Webinar Wire

Another Cautionary Tale

I would estimate 95% of the webinars I attend go off without a hitch. Of those 95%, the webinar rises or falls on the quality of the content. Sadly, in the other 5% the content is forgotten completely because of a major glitch and more often than not these glitches could have been mitigated somehow.

Such was the case yesterday when I attended a professional development webinar. This webinar was high stakes for two reasons. First, it was not free. Second, the webinar was being taken by folks wanting to earn credit toward professional certification.

I'm going to present the cause and effect in reverse order. The effect: Webinar kept crashing. Some folks could see slides. Some folks could not. Some folks who could see slides were told to leave the webinar and re-enter anyway, at which point they could no longer see the slides. This went on for 25 minutes worth of what was supposed to only be an hour long webinar. The featured speaker finally told the moderator (amid the strong support of the audience) that the webinar would need to be rescheduled since there was no way he could present 60 minutes of material in 30 minutes.

The non-profit giving this webinar is now faced with a rescheduling nightmare since they must accommodate everyone who paid for the webinar or grant refunds (which this organization seldom does).

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Looking For Help With Higher Education Webinars

We have a request for help from one of our readers. He is holding public webinars targeted at decision makers in higher education institutions. He's looking for any help on whether attendance rates or behavior patterns are different for those users than for general B2B webinars and if there are any special strategies or tactics you have employed to boost the performance of webinars targeted at that audience. I don't have experience with that market, so I'm looking for community help.

Please add a comment with your experiences or tips. Much appreciated!

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Webinars as Social Media

When I say the phrase "social media" to you, what is the first thing you think of? Probably Twitter or Facebook or MySpace or LinkedIn. What if I added "webinars" to the list?

What?

Think about it a minute. During a webinar we do all the things that are achieved in social media. We impart information (often for free). We build relationships. We obtain valuable feedback from customers and prospects. In fact, to the extent that our webinars don't do this, we have somewhat failed, haven't we?

Why don't we typically think of webinars as social media? Corporations have been using web conferencing software for ages now to facilitate internal communications. When the software began to be used externally, it was likely viewed as simple advertising. It was likely viewed as one-to-many communication which really violates the tenets of social media. Since that is the root history of webinars, I think people have been slow to change their view of them.

Now, as web conferencing software has grown in sophistication, implementing chat rooms, polling features, breakout rooms, and interactive white boards the one-to-many paradigm has been broken.

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Webinar Public Chat -- Be Careful What You Ask For

I just finished attending a webinar that at least by certain measures was an unmitigated disaster. Let's put aside for the moment that the attendance information did not arrive in my inbox until an hour before the webinar was to begin (I registered early yesterday) and I only found it in my inbox 10 minutes after the webinar had started!

Once the three minute process to "retrieve the client" software was finished, I entered the webinar to find a major distraction. The webinar moderator had enabled public chat and in this case, there seemed to be more chat than webinar. The chat session had taken on a life of its own.

There are of course benefits to public chat within a webinar.

• Attendees can learn from each other during the webinar.
• Webinar hosts, moderators and producers can obtain valuable feedback.

The problem arises when the public chat goes into overdrive and folks are exclusively chatting or the feedback is abundantly negative.

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5 Effective Ways to Create An Online Quiz

Online quizzes have become more and more prevalent in the web 2.0 era. For bloggers or webmasters, a quiz is an outstanding way to engage readers and grow blog or web site traffic. For trainers, an online quiz is a good e-assessment authoring tool. For businesspeople, an online quiz can also be used as a sales tool. Here are 5 ways to create a quiz for online use.

1. Use a desktop Flash quiz maker
Some Flash quiz makers supply an easy way to create a professional Flash quiz in minutes. With these tools you can create Flash-based quizzes with images, sounds, narrations and Flash animations with up to 10 question types. You can add feedback to questions and randomize the order of questions and answers. Some quiz makers also supply a results tracking system, (QuizCreator is an example). Users can track quiz results by email or the product's Quiz Management System. Here is a sample image from a QuizCreator quiz.

 

2. Use Adobe Flash authoring
If you are sophisticated with Adobe Flash editing, you can use Adobe Flash to make your quizzes. Adobe Flash MX and later versions have quiz templates included, and are designed to automatically track results and send them to a learning management system configured for your quiz. Here is a tutorial about how to Create a Quiz with Free Quiz Template with Adobe Flash.
http://www.sameshow.com/quiz-creator/flash-quiz-adobe-flash.html?page=110

 

3. Use php Script or JavaScript
If you are familiar with php script or JavaScript and HTML code, you could use HTML code and script to create online quizzes. Here are some tutorials to help you create quizzes for your Web site.
Create a quiz with php script: http://www.trap17.com/index.php/php-quiz-script_t8729.html
Create a quiz with JavaScript: http://www.spacefem.com/tutorials/typequiz.shtml

 

4. Use a free online quiz creation tool
There are numerous online quiz-building tools that can make quiz creation and grading less of a chore. Do a Google search for "make online quiz free" and you will find many free online quiz tools.

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Prioritizing Questions

The Conference Group recently announced that they have added a feature to their ReadyShow web conferencing platform to give event moderators more control over questions submitted from the audience during a webinar.

I haven't had a chance to use it and this is not an endorsement for the company or their software. But speaking as a professional event moderator, I LOVE THIS FEATURE!!! I hope other vendors will take note and put similar functionality on their development plans.

The Conference Group is not the first to implement this. Stream57 included question prioritization a few releases ago and there are a few other products that have something similar. I can't remember them off the top of my head, so if you are a vendor that allows question prioritization, feel free to add a comment and let us know. All I know is that it is still far too uncommon.

If you run small web conference meetings or take audience questions over the phone, you may wonder what I'm going on about. Imagine a larger public webinar with hundreds of attendees. I often work on these as a moderator, supporting two or three presenters who are experts on the material. We have a live Q&A session at the end of the event where I read questions typed in by the audience and our experts answer them.

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Managing Followups On A Webinar Series

My standard recommendation for marketers using webinars to generate sales leads or communication permission lists is to follow up as quickly as possible with attendees and with non-attending registrants. Same day if possible, within 24 hours is good, within 48 hours should be your limit.

But a client recently asked me how to manage the process if you offer a series of webinars. They are holding webinars every couple of weeks and the same audience members might attend many webinars to further their education in the subject area. My client didn't want to keep contacting people over and over, as that would be seen as harassment.

The right way to deal with this situation is more complex than many marketers want to implement. It's not difficult, it just involves additional record-keeping and probably the use of a third-party CRM system.

You really want to keep a list showing the last contact date from you for each individual. If it's never or over two months, make an immediate contact after the webinar. If it is more recent, add them to a tickler list for "check-in contact" later.

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Liven Up eLearning Courses With A Funny Quiz

Making good eLearning courses is a developing art. As a trainer, your goal is to make the training memorable. As you design the course, you must design not only the "what" (or content), but also the "how" (the delivery mechanisms). Integrating a funny quiz (like "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire") into an eLearning course is an easy way to capture the attention of learners and make your course memorable. Learners will quickly interact with key concepts for your course.

A funny quiz can energize almost any content and produce powerful new understanding for your learners. A funny quiz can promote learning – more than just relieving tension, it creates opportunities for the learners to interact so as to demonstrate their understanding of the course. Many Among the benefits of a humorous quiz are these items:

• It entertains learners with a purpose
• It gives learners valuable feedback
• It gives trainers feedback
• It motivates learners
• It accelerates the learning process

So how do you go about integrating the right funny quiz into your course? Let's take a look at the steps.

Step 1 - Identify your course objective
Take careful consideration of the objective you want your course to achieve after the training. Specifically, what skills and knowledge do you want your learners to take from your course? Then think about how the funny quiz will help your learners meet this objective.

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Web Conferencing In The Time Of Cholera

Well, it's started. The first few press releases are already out from web conferencing vendors keying off the current swine flu media coverage.

Please, people, a little restraint. There are many good reasons to encourage the use of web conferencing in both personal and business applications. But riding on the coattails of panic and fear does not help society.

Yes, I know that several government agencies have started to suggest curtailing travel as a response to flu outbreaks. Government bodies often want to be seen as doing something to show that they are responsible and proactive. This can lead to silly knee-jerk policies that do nothing to help the actual problem. For instance, quite a few countries have implemented restrictions or bans on pork product imports... Even though people cannot get the flu by eating pork or pork products. You'll be seeing more of these kinds of  reactions falling under the label of "Do something - Anything!"

Now is not the time to spread additional fear and business paralysis by suggesting that we have to stay locked in our homes, afraid to go to work in protection of our health and safety.

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How To Embarrass Yourself In A Webcast

I just saw a news story with a public apology issued by a communications company. It seems that the radio station employees making rude, racist, and sexist remarks during a football game webcast didn't realize that their mike feed was going out to the internet audience. Oops!

There's a lesson here for all of us. During a live webinar or webcast, ALWAYS assume your communications are public. If you put your phone on mute, don't start talking trash to yourself about the current presenter. Some day you are going to realize that you didn't press the mute button hard enough, or that you accidentally pressed it twice and the presenter and audience can hear you muttering, "Is this joker every going to shut up?"

If your web conferencing software lets you send private messages to other hosts/presenters, take care with what you choose to communicate. Sure, there are times when you want to say "Watch your time" or "Speak louder, Ken!" If you accidentally have your dropdown selector set wrong and the message goes out to all attendees, it's not a calamity. But if you are trading catty messages with your moderator and say, "Can you believe we have to listen to this tripe?" you are setting yourself up for disaster when you find that somehow you hit the public response button instead of the private response button.

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