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?

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

Goodbye LogMeIn, Hello GoTo

LogMeIn rebranded today to better reflect their primary product line. The company is now known as GoTo. Product names that we care about on this blog remain largely the same, but now get a space in the name. So GoToMeeting is now GoTo Meeting and GoToWebinar is now GoTo Webinar.

You can compare the old and new versions of the product lists as presented on the company home page by clicking on the following two thumbnail pictures. Old LogMeIn branding is on the left and new GoTo branding is on the right.

   

For those of you keeping track, the GoTo products started out as collaboration utilities from a Santa Barbara company called ExpertCity. GoToMeeting was announced in early 2004, around the same time that Citrix acquired ExpertCity. Citrix continued to develop and market the product family, introducing GoToWebinar in 2006.

In 2016, LogMeIn took over the GoTo collaboration products from Citrix in a merger agreement that separated them from the rest of Citrix’s business. Since then, the products have continued to evolve under the LogMeIn corporate name. They have benefitted over the last couple of years from the worldwide boost in remote work spurred by COVID response.

Today’s press release introduces the new company branding, but also highlights a new “simplified product portfolio with a single application and two flagship products.” GoTo Resolve will handle IT management and support, which isn’t the focus of this blog. GoTo Connect will now be the universal umbrella encompassing all the company’s collaboration solutions, including GoTo Meeting and GoTo Webinar.

The announcement says that GoTo Connect also gives customers access to additional features such as cloud telephony, messaging, contact center capabilities, Facebook integration, website chat queues, and more. It’s an attempt to offer a full Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solution suite.

I asked whether GoTo Meeting and GoTo Webinar would continue to exist as individual product offerings, and received confirmation that they could still be licensed as standalone products. Existing customers of these products will access them through the new universal administrative front end, but should not see changes in their operation for running meetings and webinars. GoTo Webinar remains an added-value, added-cost option for those who need to run structured, presentation-oriented web events.

The third major part of the press release announced a new GoTo Partner Network to help stimulate global sales growth via Managed Service Providers, resellers, and distributors. It’s obvious that GoTo wants to leverage the current momentum and awareness of remote work solutions that has lifted the collaboration market in order to increase their penetration into multiple channels and geographies.

I just logged into my existing GoTo Webinar account to check on a customer event scheduled for later today. As of this morning, everything looks exactly as it always has inside the GoTo Webinar product itself. It still shows the old LogMeIn branding, GoToWebinar name, and the same administrative layout and functionality as before. So the new corporate branding change seems to be functionally transparent to existing users with no impact on operations. I would presume (or hope!) that the company will put out notifications and banner announcements before changing the operational interface so that hosts and administrators are not blind-sided by any new look-and-feel that might be coming up.

I use GoTo with customers on a regular basis, so I’ll stay on top of any future changes that impact operations and report if I see something you need to know about.

 

Technorati Tags: GoToWebinar,GoToMeeting,LogMeIn,GoToConnect,webinar,web seminar,online collaboration,web collaboration,web meeting,online meeting

A Look At Current ON24 Lawsuits

I’m going to write about ongoing lawsuits involving webinar software vendors. I should start with a disclaimer that I have ZERO legal training and no firsthand knowledge of the case specifics. I am an unbiased external observer interested in what’s going on in our industry. I should also point out that I have no fiscal or business relationship with the vendors mentioned in this article and no investments in any companies involved.

ON24 is a long-established major player in the webinar/webcast space. Its history stretches back to 1998, starting with streaming news content over the web and morphing to a DIY platform for hosting web events. The company went public roughly one year ago.

The stock price has not had the explosive growth that investors were hoping would mirror the financial success of Zoom. It briefly hit $81.98/share on opening day and has been on a downward trajectory ever since, now trading under $17/share.

This has spurred a class action lawsuit against the company alleging that “representations made in the registration statement and prospectus used to effectuate the Company's IPO were materially inaccurate, misleading, and/or incomplete because they failed to disclose, among other things, that the surge in COVID-19 customers observed in the lead up to the IPO consisted of a significant number that did not fit ON24's traditional customer profile, and, as a result, were significantly less likely to renew their contracts.”

I don’t really have anything to say about that. We’ll see what happens. My cynical side says that when the dust settles the lawyers will get richer and the common investor won’t see much benefit from the lawsuit either way.

I’m much more interested in a lawsuit that ON24 has filed against webinar.net (Yes, the latter is one of those company names that includes a period and no capital letter. It makes sentences look very strange).

Part of the suit claims that webinar.net infringed on a technical patent held by ON24. The rest of the suit alleges “intentional interference with contractual relations, unfair competition, and false advertising.”

Technical patents get challenged all the time in our high tech world. I’m pleasantly surprised to see a suit pitting first-party developers against each other rather than the usual “patent troll” harassment suits that are brought purely as a financial gambit.

The current stage in the rather standard process for such things is that webinar.net has challenged the validity of ON24’s patent. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board will do a review of the merit of the original patent itself and then decide whether the suit can proceed to look at whether webinar.net infringed it in their software code. These things tend to play out over a protracted timespan.

At issue is the user-controllable webinar console that I have praised on my blog in the past. ON24 originated a unique way for webinar attendees to have their own control over size, placement, and expanded/collapsed status of different content windows on their own screens. It effectively makes the entire webinar window work like a modern operating system GUI, where users can dynamically view whatever content pieces they want in any way they want.

I was so impressed with the design concept and execution that I wondered why other vendors weren’t going with the idea. It is instantly intuitive. Now I know why… ON24 patented it under US-9148480-B2: “Communication Console with Component Aggregation.” 

webinar.net started up in 2018 and introduced their software platform in November of 2019. The key executives had previous work experience with other companies in the industry, as might be expected. Most germane to the suit, co-founders Mike Nelson and Michael Henry both have LinkedIn profiles listing 11 years acting as Sales VPs at ON24 through the first decade of the 2000s. That makes the interference and competition parts of ON24’s suit more interesting. Could they have used previous familiarity and relationships with ON24 customers as an entry point to getting their new product into those companies? I have no idea and no insights into this part of the suit.

From a technical perspective, webinar.net certainly took the same conceptual approach as ON24 in creating a user-controllable webinar console. They let webinar administrators select which content pieces should be present as windows in the console. You might elect to show slides, webcam videos, public chat, private (moderated) Q&A, presenter bios, headshots, or something else. Then attendees can expand, collapse, resize, and move those content windows independently.

There is no question that the operational end result for users is similar in the two products. The question is whether the implementation in code violates a protected methodology. That’s not anything that we can see from the outside. If the Patent Office decides that the patent itself is valid, the investigation into the specifics of the coding will be quite a challenge.

There’s little else to report at this point. Things need to play out and we’ll see how all parts of the cases progress. I’ll try to check in from time to time with updates as I see them. I think it’s an interesting glimpse into a world where webinars are increasingly significant from a business and financial perspective.

Technorati Tags: ON24,webinar.net,patent infringement,webinar,webinars,web conferencing,webcasting,web collaboration,online collaboration

Webex Announces Multilingual Interpretation

Webex put up a blog post announcing support for attendee-selectable interpretation channels in online meetings. This is a good thing and increasingly crucial in reaching international audiences.

One of the features I really like in the Webex implementation is a slider that lets each attendee balance the relative volume of the source speaker and the interpreter. That is great for checking presenter intonation and emphasis that can sometimes be lost in translation. It can potentially be useful for listeners who are somewhat comfortable in the source language, but want a little backup assistance just in case they don’t understand everything.

I grabbed the following picture from the promotional video that Webex made to explain the new functionality:

This simple menu shows how fraught with practical difficulties it is to think about everything involved with multilingual events. First off, I want to give Webex credit for writing the language choices in the target alphabet. It’s crazy to ask someone in China to look for the word English word “Chinese” in a selection list, yet many products do this.

But look at the examples above. There are several things that could potentially frustrate a meeting host or attendee. I’m not quite sure how this list gets generated… Is it all just text entered by the person who schedules the event? Or is it pulled from a choice list offered by Webex?

If you speak Spanish, you’ll notice that the word for “Spanish language” is incorrect. The ñ in Español is missing its tilde. Then you have the interesting fact that languages are listed in association with a single country. That’s potentially misleading, as some languages sound different based on their locality. As I understand it, Brazil and Portugal have differences in their versions of Portuguese. Which one gets listed?

And coming back to China, I can’t read the characters in this menu, but I know enough to understand that my comment a little earlier about looking for “Chinese” as a language choice is silly. Mandarin sounds nothing like Cantonese. Neither one would be exclusively associated with the country of China. You might very well want two interpreters available if you were targeting audiences in that country. A single menu choice for “China” wouldn’t make sense.

And of course, simultaneous interpretation is just the start when you dig into the complexities of true multilingual meeting support. I wrote up a long post about other factors that should be considered when Planning A Multilingual Webinar. I wrote that five years ago, and I have seen very little progress from webinar technology vendors in trying to support things like true multilingual registration, email communications, visuals, and interactions. That’s not surprising… It’s really HARD!

But globalization proceeds apace and we need to keep moving away from a purely English-centric view of online collaboration. Simultaneous interpretation is a great way to start. Let’s hope the vendors keep going and work on full multilingual support for all aspects of webinar configuration and delivery.

[If you are interested in this topic, you may want to check out past posts looking at KUDO, Intrado, and VoiceBoxer for ways that they are working on the problem.]

Technorati Tags: simultaneous interpretation,multilingual conferencing,Webex,webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,webcasting,webcast,web collaboration,online collaboration,web meeting,online meeting

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

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

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.

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.

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