The Webinar Blog

Has WFH Killed Presenter Professionalism?

I saw a tweet that was later removed by the author, so I won’t attribute it out of respect for their wishes. But I thought the concept expressed was provocative and want to explore it. Paraphrasing rather liberally, it went along these lines…

The pandemic made working from home standard procedure. Will a lack of professionalism be the thing that ends WFH?

Now, there are a lot of potential ways to interpret “a lack of professionalism.” I don’t know what this particular author had in mind in that short tweet. You could focus on behaviors in team meetings and group video chats, or allowing inappropriate things to be seen on camera or in screen shares, or not joining meetings on time, or not muting your microphone, or all kinds of annoyances in group conversations. Peer-to-peer web conferencing is not my focus in this blog. But I believe it’s worth thinking about how universal WFH may have affected professionalism in outbound webinars.

Allow me to use a specific example to make some points.

Earlier this year, I attended a corporate conference. It was hosted by a big name in webinar/webcast software. Instead of booking a physical location and flying everyone in, the company produced the entire event online using their own web event software. Easy to attend, easy to host as many breakout sessions as they wanted with no incremental event costs.

The software worked very nicely. It was a lovely testament to how web presentations and virtual events can fill the needs of outbound communication to large, geographically distributed audiences.

The keynotes by company executives were produced at high quality in a controlled environment with professional sound, lighting, and camera operators. They started the event off nicely.

Then came the breakout sessions led by company employees. Each employee presented from home. I saw half-shaven employees wearing rumpled hoodies. I saw presenters sitting in their garage, surrounded by bicycles and lawn gear. I saw people on weak wifi with stutters and freezes. I saw overexposed and underexposed images, framed improperly. I saw laptop webcams on desks, shooting up into the presenter’s nostrils. I heard microphone scrapes, thumps, and volume changes as speakers moved their heads. In other words, exactly what you have seen for years in webinar after webinar.

It didn’t make the shared information any less valuable. But as an attendee, I felt like there was a lack of professionalism on display. It colored my perception of the company. Especially since the keynotes showed that the capability was there… they merely lacked the will to bring the entire event experience up to the same level.

It would have been less convenient for the employees. It would have cost more for the company. But they could have provided backdrops, lights, microphones, or broadcast rooms/studios in locales central to multiple presenters. They could have coordinated dress codes and branding for all presenters. They could have provided advance A/V checks and suggestions for each presenter to optimize the way they were perceived online. Or they could have demanded that each person come into the office for their breakout session presentation.

In other words, they could have dedicated the same kinds of oversight and comprehensive corporate standards to the online event that they would have done for a physical event. But that didn’t happen.

--- HAS WFH CONTRIBUTED TO LOWERED STANDARDS? ---

I don’t want to minimize the strains that COVID-related lockdowns, lockouts, and distancing placed on everyone. Companies, managers, and employees deserve kudos for making it all work as well as they have overall. Homes were forced to serve makeshift duty as offices and broadcast studios while coexisting with the demands of home life, partners, pets, and children.

Home wi-fi networks were suddenly tasked with bandwidth loads they were never built to handle… Simultaneous contention among kids doing remote schooling, family members streaming movies, multiple workers on video conferences, large “office-sized” documents being downloaded in email messages. Add to that the limitless wireless interference sources found in homes.

So we have all made allowances. Sometimes people are just going to have little freezes in team web meetings. Sometimes kids and pets are going to interrupt or add their presence on camera. Sometimes the background environment isn’t going to be pristine. Sometimes the neighbor’s leaf blower is going to make background noise.

Now we come back to that loaded phrase about “lowered standards.” It sounds accusatory or judgmental. That’s not my intent. I’m not belittling employees who have had to deal with the pandemic-enforced reality of life. You tell me what the alternative is for a single parent living in a New York studio apartment with a kid who isn’t allowed to go to school!

But there is an objective reality to face… We used to expect a given standard in work communications conducted in and between office environments with IT-managed networks and equipment and dedicated meeting rooms or office spaces. The new standard includes the allowances I mentioned above. It’s a lower standard.

And you know what? I don’t care. Internal business operations seem to be ticking right along, and if I see a coworker’s cat or kid while we’re talking, it’s kind of cute and doesn’t make me think any less of them. We’re all in this together.

--- THE IMPACT ON PRESENTATIONS ---

But! …

Now we switch our attention to the matter of presentations being made to customers, prospects, press, and analysts. Or donors. Or association members. Anyone we are trying to influence or drive to a course of action.

Once we face the world outside our corporate walls, we become ambassadors for our organization. The information we share is only one part of our job. We also have a duty to help create or reinforce a positive image of our company, to create goodwill, to build a sense of trustworthiness and reliability. In short, to show that our organization and the people in it have a sense of professionalism that makes us a desirable organization to work with.

And this is where the lowered standards of remote communication we all agreed to accept during the strict lockdown years is hurting companies. If every public-facing presenter is a spokesperson for our business image, then every public-facing presenter deserves proper support, training, equipment, and setting necessary to represent the organization in the best, most professional light.

That means corporate management needs to define and communicate a different set of standards and expectations for outbound presenters. It means asking presenters to come to controlled environments or studios when making their public presentations, or agreeing to set up home spaces that adhere to corporate A/V standards.

This is how I choose to interpret that original tweet way back at the beginning. Because most home environments cannot meet the standards for professional presentation that companies need to project, it creates a strong impetus for managers, executives, and event organizers to demand Work From Office rather than Work From Home when making presentations.

It’s not so much that employees are not acting professionally themselves, it’s that they are physically unable to create the impression of professionalism demanded by the company. So maybe “a lack of professionalism” won’t kill WFH overall, but it may well kill it for company webinars and conferences.

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,web event,online conference,online event,webcasting,webcast,work from home

Are We Asking Too Much Of Video Presenters?

Take a quick look at the video below. If it doesn’t play in your feed reader, you can find it on YouTube at https://youtu.be/1oh9fkwDCGg. The video is only 55 seconds long:

Pretty cool, isn’t it? It really is… I’m not being sarcastic or derisive. At least not yet. This is a teaser announcement from Prezi showing a concept feature enhancement that would allow presenters to use hand gestures to control display, orientation, and placement of graphic objects on the screen along with the presenter’s live webcam video.

The YouTube date associated with this video is October of 2020. As far as I can tell, the feature never made it into public beta, much less into general availability. In my research, I found a much earlier article from August of 2013 looking at a similar capability using the third-party Leap gesture controller.

I like looking at these kinds of cool tech applications. But I remain cynical about their use in practical business scenarios.

Zoom and Prezi have both built some rather nice features for integrating webcam video with presentation graphics. Zoom lets you appear on top of a slideshow, effectively using the slides as a sequence of virtual background images.

Prezi lets you embed your video as a live component integrated with your slide graphics. Rich Mulholland blew my mind in a presentation where he demonstrated this in a fun and engaging manner. You really should register and watch the replay. The carefully thought out design of graphics and smooth integration of live video is a marvel.

Advanced presenters who do this kind of work on a daily basis can use these technologies to really stand out. It’s great that the tools exist and offer the additional freedom and flexibility to create exciting next-gen presentation effects.

BUT… Now I need to play devil’s advocate for a bit. The sad reality of business presentations is that most of them are terrible. That’s why there’s an entire industry of presentation trainers, consultants, and designers.

We still can’t get people to put enough light on their faces to keep them from looking like members of the witness protection program. We see laptop webcams shooting up from desks into the presenter’s nostrils. We see slides thrown together as last minute obligations, written like white papers with text sentences spelled out in bullet point lists. Graphics get stretched out of proper aspect ratio. Presentations are completed an hour before presentation time, without a single run-through of the content.

I’ve written in the past how this is more the fault of management than of the presenters. There is not enough incentive and reward for making a quality presentation to warrant the extra investment in time and labor by employees.

Now imagine asking these same overworked, time-constrained business professionals to plan out graphic layouts and designs that feature their webcam image as an integral part of the visual presentation. White space for where their head will be. Component graphics that will move in and out of the presentation to highlight carefully plotted and rehearsed movements. Monitors, lighting, camera position, controllers all placed to allow presenters to look like they are interacting with the audience while they actually are tracking their own video and content placements at the same time they are delivering the actual message.

It CAN be done! Look again at Richard’s presentation. Done well like this, it will blow your audience away. But WILL it be done by more than a handful of people? Are YOU willing to put in the planning, the careful construction, the technical setup, and the rehearsal necessary to pull it off so the technology is a value-add rather than a distraction that makes you look unprofessional?

Perhaps that’s why Prezi gesture control never made it into production. While it was technically possible, the pragmatics of actual use were too daunting for the public to employ it. We need to make it as easy as possible for video presenters to achieve basic professional-looking results as part of a solid, effective presentation before we start asking them to add bells and whistles that cause even more task-related overload.

I’m glad tech companies are testing new features. But if you are a business presenter, never forget that bells and whistles don’t create a great presentation. YOU create a great presentation. With or without tech. Take care of the basics. Don’t let software manufacturers sway you into thinking that their latest bright ‘n shiny new feature is necessary or even beneficial. Think about what makes you most comfortable and effective. You can always add fancy stuff later.

Technorati Tags: presentation tips,presentation technique,slide design,Prezi,videoconferencing,video conferencing,web conferencing,web conference,web meeting,online meeting,webinar,web seminar,webcasting,Richard Mulholland

Could ON24 Be Next?

Come, let’s engage in a little blue sky speculation. This is going to be one of my infrequent posts talking about financial considerations, so disclaimers are important:

• I have ZERO insider information or informants providing any facts or rumors that would contribute to anything mentioned here. This is just my own personal musings.
  
  
• I have no financial stake or investments in ON24, their competitors, or any companies mentioned in this post.
  
  
• Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, should make any investment decisions based on anything I write. I’m not a financial analyst and I probably have no idea what I’m talking about.

With all that out of the way, I found myself thinking about ON24 today and wondering if they aren’t an awfully attractive takeover candidate at the moment.

The company went public on February 3, 2021. The IPO was officially priced at $50/share and the stock opened for trading at $77/share. They sold around 8.6 million shares to the public and had a first-day market capitalization of more than $3.42 billion.

Thirteen months later, the stock price closed on Thursday under $14, up from a low of $11.20. The current market capitalization is around $655.5 million. The company is facing a class action lawsuit claiming that the IPO Offering Documents were false and misleading.

Would this be a good time for a larger entity to scoop up ON24 at a bargain price? I can think of several companies that could conceivably see it as a canny move.

ON24 is not interested in the peer-level web meeting space. They aren’t going to compete with low priced Zoom, Webex, and Microsoft Teams meeting offerings. ON24 is a big-ticket offering designed for large enterprises to offer large audience webinars and webcasts. The company has made a definite push over the last year to play up a larger “digital experiences” story combining the delivery of web events with marketing, customer relationship management, lead tracking and development, and digital resource management.

So who might want to acquire that sort of technology stack?

I doubt that Microsoft would want to muddy the waters and try to integrate ON24 with its own Teams play. They tried buying a webinar offering years ago and it didn’t go well for them (buying Placeware and renaming it to Microsoft Office Live Meeting).

I discount most of the other existing players already in the webinar/webcast space. If they have enough capital to make the purchase, they don’t need the technology. They’d be buying ON24 purely for the customer list. And those customers would eventually end up angry at being forced to switch their product licensing. PGi is maybe the only vendor that might consider it. They were on an acquisitions kick before the pandemic, and their own GlobalMeet Webcast platform seems to me like it never developed the public recognition and awareness enjoyed by ON24.

But my top candidates are Salesforce and HubSpot. Salesforce has been talking about plays to boost its performance, with co-CEO Marc Benioff telling Jim Cramer recently that “there’s no finish line when it comes to making acquisitions.” They already bought Slack for peer-to-peer collaboration and might want to add a large presentation offering to keep enterprise customers tied into an end-to-end Salesforce technology stack. Salesforce has a market cap of more than $208 billion and wouldn’t even blink at the purchase price for ON24.

HubSpot has a smaller market cap, at $22.2 billion, but their stock price is very high and they have made lots of integration plays with webinar/webcast vendors. They might want to more closely tie enterprise customers into an end-to-end play with promotion, delivery, tracking, and follow-up of digital event attendees all taking place within their own technology stack.

Who knows? Maybe this is all just intellectual game-playing for my own amusement. But I have to say that the possibilities are tantalizing, and if I heard about ON24 being acquired this year I certainly wouldn’t feel surprised.

Are there any other big players you would think of as potential contenders for scooping up ON24? Let me know in the comments.

Technorati Tags: ON24,Salesforce,HubSpot,webinar,web seminar,webcasting,webcast,web event,online event

Is Presenter Training Biased Against Females?

I am an old, white, cisgender male. A product of my culture, my upbringing, and my practical work/life experiences. Why start with an introduction like that? Because I am going to delve into a controversial topic and my identity is naturally going to color the way I think about it.

I just finished a presentation training session with a wonderful client. We ran through some practice presentations and group feedback discussions. In this particular session, all the participants were female.

One of them exhibited a common speaking habit… Frequent upward inflections at the ends of conceptual phrases or complete sentences. Linguists refer to this under a variety of labels. You might see references to High Rising Terminal (HRT), upspeak, uptalk, rising inflection, upward inflection, or High Rising Intonation (HRI).

The woman in question was preparing to speak on stage at an industry professional conference. I had a choice to make… Should I mention her intonation tendency and recommend modifying it for a more declarative tonality, or should I let it slide?

Several years ago, I would have recommended a more declarative style without another thought. I was trained to believe (and thus DO believe) that upward inflections can result in a perceived lack of confidence and authority from a speaker. The perception can be exacerbated (unfair as it may be) when males listen to female speakers.

But nowadays the issue is not so cut and dry. Linguistics professional Amanda Montell is among a group of people working to “decriminalize” upspeak and other increasingly common speech patterns that have long been labeled as incorrect, especially for female speakers. Ms. Montell wrote a deliberately confrontational book called “Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language” in which she effectively says that men should stop trying to make younger women speak in a more traditional older male style. She particularly calls out attempts to stop upspeak, vocal fry, and “like” as a conversational filler.

This one’s tough for me. If I argue the point, is that another piece of evidence pointing to a knee-jerk age/gender bias that refuses to recognize a different, valid style from people who fall into a different demographic than mine? Possibly. I may not be able to break myself out of that viewpoint.

But I think it’s worth at least considering “the reality of perception.” Presentation is not just simple transmittal of facts. White papers, charts, and reference books can take care of that. A significant component of effective presentation is performative. You make choices designed to influence an audience’s attention, agreement, and action. So many things contribute: vocabulary, facial expressions, body language, tempo, tonality, supporting visuals, and more. Experienced presenters don’t just think about what they want to say – They think about how the audience will perceive them and emotionally or intellectually take in the message.

Your audience may be unjustified in their perceptions. But that doesn’t mean the perceptions don’t exist. If your presentation style introduces doubt in the minds of your audience or distracts them from listening to and assimilating the message you want to deliver, they may be in the wrong. But that’s small consolation after your presentation fails to achieve its desired goals.

You can’t change all those perceptions at once. You don’t have control over all those accumulated biases and backgrounds out there. You only have control over one person… YOU. Which puts the onus back on you to understand how you are perceived and work on eliminating the things making you less effective at your task.

There is a glib piece of advice given to marketers, salespeople, authors, and speakers… “Know your audience.” We may not agree with the way they think. We may not like the way they think. But if we can UNDERSTAND the way they think, we can communicate with and influence them more effectively.

For now, I will leave it to Ms. Montell and others to change public perceptions across the populace at large. In the meantime, watch out for rising terminal intonation as something that could potentially undermine your effectiveness. If this is even more important for females presenting to males, let’s acknowledge the unfairness but still account for the reality.

As with all presentation habits, the goal is not to eliminate them completely and sound robotic. The goal is to reduce their frequency and prominence to the point where audiences ignore them and concentrate on your message rather than your behavior patterns. I believe in this for all presenters – male and female, young and old.

Technorati Tags: presenter training,speaker training,presentation tips,presentation training,vocal habits

Is It Worth Having Your Presenters On Camera?

It’s time once again to revisit a controversial topic. Is the conventional wisdom about webcam presentations correct? Does having the presenters appear on camera enhance the experience?

Whenever I write about this, I have to couch the subject in disclaimers. People get passionate about the subject and sometimes make arguments against things I haven’t said.

DISCLAIMERS:

1) I’m talking about presentation-oriented web events. Not peer-level meetings or participatory discussions.

2) I’m talking about presenters sitting in front of a fixed computer webcam on their laptop or desktop. Not videography of people standing and using full body language and movement.

In addition to those caveats, I have to say one more thing… A good presenter who has practiced their presentation, is conscious of camera considerations, has a good technical and environmental setup and plenty of fast, reliable bandwidth is almost ALWAYS going to be more engaging, influential, and interesting on camera than voice-only. I’m all in on using video when done well.

Unfortunately, the people who fit the preceding description seem to be a vanishingly small percentage of the people who present on business webinars.

I repeatedly see presenters on camera who look down at a script on their desk. Or look offscreen at a monitor positioned off-axis from the camera. Or use a laptop camera pointing up at their nostrils and the ceiling fan above their head. Or appear in shadow because of more light behind than in front of them. Or who never change their facial expression once during the recitation.

What do we feel is being gained by forcing these people to appear on camera? Is the hosting company benefitting by broadcasting a public image of “technical inadequacy?” Are attendees benefitting by watching a small window of a head that never moves and never maintains virtual eye contact?

Get these people some training. Get them a proper technical setup (yes, companies… I mean actually pay for your public spokespersons to have lights, a backdrop, and an external microphone and webcam). Give them compensated time and job performance recognition for rehearsing and being able to deliver a presentation without reading a script on the desk in a monotone.

Until you do that, you might as well just work with slides and vocal narration. At best, you’ll make your presenters more comfortable. At worst, your audience members will wish they had the quality video experience you weren’t going to give them anyway. To paraphrase the old adage, “It is better to use voice-only and be thought to be ineffective with video than to turn on the camera and remove all doubt.”

Technorati Tags: webcasting,webcast,webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,webcam,video presentation

The Lost Countries Of Zoom

Pop quiz: What country is missing in this registration list?

What if I scroll down a bit… Can you pick out the missing country in this part of the list?

We’re looking at a built-in registration field offered in Zoom. When you create a registration page, you can check a box to indicate that you want people to select from a prepopulated list of countries (or geographic regions in some cases). Zoom is kind enough to manage that list so we don’t have to construct a drop-down menu with hundreds of choices.

In the above portions of the list, I was surprised to find “Bahamas” and “Czech Republic” missing as answer choices. But then I glanced at the default selection that Zoom filled in before selecting anything else… “The United States” ???

No, they couldn’t have, could they? Time to scroll down farther:

No, no, no, no!!!!!

This is nothing short of insanity. What happens when the list is displayed on a computer using a different operating system language… Do Spanish speakers see country names preceded by El, La, Los, and Las?

I don’t know when this went into effect. I looked over old registration reports in Zoom and saw that they did not used to include “The” in the country names. I sure hope Zoom realizes the error of its ways and goes back to proper alphabetic ordering based on the primary identifying and distinguishing word in the name. Otherwise I’m going to hack into their developers’ digital music libraries and re-alphabetize their song and artist collections in this fashion.

Technorati Tags: Zoom,event registration,webinar,web seminar,webcasting,webcast,web meeting,online meeting,web event,online event,web conference,web conferencing

No, Presentations With Visuals Are NOT 43% More Effective

Time for another episode of presentation myth busters. You may already be familiar with the oft-quoted nonsense about “Mehrabian finding that 93% of communication is nonverbal.” You may have read my own breakdown of why “The 10-20-30 Rule” isn’t a rule and doesn’t apply to you.

Today’s battle of reality vs hype takes us to a statistic that has floated around the presentation industry for many years (read on for a shocking reveal of how many years). I just saw it featured as the key proposition of an advertising campaign from a well-known heavyweight in our space. I’m not going to call them out, because this isn’t about them or their marketing. It’s about the statistic itself.

Presentations Using Visual Aids Were Found To Be 43% More Persuasive Than Unaided Presentations.

Wow. That is impressive! And the instant I read it, alarm bells went off inside my head. “More persuasive?” How is that quantifiable? To an extent as precise as 43%? And is that oh-so-exact figure a measurement of “persuasion” or “effectiveness,” as is often claimed? Are the two terms interchangeable? Is there such a thing as an overall measure that applies to every presentation use case in every context?

Fortunately, Google is a powerful research tool. And content lives forever on the internet. So I was able to track down a superb 5-part series of articles written by Ikumi Kayama of Studio Kayama who did the hard work of tracking down the source study and analyzing it with a statistician’s eye.

I was a little surprised to find that Ms. Kayama published her analysis 8 years ago this month. But that was nothing to the shock of discovering that the source study providing the suspect statistic had originated in 1986!

I urge you to read through Ms. Kayama’s detailed analysis. I’m not going to plagiarize her work and I don’t want to reduce traffic to her website. Suffice to say, the figure of 43% was made up out of whole cloth. The “study” was a predetermined advertising ploy by 3M corporation to act as a way to promote their line of acetate overhead transparencies for business use. The so-called “study” compared color transparencies to 35mm slide projector slides for instance. Guess what… Using the color transparencies that could be made with 3M’s own color transparency foils and pens were markedly superior to illustrations made in black and white or on projected slides.

If you like the 1986 3M research project, I’m sure you’ll also appreciate how Marlboro cigarettes make men 37.6% more attractive and masculine. It’s garbage produced by an unscrupulous corporate marketing department to support a figure they have arbitrarily decided on as a promotional campaign strategy. This nonsense still goes on today… Look no further than Cisco’s recent barrage of press releases and interviews going on and on about how “Webex makes meetings 10x better than in-person.” Reciting a specific number somehow makes promotional hyperbole seem legitimate.

Now look… I have nothing against good visuals in presentations. I’m right there with everyone else in our industry, exhorting presenters to make presentations more visually interesting and engaging. DO use supporting graphics to help emphasize key points and recapture audience attention! It IS a good thing! Just stop regurgitating meaningless “statistics” to prove your point. The fact that 3M wanted to sell transparency foils in 1986 has nothing to do with your use of pictures in a PowerPoint.

Good visuals in a well-structured, well-planned, well-rehearsed, and well-delivered presentation are going to help. But not by a factor of 1.43.

Technorati Tags: presentation design,PowerPoint design,slide design

SlidesClicker Lets Presenters Advance Your Slides

Three and a half years ago I wrote a blog post bemoaning the fact that I couldn’t get presenters to modify their speaking habits when asking me to display their next slide.

Three years later, someone named Sam submitted a comment on that post. He said co-presenters can control slides remotely and never again have to say “Next slide please.” All you have to do is use something available at www.slidesclicker.com.

Sure, pal. I’ve had people try to advertise their stuff in thinly veiled comments before. I usually don’t pay it much mind. But recently I decided to go ahead and take a look. Damn it… The thing actually works! Almost exactly as I want it to! For a reasonable price!

Let’s review the use case scenario. We’ll say I’m using Zoom or GoToWebinar or another screen-share based web conferencing platform. I lead off as moderator with a few introductory slides. Then another presenter takes over. Maybe there is yet another speaker. Today I did a webinar with four panelists each presenting their section of the presentation, then handing back to me again to moderate Q&A and close out the session. That’s five people and six handoffs of slide control. Trust me, you do NOT want to mess with swapping screen share to each person in turn. They show the wrong screen, don’t start at the right slide, have a different aspect ratio on their monitor, or just introduce an unavoidable interruption in the smooth flow of information as they check whether we can see their screen after the handoff.

So instead, I show the entire presentation for everyone, advancing the slides for them. The audience hears a boring repetition of “Next slide, next slide, next slide.” And Lord help you if the PowerPoint is fancy and has builds or animation effects that need to be clicked at the right time.

Enter SlidesClicker… As host, I install it as a desktop app on my computer (Windows or Mac). I open my PowerPoint (or Keynote, Google Slides, Prezi, Libre, Visme, vMix, Zoho, Canva…) in slide show mode. I open the SlidesClicker app and see a screen giving me a Meeting ID:

I can copy the link and email it to my presenters or I can invite them through the app:

Each invited presenter gets a simple link that opens in their web browser. No install needed. It can run on a desktop or smartphone (people love it on their phone):

They tap the green box and the slide moves forward on my computer. They tap the red box and it moves backwards. Simplicity itself.

“But,” I hear you cry, “If they all have control, don’t they end up all hitting the controls at once, causing chaos?”

Aha! SlidesClicker thought of that. As host, I can enable and disable functionality for each presenter:

So I can let each person control the slides only when they are speaking.

SlidesClicker also built in an option to help prevent accidental double-clicks. When they tap a button, there is a one-second delay before they can tap again. This auto-delay can be turned off if you want presenters to be able to rapidly click through a bunch of slides (for instance, during Q&A to return to a previously mentioned slide).

If you are a GoToWebinar power user, you might be unimpressed at the moment. “GoToWebinar lets me give remote panelists control of my screen right inside the software!” SlidesClicker is far preferable for two reasons:
1) The ONLY control that remote presenters have on your computer is limited to advancing/regressing slides. They can’t drive your mouse and randomly click around your desktop.

2) SlidesClicker doesn’t care where your mouse focus is. You can be merrily typing away in a Chat window, answering an email, or playing solitaire while SlidesClicker feeds the slide advance commands to the presentation software.

There are a few other features that are thrown in with the higher cost subscription option, such as an optional countdown timer to let a presenter know how much time they have left in their section. Or a way to send text messages through the app. The one I’m really keen on seeing is a promised “Coming Soon” feature that is supposed to let the remote presenter see slide notes in PowerPoint or Keynote on their display.

But honestly, this is a gift from heaven for me as a moderator working with many different remote presenters. I bought the “Premium” license that includes the enable/disable presenter control and countdown timer. That costs $56/year. If you don’t care about those features, you can get down to a basic rate of $33/year.

Enthusiastically recommended.

 

Technorati Tags: SlidesClicker,PowerPoint,Prezi,Keynote,web collaboration,online collaboration,web conferencing,web conference,webinar,web seminar,webcasting,webcast,web meeting,online meeting

Webex Still Doesn’t Understand Video

It’s been more than an hour since my last rant about Webex product design, so we are overdue.

Today I moderated a client webinar that featured no screen sharing or document upload… It was just a simple panel discussion with several people exploring a topic. The only thing for attendees to focus on were the members of the panel.

In addition to the featured panelists, I was in the conference taking care of technical matters and we had three business stakeholders who wanted to be available to prioritize audience questions, communicate with the panelists behind the scenes, and supply links or resources in the chat if called for.

I recorded the session to the Webex account in the cloud and when I went back to take a look at the recording, here is what I saw (I blurred the display names in this post for confidentiality purposes).

The grid view is perfect… That’s how I had the layout setting on my host computer. But I also had suppressed display of non-video participants for myself. Those are the grey squares you see here with initials and names of the behind-the-scenes stakeholders.

No problem… I know that Webex offers the ability to display or suppress various components of a recorded session by using the recording options editor. I went to that menu and looked for the option to hide non-video participants:

No luck. While I can hide Chat, Q&A, Polls, and the Participant List, I can’t get rid of those empty gray squares. They take up space, distract, look ugly, and call attention to the names of people who should be hidden to the attendees.

Fortunately I was logged in on a second computer as an attendee and used Camtasia to capture the attendee view as a backup recording:

Now there are a few interesting things to note here as well:

1) I’m missing two of the active presenters. Why do I see six camera feeds in the cloud recording, but only four on the local attendee computer? Does Webex only show a square grid, so you see four or nine people, but nothing in between? I’m honestly not sure, and would welcome your comment. It seems like a strange limitation, and doesn’t match the following picture I lifted off the internet with what looks like a Webex instructional image showing a grid view with five video feeds:

2) In the Webex stock photo, do you see the “Layout” button at top right which offers the displayed menu for options? Where is it on my attendee view? It turns out that the button is invisible until you click your mouse in the content display area. It’s awfully tricky to instruct attendees on what they should click in order to adjust their display preferences when the thing they are supposed to click is invisible! I might give some instruction early on, but anybody who joins late has no idea the option even exists.

3) As a host, I have no control over the default way that my content should be displayed to my audience. I can’t force it to grid view for everyone, I can’t choose to show or hide panelist names, and I can’t hide non-video participants. That last one is the most egregious… What design manager decided that the default in a meeting should be to show empty placeholders for people who are not using their camera? Maybe there are cases when that’s desirable, but should it be the default mode? If you want attendees to see the names of everyone in the meeting, show them the Participant List… It’s already an existing feature. I found a thread on the Webex community forum site with more than 260 votes from customers asking to change this behavior.

Look, I’m familiar with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In any closed system, entropy tends to increase, leading to a maximal state of disorder. I just wish the Webex software engineers would stop trying so hard to force the issue.

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How Much Did Zoom Hurt Cisco Last Year?

I just caught up with Tuesday’s quarterly investor report from Cisco. The company runs on a fiscal year that ends in July, so January marked the end of their second quarter.

Cisco does not break out Webex costs and revenues as a separate line item. That software is part of their “Applications” business, making it distinct from “Infrastructure Platforms” (things like routers and networking solutions) and “Security.” So all we can do is look at the Applications segment as a lump sum and assume that Webex should have made up a healthy chunk of it.

For my purposes, I’m only interested in one financial figure… Gross Revenues. This indicates the top line amount brought in by sales and licenses of their applications software. With the pandemic raging last year and companies on global lockdown, conferencing software should have been a rising tide that lifted all boats in the industry. If a web conferencing company didn’t bring in more revenue than in the previous year, I really have to wonder why not.

That’s what makes the Q2 report so interesting:

I put a red circle around the segment of interest. Revenues from August 2020 through January 2021 were DOWN 4% from the similar period at the end of 2019. Why couldn’t Cisco get more revenue out of the part of the business that included Webex? Shouldn’t that have been the bright spot helping to cover for pandemic-affected losses in other areas?

I can only chalk it up to the rapid-fire ascendancy of Zoom. Obviously I don’t have any more insight or detail than this publicly-available consolidated figure. But it’s a figure that should be highly concerning for anybody wondering how strong Cisco’s conferencing business is.

 

Technorati Tags: Cisco Webex,web conferencing,web collaboration,online collaboration