The Webinar Blog

How Can An Instant Pot Ad Improve Your Communication Effectiveness?

I was skimming through an Instant Pot product description (really no more than a glorified editorial advertisement), when my eyes stopped cold on the following sentence:

“The 10-in-1 multicooker can roast, stew, bake, steam, slow cook, sear/sauté, rice, yogurt, ferment, and warm food at the touch of a single button.”

Sure. I get the idea. I’m not completely cognitively impaired… That’s still a year or two away.

But the sentence construction is wrong in a way that I see all the time in webinar promotional materials and on presentation slides. Grammar wonks refer to it as a matter of “parallel construction” – Each compared item or idea in a sentence should follow the same grammatical pattern.

In the sentence above, “rice” and “yoghurt” are not verbs that apply to the subject “food” in the same way as the other action words in the list. I’ve never heard of a cook wanting to yoghurt her food, and “rice” is a real verb in cooking that has nothing to do with this machine’s capabilities. So including it in the list actually makes the sentence a lie rather than simply unwieldy.

In the presentation world, parallel construction mistakes most commonly show up in bullet point lists. For instance, a webinar description says:

Join this webinar to learn:

• How to improve outcomes by 25%
• Ways to boost employee productivity
• Up to 50% more efficient processes
• Staying ahead of your competition

The same thing happens on PowerPoint slides all the time, whether they include the actual bullet points or not:

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that none of these examples are fatal to your message. Your audience knows what you mean. But at some level, nonparallel lists “feel” wrong. For a brief moment, the reader stops thinking about WHAT you are saying and shifts to thinking about HOW you are saying it. And that lessens the effectiveness of your communications.

This is the same reason presentation coaches advise you to get rid of distracting filler words or repeated vocal inflection patterns in your speaking. It’s not that audiences can’t understand you… It’s a matter of making the “mechanics” or “technique” behind your communications unnoticeable so that 100% of your listener’s attention is focused on the point you are making.

Parallel list construction is an easy thing to look for. For each item in the list, throw away all the other items and read the sentence as a standalone phrase. As you read each one, does the sentence sound the same? Does it make sense? …

… Or are you trying to yoghurt your food?

 

Technorati Tags: parallel construction,grammar,marketing,webinar promotion,webinar,web seminar,slide design,webcasting,webcast

Webinar Webcam Weirdness: Video Showing While Disabled

Dear readers, I need your help. I have an exceptionally rare webcam bug that vendors can’t reproduce. I need to collect evidence – even anecdotal – that it’s real.

The symptom is that even though webcam video is turned off in the meeting, one or two people still see the streaming video of presenters while the rest of the participants see nothing.

This is clearly impossible. Yet it has now happened to me on two different webinar platforms in completely different scenarios.

Mind you, that is twice out of many hundreds of webinars and many thousands of participants. And it has affected maybe four or five people in total. That’s a vanishingly low occurrence rate. Of course the vendors can’t reproduce it when I report it. So they can’t diagnose it and can’t fix it. Indeed, they are quick to assume it is user error. But it isn’t.

The first time I had the situation occur was in a Webex Meeting. We had lots of participants. We had disabled the meeting option to “allow participants to turn on video.” I was logged in on one computer as host and on another computer as a standard meeting participant. On both computers, the webcam video display area showed no streaming video for any participants. But a participant wrote to tell me that he saw camera feeds for himself and a few other participants who did not seem to realize they were broadcasting. He sent me a screenshot to prove it. I had a screenshot from my computer showing those same people without video feeds. Webex tech support filed it as an open incident and said they couldn’t do anything about it unless it happened again.

Today I was on a GoToWebinar webinar. I opened the conference for panelists and we chatted with each other with webcams enabled. I had not started the active broadcast, so early attendees could not see us or hear us. I confirmed this on a second computer logged in as an attendee, which properly showed all webcam feeds blacked out. When I started the active broadcast mode, two attendees informed me they had been able to see our cameras for the entire 30-minute prep period, although they could not hear us. When I asked the audience about this, everyone else said they had not been able to see our video during the prep.

Once again, GoToWebinar is unable to reproduce the problem. Although a tech rep said he was able to find one other similar report from half a year ago, which they wrote off as probable user error.

I am careful to log in as an attendee so I can verify what my audience is seeing whenever I host a webinar. But if everything looks good on my computer, how do I know some attendees are seeing something else? They may not even know it’s unintended and that it represents a problem. I am ignorant that anything is amiss until and unless a participant writes to me.

Having people show up on camera when they think they are safely hidden is a recipe for disaster. If the host can’t see it is happening, it’s even worse. If you have ever been involved with a similar occurrence on any webinar software, could you please write a comment or send me an email? The first step in solving these issues is proving they exist.

Thank you!

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,web conference,online collaboration,web collaboration,webcast,webcasting,web meeting,GoToWebinar,Webex,streaming video,video conferencing

Zoom Needs To Improve Group Registration

Hey, Zoom… Thanks for wasting my morning. I have a few meetings set up for a client. They have a list of people they want to invite. They don’t want these people to have to self-register and they don’t want to send out a generic meeting attendance link that could get forwarded and shared. Each person should have their own login link that will allow us to track participation.

So far, so good. Zoom is set up for that. I simply check the box in the meeting setup to require registration. And now I can load in the names and emails of the participants who should get their login information…

Aha! The shoe drops. If this were a Zoom webinar, there would be no problem – I can import a CSV file with all the names and emails of my participants. But for a meeting, I can’t do that. I have to bring up the interactive registration page and type or paste in the first name, last name, email address, and email address again for confirmation. Then click the register button. Then go through I’m Not A Robot validation, which can currently take up to twenty selection clicks, multiple attempts, and delays while waiting for replacement images to get displayed. Over and over and over, for each and every person in each and every meeting session. It’s maddening.

It’s also so easy to avoid. Zoom could allow bulk upload of a CSV file for meetings… We know the code and the design is already in place. Or they could allow a bulk input screen for account administrators to use while logged into their account, with slots for multiple records of first/last/email and no robot verification required. Or they could build a group registration page that offers the ability for a group coordinator to enter multiple participants with a single human validation check.

I’m perfectly willing to accept that most meeting participants self-register, one at a time. But that’s no reason to make it the ONLY way to get people registered.

Technorati Tags: Zoom,web conference,web conferencing,web meeting,online meeting,web event,web collaboration,online collaboration

Check Your March Webinar Times Now

Twice a year I make a quick blog post or tweet to watch out for nonstandard time conversions during the transition in and out of Daylight Saving Time. I figure it might be nice to get ahead of the curve this year as you may be starting to schedule your March webinars.

The key takeaway is that you should not make any assumptions about the equivalent starting time for people in other locations. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of common knowledge such as “London is five hours ahead of New York.” That is not always the case!

There is no global standards board for Daylight Saving Time (DST). Different countries can choose to observe it or not, and they can choose when it starts and ends. In many places, different localities within a country can choose their own DST conventions.

Here in the USA, Arizona, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico are examples of states and territories that do not change clocks for DST. In Canada, quite a few areas choose not to observe DST – and they don’t even correspond to the rest of the province they are located in!

In the USA and Canada, areas that observe DST will change their clocks on March 14 this year. In the UK and most of continental Europe, the time change won’t occur until March 28. In Palestine and Paraguay, clocks will change on March 27, while Australia and New Zealand will change their clocks on April 4 (except for those areas in Australia that choose not to observe DST).

So while you may think you know the time offset between two locations, you could be mistaken on any given date in late March and early April. This also applies to your audiences… Don’t trust them to figure out the starting time where they are based on your posted starting time where you are.

How do you deal with the situation? I usually prefer to list the local start time for a few representative major cities and then provide a clickable web link that lets people look up the equivalent time in other locations:

----------------
WEBINAR TITLE
March 27, 2021 – 60 minutes – Free Admission
New York:9am / London:2pm / Dubai:5pm
Click here to find your local time
----------------

I prefer to use city names to avoid ambiguity. For instance, CST can mean US Central Standard Time or China Standard Time or Cuba Standard Time. IST is used for Indian Standard Time, Irish Standard Time, and Israel Standard Time. And in areas where time zones are nonstandard within a country or state, giving the city name makes it clear where to start the conversion.

The “click here” link I used in my example comes from a tremendously useful free online utility. Timeanddate.com provides an “Event Time Announcer” – you specify a date, time, and anchor location, and it generates a table showing equivalent times in other locations. You can include the generated page link to direct people to the custom timetable for your event. The website is very good about updating their algorithms to account for new legislation altering regional time calculations – It happens more frequently than you would guess.

The first time you use the tool, you may not notice options that let you customize the table even more to your liking. I put red highlights around some of the options that let you choose how the reference cities get listed. Pick the display you like and then just copy the resulting URL out of your browser address window.

This is a useful tool at any time of the year, for any online event. But it’s especially critical if you are scheduling something during the “shoulder season” of late March and early April when all bets are off as to what time it is from one city to the next.

* Fun fact for the fastidious… Time conversions are not always in 60-minute multiples. If your event starts on the hour in the USA, India and parts of Australia see it start on the half hour. And people in Nepal as well as a few small islands see it starting on the quarter hour!

Technorati Tags: DST,Daylight Saving Time,time conversion,webinar,web seminar,web event,online event,webcasting,webcast,web meeting,online meeting,web conference,web conferencing,timeanddate.com

ON24 Registers To Go Public

On Friday, ON24 quietly put out a press release announcing its SEC registration to make an Initial Public Offering. At this point, no date or offer price is set, although the total amount to be raised is specified in the registration document as one hundred million dollars.

ON24 may not be as well known to the rank and file end user, as the company doesn’t compete in the peer-to-peer “low cost, high volume” online meeting space against products like Zoom, GoToMeeting, and Microsoft Teams. ON24 is all about large audience structured web events (they go back and forth from year to year on whether they offer a webcasting or webinar platform).

I have been watching their marketing and positioning over the last year with some amusement. It feels like they vacillate between wanting to play up the webinar side of things and wanting to downplay it in favor of a larger and more nebulous positioning as an enabler of “digital experiences that convert customer engagement into revenue.” That’s a higher value pitch, but can be harder for prospects to get their heads around.

Way, way back in April of 2010 I wrote a blog post expressing excitement about the new user interface ON24 was introducing at that time. I said it represented a “quantum leap in user configurability and control.” I remain enthusiastic about the ON24 attendee experience in web events and I’m surprised that more vendors haven’t tried to emulate the flexibility of a completely window-oriented GUI where each attendee can open, close, move, and resize content panels just as they do in day to day operations on their computer.

ON24 has held out against the tide of transparent pricing over the years. If you are interested in licensing their product or products, you need to go old school… You contact a sales representative who talks to you about your needs and provides a customized pricing quote. They really aren’t interested in dealing with one-off events or Mom-and-Pop businesses. Their high-touch sales and support model is designed for large enterprises that can commit to producing numerous events on an annual basis.

If I recall the company’s history correctly, early emphasis was on investor relations calls and corporate communications requirements. They made a push into the publishing vertical for a while as well. Naturally, they can handle any type of application that needs a good webcast/webinar platform (I used it on a series of professional training lectures for accountants). But the current positioning is very strongly marketing related, which lets them push their bundle of associated products and services designed to support customer acquisition, content management, and revenue generation.

This is not the first time ON24 has looked at the public option. I found an article from 2012 indicating that the company seemed to be positioning itself for an IPO that never materialized. Obviously, the current environment feels right for potentially riding the wave of investor euphoria for virtual communications. Investors who missed the opportunity to ride Zoom stock from an offering price around $60 to a high of $560 might well try to cash in on another IPO in the space (even though the two companies, products, and use cases are dissimilar). But that enthusiasm has to be tempered by the fear that virtual growth might slow down with a successful COVID vaccine and a return to more travel and in-person experiences. Zoom itself has been on a steady decline since that high price was reached last October.

Still, with BrightTALK getting purchased by TechTarget just before Christmas, there aren’t many of the old independent webinar vendors left to invest in. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a good opening gain for ON24. I should think they will try to get the IPO out to the market as soon as they can. Momentum is everything right now. I wish them well!

(Disclaimer/Disclosure: I have no financial interest or investment in ON24 or its competitors. This article represents my personal opinions and is not based on any interviews or communications with executives, employees, or representatives of ON24.)

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