The Webinar Blog

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.

Technorati Tags: Webex,Webex Events,Webex Meetings,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,online collaboration,web collaboration,web conference,web conferencing,video conferencing

What Do Your Webinar Attendees See Before You Start?

Oh dear… This is going to be one of those long and detailed posts for people who really like thinking about webinar details. Get a cup of coffee and prepare for a deep dive!

BACKGROUND

The subject is what webinar attendees see if they log in before your formal presentation has started. It’s different in every webinar product, and sometimes is different within those products depending on how you use them. In most cases I would argue that the cosmetics and psychology are not well thought out by the webinar vendors.

I’ll pick a few of the most common and well-known webinar platforms as tangible examples, but you’ll find similar things to look out for in whatever technology you happen to use.

We’ll assume that you are familiar with the underlying goal… You want the presenters, moderator, Q&A assistants, and whoever else has a finger in the pie to be able to login early and test their connections, go over last-minute details, and prepare to start on time. Meanwhile, you have encouraged attendees to log in a little early to make sure they are able to connect and start on time. Ideally you don’t want your early bird attendees to see and hear the chitchat going on behind the scenes. The attendees should feel as though they are welcomed, acknowledged, and are encouraged to be a part of the proceedings. In a classic physical auditorium event they would probably hear music piped over the room speakers while seeing some nice graphics on the projection screens at the front of the stage.

Common terminology that goes along with this includes: “Green Room” – this is the private space where presenters can hang out and chat without audience members seeing or hearing them. “Lobby” – this is a holding area where audience members can wait before the show starts.

ZOOM

Let’s start with Zoom. As with most everything else in that product, simplicity is the overriding priority. You don’t have much choice in configuration… It is what it is. The tricky part is that you have to remember to tick a checkbox when you schedule your webinar in order to get the option for private setup time:

I think “Practice Session” is a misleading phrase for this functionality, but there you have it. Now presenters can enter the webinar and communicate in private before the host officially starts the public broadcast. During that time, audience members who attempt to connect see a window like this:

I like the fact that it confirms the start time and the webinar title. I like that it gives attendees an obvious and easy way to check their audio. I don’t like the fact that they see a rotating circle icon, which gives the impression that the system is still processing something and hasn’t completed the information display. I don’t like the fact that it uses the qualitative phrase “will begin soon.” Is it really soon if people have logged in 30 minutes early? I’d be happier with options to edit the displayed text (especially on the fly to send announcements). And I’d love a way to be able to get on audio and say something to the waiting throngs. But those are more advanced features than I have a right to expect from Zoom.

GOTOWEBINAR

Our next example comes from GoToWebinar. That product gives you two ways to handle green room time. Your first option is to run the event in “Practice Mode.” Almost identical to the Zoom operation discussed above, this keeps early attendees in a holding status, looking at a similar predefined window:

Pros and cons are similar to those mentioned with Zoom, but once again there are unfortunate choices of phrasing baked into the window. “The meeting will begin when the organizer arrives” makes it sound like the host simply forgot to show up for their own event, not that things are going on in the background. I also don’t like referring to webinars as meetings. And at the bottom, it offers a question and option that are not appropriate for registered attendees. I’d rather they see something that doesn’t make it look like we have no idea who organized this thing or where they are. I get the distinct impression of a “Does anyone know how to fly this plane?” scenario.

But there is another choice in GoToWebinar. You can start the webinar and choose to hold off on starting the broadcast. In this mode, attendees actually complete the login process and see anything that is currently being shared by the active presenter. They can type questions, they can see typed chat announcements from the host, they can benefit from “lobby slides” that give instructions or questions or information before the official start time. It’s a great way to add early engagement and really make people feel like they are sitting in the auditorium waiting for the show to start.

What are the drawbacks?

1) Presenters can’t really “flip through” their slides. The audience sees whatever the team sees.

2) There is no way to give an audio announcement while staying in private mode.

3) In GTW, panelists need to be raised to organizer authority in order to see typed audience questions. That presents them with a big prominent button at the top of their control panel prompting them to “Start Broadcast.” They’ll push it, trust me. If they are on telephone audio, they’ll get a similar confusing voice prompt to press 1 to start audio, which sounds like something they have to do for their own audio. It’s terrible design.

4) If panelists use webcams, early attendees see placeholders for the camera feeds with no content. It lists each person’s name and the word “Paused”:

I might not want to show the names of everyone on the team. I don’t want attendees wondering why the visible content area is small and they can’t see something. It’s just not necessary… If no cameras are broadcasting to the audience, don’t show the camera area.

WEBEX

For our third example, let’s take a look at Webex Events. Webex offers a Practice Mode that isolates the presentation team from attendees. So attendees complete their login process to the conference room and they can type questions. But Webex offers a couple of lovely extra features…

1) You can load a PowerPoint slide deck into the conference room and set it to automatically scroll through the slides on a timing delay of your choice:

Now you can enter Practice Mode and flip through your content slides with the team while attendees continue to see the auto-advancing slides in the main room. Great for displaying instructions, greetings, branding, etc.

2) You can exit and enter Practice Mode as many times as you like. So as host, I can tell the rest of the panelists to shut up while I take us public to deliver a standby announcement, then bring us back to Practice Mode immediately afterward. Very handy if you are facing a crisis and have to delay the start of your presentation.

But of course all is not perfection. Webex has that same old fixation on presenter video, showing placeholders for webcam feeds even when no panelist has webcams turned on… In fact, even when the event has been explicitly set up to prohibit use of webcam video!

And did you happen to notice the wide oval near the top of the slide display that says “Viewing Lobby”? Lobby.pptx is the name of the PowerPoint file I loaded into the room. Webex shows the file name to the attendees. Why? Why on Earth would I want them to see the arbitrary designation I gave the file in my directory? Ugh.

BEST PRACTICES

As I mentioned, other webinar platforms have their own capabilities and quirks. It behooves you as a webinar host, administrator, or presenter to understand how things work in the technology you are using. If practical, try to log in on a separate computer as an attendee so you can see their view.

As a general best practice, attempt to get out of private “green room” mode as early as possible so you can start interacting with your audience and making the experience conversational. Getting them in the mood to be active participants will pay off in greater engagement and satisfaction during the formal presentation.

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,webcasting,webcast,web event,web collaboration,online event,online collaboration,Webex Events,Zoom Webinars,GoToWebinar

What Everyone Gets Wrong About Webinar Engagement

I just read yet another blog post with someone’s tips for making your webinars more engaging. And it made the same mistake I see over and over again: Confusing “engagement” with “interaction.”

Webinar vendors are particularly prone to mixing up the two concepts. They constantly urge presenters to add polls and quizzes, ask for virtual hand-raises, open microphones, use group chat, and so on as a way to increase audience engagement.

Now look… There’s nothing wrong with using any of those tools and features. I believe in them as well. But you should be very clear in your mind that those are ways to increase audience INTERACTION – not ENGAGEMENT.

Consider the following tweet I happened to stumble across:

But… but… it’s interactive! You HAVE to feel more engaged!

Let’s take it from the opposite perspective. I’m sure you have seen pictures like this one from ye olden days:

Zero interaction, total engagement.

But… but… That’s all she had! She didn’t know any better. Nowadays people have to interact in order to be engaged!

Oh really? Is that why people today get invested in TV shows? Movies? Podcasts? Because they are interacting with the content? Is that why this TED Talk has received more than 69 million views to date?

No, obviously not. Interaction is NOT engagement and engagement is NOT interaction.

So if interaction is not the key to audience engagement, what is? Why are people willing to sit and spend time with passive media like movies and podcasts?

You know the answer. I’m not going to astonish you with a surprise here. We are willing to invest time and attention with things that we find entertaining, interesting, and personally relevant.

Are your business webinars entertaining, interesting, and personally relevant for your audience? I’ll bet they aren’t. At least not as much as they could be with a little conscious attention to those aspects.

If you read bullet points (or worse, full sentences) off your slides, you aren’t interesting or entertaining. If you deliver your presentation in a monotone, you aren’t interesting or entertaining. If you start with an overview of your company when people showed up to hear about a specific solution, you aren’t being personally relevant. If you recite a fixed speech that ignores your attendees, you aren’t being personally relevant.

You can deliver a very engaging webinar without using a single interactivity feature of your web conferencing technology. And you can use all those nifty features and still leave your audience feeling unsatisfied and disconnected from the material.

If you show a poll during your webinar, frame it so that participation benefits the attendee rather than yourself. If you ask for comments or questions, keep an eye on what’s coming in and work them into your talk to be more conversational and less pedantic.

Interactivity will never overcome poor presentation skills and uninteresting content. Your first order of business as a presenter is to be interesting, entertaining, relevant, and engaging. That’s on you. If you want to incorporate audience interactions as a part of the experience, great. Just make sure that they serve the goal of building engagement rather than acting as a stand-in for engagement.

 

Technorati Tags: presentation tips,presentation skills,presenter training,speaking skills,webinar,web seminar,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing,web collaboration,online collaboration,web event

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

Managing Zoom Recording Settings

It is well worth checking in every so often on the global settings and preferences in your Zoom account. The company changes the options from time to time, sometimes giving you more flexibility and choice than you previously had.

I took a look today at the options for recording meetings and webinars to the cloud in Zoom. Sure enough, things have slipped in since the last time I examined them.

It’s important to note that these settings affect all sessions held in your account. To make a temporary change for a single meeting, you need to alter the global account setting and remember to change it back afterwards.

It’s also important to remember that you have a finite amount of cloud-resident storage space associated with your Zoom account. Once you run out of room, you need to delete older files in order to make new recordings. Certain option settings can greatly increase the amount of storage that a given event ends up using. There is a helpful Zoom help page describing the default capacities for different types of account and the cost to buy more space.

Here is a snapshot I took showing Cloud Recording Settings options today (Feb 1, 2021). These could change at any time without warning, and they can be different for different types of Zoom accounts. So take anything you see here with a grain of salt. I should also mention that the checkmarks do not represent recommendations or optimal settings. I was playing with them and this is just a random configuration snapped at some point in the process.

The first two options determine whether you see the full “Brady Bunch” view of multiple webcam windows from video participants (gallery view) or a single webcam window that automatically switches to whomever is speaking. I’m not a fan of active speaker view in a participatory meeting. You can get whiplash from rapid camera changes as somebody clears their throat or says a quick “mm hmm.” It tends to work best in presentation-oriented events where one person talks for a while and everyone else stays muted.

The third option is great if you plan to hand-edit the recording using video editing software that lets you size, move, and overlay different video snippets. But you can really eat up your available space with all those extra video files!

Adding an audio-only file is probably overkill if you are already producing a video file… You can just strip the audio from that. But if you want a ready-made file to send to a transcription or translation service, this is a nice way to save a step. Just remember that you are once again using more storage space online.

Having the option to display or suppress the user names that show up in webcam windows is great. This is one that I really wish was meeting-specific rather than account global.

“Record thumbnails when sharing” is an interesting one to think about. By default, Zoom overlays the active speaker window on the upper right corner of the screen share space. If you have slides where it’s important to see all the content space out to the corners, you might want to turn off this option.

The option to optimize for a 3rd party editor adds a great deal of processing time before the recording is ready and greatly increases the file size. But it removes a lot of the compression added to standard Zoom video files to let you work with a higher quality source for further editing. Remember that because this is a global setting, you can quickly chew up a lot of your storage capacity.

The final option is one that I know was added fairly recently, because I was still complaining about this not too long ago! We finally have the ability to show poll results if they were shared in the live session. I’m a firm believer in the recording showing the same thing that the live audience saw, so I was always baffled by the omission of polls from archive recordings. Hallelujah and turn this option on!

If you are an account owner/administrator, you’ll find these (and many other account options) under “Settings” in the far left navigation menu in your Zoom account. There are three tabs letting you focus on groups of options and these are found under the center “Recording” tab.

Good luck, and don’t forget to check your settings every few months. You never know what you may find as a new option.

Technorati Tags: Zoom Webinars,Zoom Meetings,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,web collaboration,online meeting,online collaboration,web conference,web conferencing

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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