Webinar Wire

Barrier to Entry: Adobe Connect Pro vs Webex

Anyone who talks to me for more than five minutes about webinars knows that I am an Adobe Connect Pro bigot, big time.

Dave Walker, the self proclaimed "Connect Guru" from InteSolv illustrates one of Adobe's advantages over Webex in a painful demonstration. Check out the difference between joining an Adobe Connect meeting vs joining a Webex meeting.

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Webinars - A Waste Of Time?

Amber Avines says "...after today's useless webinar, I will never waste my time again." She's not talking about wasting her time with a single company or a single topic. She doesn't want to ever attend another webinar, period.

Houston, we have a problem.

What happened to make Amber say "Somewhere along the line, the word 'webinar' has taken on a negative connotation for me"? She's not talking about the old flame wars regarding the coined terminology. She means that webinars as a business offering have turned her off.

And the key complaint? Simplistic content that doesn't meet her expectations as an audience member, followed by a sales pitch to make her buy "the good stuff."

Having vented a little, Amber admits that quality webinars do exist. But she's unwilling to sort through all the garbage trying to find an elusive gem.

Webinar spam is much more injurious than email spam. If you get an email you don't want, you simply delete it and move on, with a net lost productive time measured in seconds - perhaps less. But if you make a commitment to attend a webinar, postpone other business appointments and tasks during that time period, figure out login and/or dial-in requirements, fidget during the inevitable introductory fluff and then find out there was nothing behind it but more fluff and an unanticipated sales pitch, the provider has just stolen from you. Business time and productivity is a valuable asset and taking it from you under false pretenses is shameful.

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LearningWare Posts Webinar Survey Results

LearningWare has posted the results of a recent survey about webinar usage and perception. They sent out requests to 15,000 recipients and received over 300 responses.

You can go online to see summary results with LearningWare's comments or a full breakdown of responses including write-in responses from participants.

Participation was heavily oriented towards training and education webinars, which makes sense since that is the primary market for LearningWare and would have been prevalent on their mailing list.

One of the questions that I particularly enjoyed was asking people how they have multi-tasked while watching a webinar. It's not just a matter of checking emails or doing other things at the computer. People regularly get up and leave their desk or turn the sound off to concentrate on something else! This is one reason I cast a jaundiced eye at "attention meters" in web conferencing software that check whether focus is on the web conferencing window. I'd rather have someone listening to me and seeing most of my slide while they check their email than have the window focus exclusively on my slide while they are off getting a cup of coffee in the break room!

The final question and response summary is probably the most important for you as a presenter. "What could make webinars better?" received overwhelming responses of "More interaction" and "Better presentations." The next time you need to give a webinar, think about these answers!

Thanks for sharing, LearningWare.

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World's Shortest Webinar

I love this idea to death! A company named LogicMonitor put out a press release advertising "The World's Shortest Webinar." Sure, it's a gimmick, but a fun and novel one. They want to demonstrate how fast their product can be configured, so they say they will just start up, do the configuration in a minute or two, and stop.

If only they can carry through on this promise. Unfortunately, my experience with technical product marketing leads me to expect that the actual demonstration will be as quick as advertised, but will be sandwiched between another 20 minutes of introduction, marketing pitches, company background, and audience exhortations.

I hope I'm wrong. It would be SO fun to hear about a live interactive webinar that honestly lasted three minutes!

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LinkedIn Group For Web Conferencing Professionals

There is now a networking group on LinkedIn for professionals in the web conferencing industry. This should be a good place to discuss news and develoments that impact us all and maybe to do some job posting and hunting (don't ignore that tab!).

Click here to join Professionals in Web Conferencing.

You need to have an active account on LinkedIn. But honestly, if you are a business professional and don't have a LinkedIn account, you are way behind the curve anyway!

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How the U.S. State Dept. Broadcasted the Obama Town Hall in China

I had the pleasure of working with the U.S. State Department this past weekend to broadcast President Obama's Town Hall Meeting in Shanghai, China.  Because the event was not carried by Chinese TV, the White House enlisted the help of the State Department, which in turn, enlisted a combination of Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro and ConnectSolutions Podium to get the event to as many people as possible.

Learn more about the behind the scenes of this event and how we reached 7,000 people behind the "Great Firewall of China":

http://www.connectsolutions.com/blog/2009/11/16/obamainchina/

 

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Flash-based Web Conferencing About To Take A Hit?

Twitter is getting a lot of action today about a CNET article highlighting security concerns with Flash content running on web sites.

I'm not a security expert nor a Flash developer, so I won't comment on the technical aspects of the warning. At first glance, it looks like web conferencing applications shouldn't be a problem... The concern is for malicious Flash applications specifically built to be run on their own in a web browser and possibly camouflaged inside other things such as images.

But the "shot across the bow" comes near the end of the article where the interviewed security expert, Mike Bailey, says "users should disable Flash completely or use NoScript, a browser plug-in that blocks Flash and Java from untrusted sites."

Flash is becoming a much more common base platform for web conferencing technologies. Vendors like it because they don't have to make multiple versions for different operating systems and it can significantly speed and ease access times and operations compared to computer-installed applications (such as WebEx or Live Meeting client installs). Connect Pro, omNovia, ON24, VoxWire, and many others have made big investments in running their web conferencing packages as Flash applications.

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Adobe Connect Introduces Some Cool New Features

Anyone who talks to me about web conferencing knows I am a big fan of Adobe Connect Pro. No, I am not on their payroll. I just find the interface incredibly elegant and unlike anything else out there. So it was with great anticipation that I attended a webinar yesterday announcing their new release, 7.5. As the webinar host noted, while a "dot" release, it still provides some pretty good bang for the buck.

Now I must first offer the caveat that I haven't yet tested the new functionality but I think you'll agree with me that it is mouth watering.

The first concept introduced was "Universal Voice". Prior to 7.5, you could use "integrated voice" with Connect provided you maintained a separate account with an approved provider such as Premiere Conferencing. With integrated voice, the moderator can maintain software control over the teleconference aspect of the webinar. If you didn't subscribe to one of the approved vendors, not only could you not exercise software control, you could also not record the audio portion of your webinar.

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6 Weeks To A Great Webinar

Wayne Turmel of Greatwebmeetings.com has written a book called 6 Weeks To A Great Webinar (available on Amazon). It ships as a paperback, but I read the electronic version.

Wayne concentrates purely on public marketing / lead generation webinars. His approach is highly pragmatic, laying out specific tasks that need to be accomplished on a timeline, starting from six weeks before your scheduled webinar.

One of the most useful features in the book is his inclusion of checklists and templates that are ready for a webinar producer to copy, revise, and use. For instance, Wayne not only gives you tips on what types of things you should include in your invitation and follow-up emails, he actually writes out sample text, with fill-in-the-blank spots for your information.

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How To Get Leads From Marketing Webinars

To make up for that last silly post about the Fark discussion, here's a link you can really use. Michael Cage has written up a concise and well-reasoned article on "The 12 Most Common Lead Generation Webinar Marketing Mistakes." Read it. Follow the advice. Get more leads from your marketing webinars.

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