The Webinar Blog

WhatsApp With Webinars?

I hardly ever use WhatsApp. That tells you two things about me…

1. I’m an old man
2. I live in America

But even with these limitations in perspective, I know that the mobile messaging platform is incredibly popular worldwide. Heck, even in the USA it has over 75 million users – primarily 45 years of age and younger. And it’s far and away the most popular messaging app across Mexico, Central and South America, India, Russia, Africa, and Southeast Asia.

Why bring this up within the context of a blog about webinars?

My last post mentioned the problem of getting your webinar-related emails seen amid the clutter of overloaded inboxes these days. And yesterday I read an article by Dave Michels on the No Jitter website about adjacent services that improve the value of meeting platforms. These put me in mind of an interesting utility I recently looked into.

Webinar Booster is a specialized community builder designed to use the WhatsApp infrastructure to increase communications between webinar hosts and their target audiences.

The concept is centered on the idea of a WhatsApp channel associated with your webinar. Webinar Booster creates a short URL that lets people join the channel with their WhatsApp userID (they can also create a display alias if they don’t want to expose their actual WhatsApp name). You might include the join link in the confirmation email that shows up when they register for your webinar, or you might include it in initial promotions and landing pages.

Once they join the channel via Webinar Booster, they can type in questions, comments, and requests through their normal WhatsApp interface. Messages are seen only by the host’s account. The host can then decide which messages to share with the group at large, along with their own replies.

I spoke with Tomer Saar, the CEO and Founder of Texuto, the company that created Webinar Booster. He told me that the app has been in general availability for about one year and has had its greatest initial adoption in India and Europe. It is not designed to replace in-session chat inside a webinar platform, but has the greatest utility before and after the live event.

Webinar Booster may be best used to help stimulate interest and boost attendance by encouraging active participation in the days leading up to a webinar. The host can request topics of interest or questions that people would like to see the presenters address in the webinar. As people see questions asked by others, they can chime in as well. Since the chat is moderated by the host, you don’t risk a free-for-all open discussion with people promoting themselves or sidetracking the conversation. Users never see contact information for each other, so they feel safe in contributing to the conversation. And the host can use it as a broadcast channel to send out reminders and incentives for attendance.

After the webinar, the host can use the channel to collect additional questions related to the topic and to provide answers to everyone without having to create and share documents or email chains.

Tomer said that Webinar Booster can extend the sales nurturing pipeline after initial contact in a webinar while letting registrants maintain a sense of connection and interaction with the hosting company. I rather like having an alternative to email for keeping the communication channel alive with your targeted audiences, especially if you are working with demographics that already use and trust WhatsApp.

I’ll be interested to track Webinar Booster’s popularity and usage. What do you think about the idea?

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

Tell Me How Much You Like This Post

My car has OnStar driver assistance. I tap a button and a live representative comes on the line. I was driving the other day and asked them for directions to a restaurant.

(Yes, this is a post about webinars. Stay with it.)

The representative downloaded the directions into my car’s navigation system and I completed the drive with a delightful Ethiopian meal. I thought no more about it.

EXCEPT…

The company won’t stop sending me emails. “You recently contacted us. Please tell us how we did. Thinking about your overall experience, on a scale of 0 to 10 how likely would you be to recommend OnStar to a colleague, friend, and/or family member?”

In my mind, I didn’t “contact them.” Of course I technically did, but it wasn’t significant to me. I got the information I needed and went on with my day, giving it nary another thought. I’m not interested in reflecting on “how they did.” That’s more work than I wanted to put into the transaction.

This is now a universal scenario. Every damned time you have a transaction with anybody, for anything, in any context, no matter how briefly, you will be asked for an opinion about how it went. Check your fast food receipt. There’s a feedback request at the bottom (just enter these 28 digits to identify the transaction you are commenting on). Call someone to ask a question about your bill. Have an online chat session to track an order. You’ll be asked to complete a short survey because your opinion truly matters to them.

And webinars are no different. Five years ago I wrote a blog post saying “I am a big fan of post-webinar surveys.” I’ve changed my opinion on this. Oversaturation has soured me on the concept. And I’m not the only one… I administer many webinars for many clients in many industries across many topics. The one common factor I can tell you is that we are getting fewer and fewer responses on our post-webinar surveys. Nowadays you are lucky to get more than a small handful of people to complete the request.

There’s no magic bullet to getting truly high completion rates on post-webinar surveys, but I can give you a few tips that might at least make them high-er!

1. Shorter! Shorter! Shorter! Every additional question you ask reduces the probability that people will complete it. It doesn’t matter whether they are required or optional. Just seeing a bunch of questions makes people close the page.
   
   
2. Don’t ask ambiguous questions. “Rate the presenters” is useless with more than one speaker. What if one person was good and another was bad?
   
   
3. Don’t ask whether you would recommend the webinar. “Would you recommend this webinar to a friend or colleague?” The answer tells you nothing. Maybe they liked it, but they don’t like recommending things. Maybe it was right for their interests, but they don’t know others with similar interests. Maybe they wouldn’t recommend it because of general dissatisfaction, which still gives you no actionable information.
   
   
4. Pick one rating scale. Don’t swap between 5-point and 10-point scales within the same survey. 5-point scales are general better because they require less thought on exactly where to answer. What’s the difference between a 7 and an 8 response?
   
   
5. Only include one comment box. Don’t add optional comments to every rating question. Just put one box for “Additional comments, clarifications, and suggestions.”
   
   
6. Set up value to the attendee. Tell them you want to refine your webinars to make the content, presenters, and format more useful and valuable for your listeners. Never make the responses about the benefit to you (“Please help us out by answering”), make it about them (“We’d like to make these webinars more useful for you, and you are the only one who can tell us how to do that”).
   
   
7. Give an incentive. Everybody who fills out the survey gets a handout. Or is entered in a drawing. Of course this kills the ability to do anonymous surveys, but in conferencing products where the survey is integrated and you know the responders anyway, you can use that info.

And the most important piece of advice is to step back and truly ask yourself if you are making any substantive changes based on the responses you get to your surveys. In most cases, the answer is no. Somebody glances over the numbers, which look good on status reports, but the next webinar follows the exact same format as every one before it. All you’ve done is wasted your audience’s time and increased their frustration. Give them the information they requested in the webinar and let them move on with their day.

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

Get Free Tips About Virtual Engagement

Engagement, engagement, ENGAGEMENT! It’s the buzzword darling of our industry right now.

You can’t click on a link about webinars, webcasts, and virtual presenting without encountering a sentence urging you to find ways to better engage your audience.

Want to know what they ALL get wrong about the concept?

I’ll tell you within the first few minutes of my upcoming webinar next Tuesday, October 26. It’s free, courtesy of Adobe Connect and the American Marketing Association.

We have an hour to go over practical guidelines and “tricks of the trade” that actually work and are easy to put into practice. We’ll take a look at examples taken from real webinars with an eye towards making the presentations more engaging. And of course I’ll answer your questions live in the session.

The start time is 10am San Francisco / 1pm New York / 6pm London (click to see conversions to other locations).

You can register by clicking here. I will be focusing on the needs of virtual marketers, but I’ll bet you can pick up tips that will transfer to other virtual scenarios as well.

I hope to see you there!

Technorati Tags: presentation tips,presenter training,virtual marketing,webinar,web seminar,webcast,webcasting,online presentation,web conferencing

PowerPoint Zoom Navigation Curiosity (Don’t Call It A Bug)

Here’s a strange one for you! I discovered a curious behavior in Microsoft PowerPoint that looked like a bug to me. But I found that Microsoft considers it intentional designed behavior. Take a look and see what you think.

As is so often the case with software functionality, it’s easier to show than to describe in words. I made a short video to clearly demonstrate the situation:

 

If you have trouble seeing the video in this post, you can watch it on YouTube at https://youtu.be/pQXtiFJfQRE 

The first three minutes of the video are an introduction to the use of Sections in a PowerPoint presentation and how to use the Insert Zoom Summary navigation slide to allow non-linear access to the different sections in your file. If you are a power user and know all about that, feel free to scrub forward to the 2:59 mark for the interesting part.

In a nutshell, the Zoom Summary slide inserts thumbnail images that hyperlink to target slides in your presentation and then return to the Summary slide. If you place any element of text or graphics that overlaps a thumbnail image on the Summary slide, the overlapping visual is shown on all slides in the section when selected from the Summary slide. If you visit the slides through other types of navigation, their display is unaffected.

This is one of those conditions that most people are unlikely to ever hit. But if it happens to you, you’ll want to know what’s going on, and hopefully this demo will help.

 

Technorati Tags: PowerPoint design,PowerPoint,Microsoft PowerPoint

The GoToWebinar Security Flaw I Couldn't Talk About

It took six months, but I finally got LogMeIn to fix a nasty bug in GoToWebinar. I made a decision to keep the bug quiet in order to reduce the likelihood of people using it against unwitting webinar presenters. Now the fix is in place and I feel free to talk about it.

The short summary is that webinar attendees had the ability to see presenter webcams during pre-broadcast time when the presenters thought they were in private mode.

To understand the situation, you need to understand how GoToWebinar handles early attendees who login to a webinar before show time. I wrote about this subject several months ago in What Do Your Webinar Attendees See Before You Start?

GoToWebinar allows hosts to choose between two options: They can open the webinar session in Practice Mode, which keeps early attendees in a holding area, not fully connected to the conference, with a message that the meeting will begin when the organizer arrives. Not very welcoming, and it reads as though the host is simply running late.

Or hosts can start the webinar session and refrain from clicking the button that says “Start broadcast.” This lets attendees see a presenter’s shared screen (I usually show a welcoming title slide) and type questions. Presenters can talk to each other and test their webcams without the attendees being able to see or hear.

EXCEPT…

Back in January, I published a post asking readers if they had run across Webinar Webcam Weirdness: Video Showing While Disabled. I had two GoToWebinar attendees inform me that they had been watching all the presenters on webcam during the preshow portion. This baffled me because I was logged in as an attendee myself and verified that the webcam video streams were not showing. How could they be seen by two people and nobody else?

I filed a bug report and received a disappointing response from tech support. “There’s only one other report, and that couldn’t be replicated either. So it’s basically like we don’t believe you. Unless we get several reports, it’s just user error and I can’t escalate it.”

That didn’t sit well with me and I called upon some contacts in the organization to help pull some strings. Sure enough, it got escalated. They analyzed log files and after a month, they figured out the problem.

It turns out that when webcams are turned on at the same time as screen sharing, the webcam videos are displayed in a horizontal strip running across the top of the attendee’s display. The shared screen content is shown below that. Attendees can move the divider line between the two sections to change the relative amount of screen space taken up by the two elements.

In pre-broadcast mode when I showed a welcome slide, attendees saw the divider bar and blank webcam windows above it. If they moved the divider bar all the way up to the top of the screen and then dragged it back down again, the webcam windows were no longer blanked out… They showed the streaming video that the presenters were seeing during preshow.

I made a very short video showing this operation in practice. It might be hard to visualize from the preceding description, but you’ll grasp it quickly if you watch the minute and a half video explanation. (If the embedded video does not play in your reader, you can see it on YouTube at https://youtu.be/MVD3rPhIt4o) 

I think we can all agree that you don’t want to be broadcasting to the public without knowing it. Sure, in most cases preshow video is perfectly innocuous. But what if there was confidential information written on a white board behind a presenter and they weren’t worried about erasing it immediately, safe in the knowledge that nobody would see it until we went public? Even worse is the idea of a single presenter thinking that nobody can see him or her until the broadcast starts. I gave a few examples in my video of how embarrassing THAT could be! I have even had presenters hold up documents or photos to the camera during preshow to share personal items with me that they might not want the public to see.

After a few false starts (“Hey Ken, we fixed it.” “No you didn’t.” “Yes, we did.” “I’ll show you.” “Oh, I guess we didn’t.”), LogMeIn rolled out version 10.17.0 last week and I verified that the behavior is finally gone.

Now in pre-broadcast mode, the webcam portion of the screen is suppressed and the shared screen content takes up the entire display for attendees. Once the organizer clicks Start broadcast, the webcam area shows up and attendees can move the divider line to change the screen space devoted to the different content areas. Perfect.

So now you know the story and can lament the fact that you missed your opportunity to spy on presenters when they thought nobody could see them.

 

Technorati Tags: LogMeIn,GoToWebinar,webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,webcam,webcasting,webcast,web collaboration

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

Zoom Hack - Showing A Panelist Without Webcam

This is a rather niche concern, but I was pleased with my off-the-cuff solution to a client problem and thought I would share…

The scenario was a public webinar given on Zoom Webinar. Attendees off-camera and muted; panelists on-camera in a round table discussion format. Also a couple of us working behind the scenes to manage introductions and deal with audience questions.

Shortly before go-time, one of the panelists informed us that she was having a bad reaction to her COVID vaccine and looked/felt terrible. She was willing to still be on the webinar, but didn’t want to be on camera. Could we accommodate that?

OBVIOUS SOLUTION #1: Just turn off her camera. The organizer was hoping to avoid this, because it would look inconsistent… Three panelists on video and one disembodied voice who can be forgotten when she isn’t talking.

OBVIOUS SOLUTION #2: Make sure she has a profile picture loaded in Zoom and enable the option to Show Non-Video Participants. It would show her picture and her name in a square in the grid view. The problem is that it would also show us worker-bees who are supposed to be hidden behind the scenes. Not perfect.

Before I tell you my alternate solution, would you like to pause and think about how you would get around both issues so we could see a picture of her along with her fellow panelists while keeping the assistants hidden?

…

WORKING SOLUTION: Have her upload her headshot as a virtual background image in Zoom. Cover her webcam lens and turn on the camera, selecting the uploaded virtual background. With a black camera image, all you see is the virtual background… In this case, her headshot appearing alongside her fellow panelists.

 

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

Webinar Case Study - A Year of Pathology Training (Part 3 of 3)

• 1 Year
• 75 Webinars
• 39,894 Live logins
• 130,871 Recording views

PART 3: SOCIAL MEDIA INTEGRATION AND COMMUNITY BUILDING

The CAP helped to foster a sense of global community by building strong tie-ins between the Virtual Lecture Series and Twitter. In the days leading up to the first lecture, there wasn’t time to create and distribute traditional promotional campaigns. Twitter was one of the primary ways that pathologists found out about the program, and the CAP quickly created a formal hashtag that people could use to share comments, ask questions, and get help from peers and experts.

Many attendees took screen shots and live-tweeted significant learnings during lectures, which helped extend the reach of the series and brought new registrants. I learned a marvelous phrase that is prevalent in the medical community… “Pearls and Pitfalls.” This is a great way to encapsulate key learning points gained by positive or negative experience and pass them on to others.

INSIGHT – LOOK FOR WAYS TO CALL OUT ISOLATED PEARLS AND PITFALLS IN YOUR SUBJECT AREA THAT CAN BE TWEETED AND REPEATED TO SPREAD THE VALUE OF YOUR EXPERTISE AND OFFERINGS.

Given the subject area, most of the visual materials were inoffensive microscope pictures of cells. But every so often we would visit an area of pathology dealing with external imagery important to the profession. For example, forensic pathology looking at corpses, or pediatric dermatological abnormalities. Doctors wouldn’t think twice about such things, but to my eye as an outsider they stood out as potentially disturbing. I recommended adding disclaimers and reminders for our audience of doctors during these specialty topics that Twitter is a public forum and that retweeting such images could violate usage standards and potentially get people banned.

INSIGHT – THINK BEYOND THE IMMEDIATE REACH OF YOUR LIVE WEBINAR AND TAKE PRECAUTIONS AGAINST OUT-OF-CONTEXT MISUSE OR MISINTERPRETATION OF CONTROVERSIAL MATERIAL.

The CAP found that their social reach grew rapidly from the impact of the webinars and Twitter. Even though that social platform may seem like old news to many of us, there are still people for whom it is unexplored territory. The CAP decided to hold a special “Twitter Workshop” as a supplement to the usual pathology lectures. It covered everything from the basics of how to set up a new Twitter account to how to use hashtags and follow others. We had hundreds of attendees and as participants practiced tweeting and others in the pathology community joined in to welcome them, our hashtag actually trended for a short time as a leading topic on Twitter overall!

One of our experienced lecturers had never used Twitter but decided to set up a Twitter account before his talk so people could ask additional questions and make comments. He received 1000 followers in the next 24 hours and it had a carryover effect on increasing readership and citations of his published research.

INSIGHT – LOOK FOR WAYS TO INTEGRATE WEBINARS WITH OTHER SOCIAL MEDIA AND COMMUNITY FORUMS TO BENEFIT ALL PARTICIPANTS.

If you go back to the statistics at the top of this article, you’ll see that the total views of recorded lectures is more than three times the number of live attendees we received over the course of the year. That is a common occurrence with material that has lasting value and is properly promoted. The CAP continues to get views on those lectures and they provide an ongoing benefit in the perception of the organization as providing value for its members and its professional community. We used the built-in GoToStage portal site that GoToWebinar offers account holders as a single one-stop location for people to find all past lectures. This made it easy to give a consistent and unvarying URL for anyone seeking the materials.

INSIGHT – MAKE IT EASY FOR YOUR WEBINARS TO KEEP PROVIDING VALUE IN THE LONG RUN. PLAN YOUR RECORDING ACCESS STRATEGY AND MAKE IT A PROMINENT AND PROMOTED OFFERING.

The College of American Pathologists really hit a home run with this Virtual Lecture Series. One of my contacts there told me that it demonstrated that they could be more agile than they ever thought possible by leveraging the flexibility and reach of virtual communications. The webinar series helped increase new membership in the organization, but went even farther than that direct benefit. Studies conducted during the year showed that the program was a driver in improving the perception of value offered by the CAP.

I want to close with one final insight that I noticed as an outsider in listening to all these lectures. The pathology community is universally explicit and outspoken in recognizing the support, mentorship, and contributions of others. I don’t think a single lecture went by without the speaker talking about a doctor who they studied under, or a piece of research they had found valuable, or a colleague who had provided assistance. It’s a lovely way to keep the spirit of professional collaboration and cooperation alive as a pillar of the industry. So in that same vein, I’m going to mention just a few of the many people I worked with at the CAP in the course of this lecture series. I can’t possibly mention every lecturer by name, and these won’t mean anything to you. But they mean something to me and to more than 130,000 viewers who benefitted from their hard work. Thank you to:

• Christina Arnold
• Michael Arnold
• Adam Booth
• Teresa Burgin
• Ashley Holloman
• Kim Kruger
• Denise Mack
• Barbarajean Magnani
• Kamran Mirza
• The CAP creative, digital, and promotions teams

And thank you to the global community of pathologists working hard to enable and advance healthcare and patient outcomes around the world.

If you missed either of the previous installments, you can click to read PART 1 or PART 2.

 

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