In the closing years of the prior decade, my colleague Ken Molay used to understandably bemoan the state of the term “webinar” both legally and semantically. His musings on the subject can be found here, here, here and here. Recent anecdotal evidence leads me to believe the days of webinar obscurity and semantic scorn are gone.
I recently went shopping online for a new set of PC headphones. To my surprise, I found several advertised to be “excellent for webinars”. We would never have seen this benefit itemized just a couple of years ago. But then you say, these sales people are techies selling to techies. Fair enough.
Indeed, you don’t know how many times, to my frustration, I have had to explain my job to people who have never heard of a webinar — that is, until recently. I just opened a bank account in my new home state of Illinois. The banker asked the inevitable question, “what do you do for a living?” I replied “webinar producer” and then got ready to go into my spiel. To my shock, an expression of recognition spread across the banker’s face. “Oh, I used to attend webinars all the time,” she said. The same thing happened a couple of weeks later when my new attorney started asking me for advice on giving a webinar.
OK, this isn’t science. I haven’t run any surveys yielding statistical confirmation of my theory but the anecdotal data is, to my mind, conclusive. Webinars are now mainstream. The next question is, does the mention of webinar evoke a positive or negative reaction? In this area I think there is still progress to be made but at least fewer folks are asking, “what’s a webinar?”
Have you ever attended an audio only webinar? Neither had I nor had I ever intended to until today. When I clicked “attend” on my webinar confirmation, GoToWebinar informed me that the webinar was “full”. I tweeted the webinar sponsors but alas the room limit had been reached and nothing could be done. Since I had already set aside this hour of my time, I decided to dial into the webinar conference number and listen anyway.
First, the obligatory scold. Most webinar platforms allow you to place a limit on registrations. Anyone who receives a confirmation of their webinar registration should expect to gain entrance. I don’t know why GoToWebinar couldn’t handle everyone who received a confirmation. If the webinar hosts did place an attendance limit, GoToWebinar should have rejected registration requests that went beyond the attendance limit. From my Twitter feed, I could tell I was not the only one locked out. Thank goodness I had not paid for this webinar.
However, here is the odd thing. The audio of the webinar was quite engaging. In fact, it was so conversational that I found myself wondering what slides could possibly have supported it. I surmised that the slides perhaps presented a question for the panel to discuss. When I finally got into the visual part of the webinar with only ten minutes left I found my guess was correct. The slide documented the question that was being discussed by the panel at that moment. So, my first assessment of the experience was that the slides didn’t add much value. (When I actually play the recording that they’re sending me, I’ll know for sure.)
But then I looked deeper at my own behavior as an attendee. Despite the enjoyable conversational style of the webinar, my mind wandered without any accompanying visuals. I picked up the essentials but I wasn’t riveted. Once I got into the webinar proper with only ten minutes to go, I noticed that my attention level increased even though the slide being presented wasn’t particularly interesting.
So the question remains did my attention waver because of my EXPECTATION of a visual component? Clearly the two or three slides I saw at the end of the webinar did not add much value yet they commanded my attention anyway. Had the same audio been advertised as a tele-seminar would it have had a different effect on me?
The whole experience speaks to the complex psychological mix that is the well produced webinar. In that typically one hour time frame, you are engaging your attendee’s eyes, ears and mind. You are immersing him into your world such that he stays with you and does not wander. If any component — visual, audio, interaction — fails, your audience suffers.
Just for kicks, attend a webinar and don’t look at the slides and see how it effects your experience. I discovered that even with a great audio track, a webinar without visuals didn’t quite hit the mark.
Back in November, I got a preview demo of the latest edition of Adobe Connect which I shared with all of you. Over the past week I got my hands on my own preview account so I could kick the tires myself. As someone already predisposed to the product, I was not disappointed.
The first thing you notice is the consolidation of controls along the top menu. Everything from recording to setting up audio/video to layouts to launching specific pods can be done from this top row menu. So you’re no longer hunting around the screen to discover how to control some parameter or another.
I won’t make this review exhaustive but instead mention two standout changes that I found quite cool. The first is drag and drop. Now, any resource you wish to share with your attendees, be it a PowerPoint pitch or a graphic, can be dragged and dropped into the share pod and Adobe Connect will process it and display it. Anyone familiar with my computing habits knows I am a drag and drop fanatic. I believe the whole point of modern operating systems is to manipulate objects, not type commands. So this new capability in Connect really appealed to me.
The second thing that I loved was the way they changed the implementation of the Q&A pod. In prior releases of Adobe Connect, you had to associate Q&A functionality to an existing chat pod. I never understood that implementation. It was not the least bit intuitive so I have to assume they had some technical limitation. Perhaps now that they’ve moved to a Flex architecture they can do things they couldn’t do before? Bottom line, the Q&A pod can now be launched as its own functional entity in addition to any chat pods you may have open.
I encountered only one odd problem during my testing involving Adobe’s automatic translation of my PowerPoint deck to Flash. I tested both a PowerPoint 2007 (PPTX) file and the same pitch saved under the prior release of PowerPoint (PPT). I used two methods with each file. I uploaded the files in the traditional way and I dragged and dropped them. Only the traditional upload of my PPT file yielded the fidelity to the original that I wanted. The upload of the PPTX as well as both drag and drops, for some reason resulted in font problems. I can’t swear I executed what I would call a controlled experiment so I can’t begin to suggest what might have caused the problems.
I also tested a PowerPoint pitch deliberately designed to stretch the webinar capabilities (using multiple slide transitions and animations). Adobe Connect 8 had the same limitations in duplicating these transitions that Adobe Connect 7 had, with one exception of a font that 7 could handle but 8 could not. All this means is that every webinar presenter needs to review their pitch within the webinar platform before going live to ensure that it displays what you intended.
Creating your own custom pod layouts within the product is quite easy as grid lines appear on your screen as you position a pod onto a portion of the work area, helping you get the alignment of pods right.
My only other very minor gripe about the new release is I preferred the rounded corners of the prior release pods to the squared off corners of the new release. That is just a matter of aesthetic taste. Otherwise, I found Connect 8 to be a worthy successor to prior releases of the product.
As I’ve said before, Adobe has finally learned the treasure that it inherited in the old Macromedia Breeze product and they have invested in it to make it that much better. Adobe Connect is still a powerful competitor to the two primary opponents in this space, Cisco’s Webex and Citrix’s GoToWebinar.
TechCrunch reports today that the CRM vendor Salesforce has purchased the webinar product DimDim. Details of the purchase can be found here.
There is some conjecture that Salesforce will integrate DimDim into its enterprise communications program called Chatter, a product that from what I can gather runs behind a corporate firewall, facilitating a private chat and file share network.
Personally, I hope Salesforce does us all a 31 million dollar favor and takes DimDim off the general market. While some folks sing its praises, my experience with DimDim has been lackluster. Its interface has always looked amateurish to me and the last DimDim webinar I attended (yesterday) was a technological disaster. If Salesforce is going to keep DimDim on the general market, then they need to do some serious development with it.
Personally, I find the purchase puzzling to say the least.
A hat tip to my friend Rob Cairns for alerting me to the purchase.
Last week I hosted a webinar about what webinar attendees should expect and demand from webinars. A good time was had by all and we had a great Q&A session. For those of you who did not attend the webinar (and those who want a refresher), I thought I’d share some of the questions that were asked and give you the best answers I can come up with.
You suggested that if you set the webinar price too low, participants will assume you’re not offering much value — what was behind your decision to offer this webinar for free?
When we talk about webinar pricing, we need to start with the premise that it is priced in the first place. We’re talking low priced webinars vs high priced ones. The “free webinar” space, which is huge, is a whole different can of worms. If lead generation is your primary motive for giving the webinar, you will not likely charge for it. If you are participating in an expert series given by a webinar platform (as I did last week) you will not charge for it. In those cases the compensation that the webinar presenter and platform provider get for the quality they give is the lead, or exposure to their services. Of course attendee-funded webinars are also great for lead generation but they go by different rules where quality and price must be very carefully aligned.
What percent revenue split do you recommend between an organization who is marketing a webinar and the webinar designer/presenter?
This question stumped me in the live webinar but upon further thought I can give a general answer. First, we must define our terms. If we are really talking strictly marketing, then the marketing venue (e.g. WebinarListings) will have a flat rate for advertising your webinar. Many webinar marketing firms offer listings for free or a flat rate and do not engage in revenue sharing. One reason would be that they don’t want to limit themselves to advertising for-fee webinars. Obviously there can be no revenue sharing for a free webinar.
If, on the other hand, you’re talking about being a guest speaker for a hosting organization, then I can’t give you a solid revenue split but I would lean toward the bulk of the revenue going to the speaker. Without the speaker, the host has no show. I’d think an 80/20 split would not be unreasonable. Again, that’s my gut talking. I don’t have an industry-endorsed answer.
What would you consider the “sweet spot” when it comes to the upfront charge for the webinar?
I’ve seen webinar prices all over the map. As of this writing, Business Expert Webinars offers all of their webinars for $99.00. Its CEO, Lee Salz has very high standards for webinar content. (I’ve embedded my interview with Lee Salz at the end of this article.) On the other hand I belong to a non-profit organization with a $30.00/year membership fee to one of their sub-communities. That $30.00 buys me unlimited webinars (with credit toward certification) for that year. My very non-scientific survey of online webinar directories tells me that one hour webinars top out at about $100.00. When you go over that amount you’re usually talking multi-hour or multi-day events.
Do you think that holding weekly/regular webinars are worth it, instead of trying to call and set up individual webinars (demos)?
The devil is in the details. If you have one topic, say a product you’re selling, and you want to demo it, then the only way weekly webinars are going to work is if you are very good at getting out the word and you have a large base to entice to the webinar. Otherwise, you will have some weeks where 10 folks show up, some weeks where you will talk to an empty “room”. A couple of years ago I tried promoting a product with weekly webinars and the results were very disappointing.
On the other hand, if you have a following and your webinars touch on a different topic each week, then there are possibilities there. It’s kinda like doing a weekly radio show but with slides. If you are promoting the same product with more or less the same slides every time, I would not give the webinar more than monthly and I’d make sure you have a deep potential audience pool from which to pull.
I want to produce webinars directed towards consumers (many have never attended a webinar before) what can I do to “jazz up the presentation”?
Take advantage of all the features provided by the webinar platform but do it all in moderation. Polling, slide annotation, attendee chat, Q&A, white boards, virtual “break out rooms” are all features found in many if not most webinar platforms. Including a little of each will keep your audience on its toes. But never use technical tricks as a gimmick. The audience will see through that. Use techniques that serve the subject matter … don’t tailor the subject matter to the technique. Browse through the articles on this blog to find many do’s and even more don’ts!
If using a wireless connection, is this especially bad because of bandwidth issues or is it more a matter of the consistency of the connection (ie. the connection getting dropped periodically)?
Although wireless connections to PC’s and laptops are high speed, there tends to be some speed degradation when compared to a wired connection. This will impact how fast slides load on your screen and how well video will play. The bigger risk of course is the connection being dropped altogether because of a bad wireless access point (WAP). Once you’re dropped the webinar ends for you until you get that connection reestablished.
Best frequency and methods to promote webinar to appeal to consumer? And how do I make sure they SEE the invitation?
Second question first. Email marketing is a great way to get your message out to a known opted-in audience and the best providers (Aweber, Constant Contact, etc.) have excellent deliverability rates because most Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) do not bounce mail originating from their servers … they are trusted “senders”. So near-guaranteed delivery is one way you get the invitation in front of your potential audience. Once it is in their inbox, you need to have a compelling subject line so they will want to open your invitation rather than just toss it.
As far as frequency goes, this differs slightly depending on whether you are charging a fee or not. If you are charging for your webinar then you want to get that advertisement going full force CLOSE to the webinar when your audience will know for sure they have the time free and will commit money to attending. Reminding them too far out will not help with that. You can plant the seed several weeks in advance, but do heavy promotion in the 48 hour time frame. (This advice comes straight from webinar pricing guru Lee Salz. Again, listen to the interview for more.)
For a free webinar, you can alert folks two weeks or so in advance and increase frequency of communication as you get closer but because it is free, always expect a 50% or so drop from registrant to actual attendee. A free registrant has no skin in the game and may easily drop your webinar to a lower priority. That is why you should indicate in the webinar literature if the webinar will be recorded. Then you can get some registrants who will still watch your webinar on their own time if they can’t attend live.
In addition to email marketing, optimize your use of social media, e.g. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to get the word out. Also use online webinar directories.
What about having live video of presenters during webinars?
In a word, don’t. Your audience is focusing on your slides so your moving picture is really an unnecessary distraction. It also puts an unnecessary burden on you. You can no longer scratch that itch or look down at your notes. Now you’re a video performer instead of just a “radio” performer. Why add the extra degree of difficulty?
Is there a benefit to the presenter using a phone?
My answer betrays how old fashioned I am. I have just not gotten to the point that I trust VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) as much as I trust POTS (plain old telephone system). I find phone to be the more reliable way to make sure my audio sounds good. With that said, my voice tends to come across louder on VOIP which in my case is a help. On last week’s webinar, I used VOIP. The caveat with using VOIP is that if the Internet connection is not good on your end or on your attendee’s end, your voice may “break up” as the net clobbers it.
If you have any other questions about webinars, comment below!
Now, as promised, if you click the play icon on the widget below, you will hear my interview with Lee Salz, Attendee-Funded Webinar guru and author of Stop Speaking for Free.
