to allow arbitrary sorting by an analyst for their purposes. Every message is included in the spreadsheet, even if it was deleted during the session.

By including all the information in the mockups above, along with identifying information, stakeholders can sort to see what topics stimulated conversation, who needs attention, or how chat messages were dealt with.

 

DESIGN & IMPLEMENTATION

It would be silly to say that my quick mockups are the perfect final design and implementation for all web conferencing products. I don’t believe that for a second. Providing the extra controls also adds complexity of use, and that’s a real concern. Think of my examples as an exhibit of concepts that might be incorporated in more subtle ways into consumer-ready products.

Every web conferencing product needs to design appropriately for their environment and their look and feel. The specific commands available to users will be different among vendors as well. But I hope the main point comes through… We can and should offer more control and more analytics for typed chat and questions. It benefits everyone. Let’s not fall prey to the simplistic paradigm of two-person texting as the industry design benchmark.

I would love to hear your thoughts. Additional functionality that would be useful to you as an attendee or as a host? Disagreements with things I have suggested? Let’s get some commentary going.

 

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

omNovia Releases New FLOW Webinar Platform

We have another new webinar technology to discuss! FLOW is a new offering from omNovia Technologies. (This company seems to really have something against initial uppercase conventions in branding.)

I have used their previous web conferencing product for many years. It started out as omNovia and went through a name change to Webinato. I still recommend Webinato for some client needs, but it is hampered by a reliance on Adobe Flash technology. Many companies have prohibited the use of Flash on employee computers, and even when it is available (as in the Google Chrome web browser), it now requires confirmation clicks in order to use. Adobe will completely discontinue distribution and support for Flash at the end of 2020, so web conferencing vendors have been switching to HTML5 and WebRTC to support web collaboration. FLOW marks this same HTML5 transition for omNovia.

But FLOW is not just a rewrite of the underlying communications protocol, keeping everything else the same. The company decided to create a substantially new product that will operate in parallel with the final years of the Flash-based Webinato product. FLOW is positioned as having features tailored specifically for use in marketing and lead generation webinars. The company says that FLOW is not intended for use in peer-level web meetings and ad hoc conferences.

I have had a chance to do some testing with a pre-release version, but I have not yet employed it in a live client webinar. So I can’t comment on robustness or performance with large numbers of participants. The online FAQ page says that online events should be able to handle audience sizes of more than a thousand.

The most obvious functional differentiator separating FLOW from other webinar products is the use of a “Storyboard.” You set up an online event by creating a sequence of planned content pieces that will be activated in order (you can also access them out of order at your discretion). These can include live screen share, displaying uploaded PowerPoint slides, activating a survey, conducting Q&A, showing presenter bios, or broadcasting an uploaded audio or video clip.

There are some interesting options available. If you have multiple presenters associated with the webinar, you can have the software automatically turn on a given presenter’s microphone and/or webcam at the start of each content segment. This makes life a little easier for presenters or a moderator trying to make sure that mikes get muted and unmuted correctly throughout the session. You can also have the software display a countdown timer for presenters in each content section, in an attempt to keep people on schedule with their material.

Slides get uploaded to static images, with excellent clarity. As with more and more webinar technologies these days, the vendor has decided to stop trying to chase Microsoft’s frequent functionality updates, and instead asks you to rely on screen sharing if you want to show transition effects or animations on the slides. One nice thing about defining a Storyboard content block with uploaded slides is that you can designate a specific range of slide numbers to be associated with one content block (and potentially one presenter), and then upload the same slide deck with a different range of slides as a separate content block. This makes it clear to multiple presenters who is responsible for which section of the presentation, and also lets you assign timers to each section.

Another cute option for uploaded slides is that you can click a checkbox to automatically make the slides available for attendee download as a PDF file. Of course you can’t make any edits to the PDF, but in many cases where you just want a quick ‘n easy way to distribute your slides, this handles the entire process in a single click.

In order to properly play audio/video clips and match broadcast audio and video streams, FLOW assumes that all attendees will use computer audio. There is no built-in provision for a telephone bridge to provide a dial-in listening option. I was very surprised (and pleased!) to see near instantaneous transmission of signal from my presenter computer to my attendee computer. I had thought that a 15-30 second broadcasting buffer lag was built into HTML5 as part of the protocol. If FLOW is able to maintain that zero-lag transmission speed, it eliminates a major concern I have had in training presenters how to deal with a supposedly live presentation where they can’t really get two-way feedback from attendees in real time.

It will be interesting to see how the new platform catches on, with its more focused concentration on a certain type of structured webinar. I can definitely see the advantages for multi-presenter scenarios, and the lack of broadcast delay looks like a potential advantage over many competitors. We’ll have to keep an eye on this one.

Technorati Tags: omNovia,Webinato,FLOW,webinar,web seminar,web event,online event,web collaboration,online collaboration,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing

Why Are You Giving A Webinar?

I recently wrote a blog post about “Strategy-Free Webinar Tactics” where I cautioned against concentrating on implementation details without first thinking about the objectives behind them. I mentioned things such as slide design, use of polls, and appearing on camera while presenting.

It occurs to me that I overlooked an even more important application of the same advice at a much higher level. When you first start thinking about hosting a webinar, webcast, or web conference do you ask yourself what your goal is? You should!

You can’t possibly create effective marketing, content, and follow up (much less measure the success of your efforts) if you don’t have a clear and unambiguous statement of intent to guide you and your team. Intent is different for each and every webinar, and needs to be explicit.

Let’s take an example. Assume you work in marketing. Many (if not most) marketers gauge the success of their webinars by looking at the number of registrants and attendees. Some go a little further and add lead qualification scores. A few take their analysis all the way to an examination of how many attendees eventually complete a sale. But are those the right measures of success? It depends on what that particular webinar was supposed to accomplish.

Looking at the number of registrants is a reasonable measurement tactic if your intent is to increase the number of contacts in your house list or marketing contacts database. But even then, shouldn’t you be examining how many NEW contacts you collected?

If the intent of the webinar is to foster retention of existing customers, that would call for a different choice of topic, structure of content, and type of follow up than in the previous case. And the measurement of success might now be actual attendance rates, perhaps matched against customer value or renewal rates. A customer who registers but doesn’t attend (or at least view the recording) has received no extra influence or persuasion from you.

Is the intent of the webinar to get prospects into the sales pipeline? Or is it to actually drive attendees to complete a purchase? These goals have different calls to action at the end of the presentation and need different channels for following up, as well as different tactical measurements to calculate the webinar’s success in achieving those goals.

Let’s shift to a training example. Organizations offer training all the time. Few ever stop to ask what the purpose is. You can’t justify the time, cost, and effort put into development and delivery of a class if you don’t know the strategic reason for offering it. Are you trying to generate goodwill? Stimulate additional usage of your company’s services or products? Provide a perception of value for an annual membership or maintenance fee? Reduce demands upon your support department? Knowing WHY you offer the training helps you determine HOW to plan, prepare, deliver, and measure it.

This exercise trickles down to everyday peer-level meetings. You may be holding a web conference with a customer, with team members, or with employees. Just as with a public webinar, your very first task before ever scheduling the session is to make sure you are clear on the reason behind the meeting. How will you decide afterwards whether you successfully achieved your objective?

Watch out for falling into the trap of answering the wrong question. It is easy to ask yourself “Why am I holding this webinar?” and answer it with: “To allow customers from all over the world to attend without traveling to our location.” That tells you why you chose a webinar over an in-person session, which is simply a tactical decision that was made in order to further a higher-level business goal. Move up the conceptual chain and refocus on what that business goal was.

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