Webinar Wire

Bulletproofing Event Audio

I received an email ages ago (Sorry, Michael!) asking if I would write about audio problems in webcasts. Michael said that after several years and hundreds of webcasts, he hasn't found a bulletproof way to ensure audio quality and continuity during an event. More infuriating, he said, was the lack of responsibility and responsiveness he has seen from audio vendors when something does go wrong.

Audio is the lifeblood of a web seminar, and losing a speaker line or disconnecting your audience is one of the worst things that can happen to you during an event. Having a vendor say "the fault wasn't on our network" doesn't help when you have hundreds or thousands of angry audience members who suddenly find themselves without sound.

I don't think it is theoretically possible to guarantee audio continuity. There are too many weird things that can go wrong. Presenters can lose their connection in a power outage, a local line break, or tripping over a phone cord. I have taken to dialing in to the presenter line on two separate phones. My personal office setup allows me to have one traditional "phone company" line and another phone carried over the cable company's system. They are separate and distinct carrier circuits and a failure in one would still let me speak on the other. That's an unusual configuration, but you might try the same thing by dialing in on a cell phone as an emergency backup (although you would need a full battery charge ahead of time!). At the least, you could program the dial-in number on your cell phone so you just have to hit "Send" in the event of an interruption on your normal line.

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Virtual Investor Presentations

Investor Presentations are the lifeblood of public companies. Without them, these companies would have no way of communicating their story with potential and existing investors. Generally, these presentations occur during Investor Meetings which can mean thousands of dollars in travel costs for both the executives and the investors. Not to mention, with the recent air-traffic delays, CEO's often end up trapped in airports instead of working on the business!

Offering an alternative to plane delays, WallStreet VIPs launched a service that allows public companies to deliver their investor presentations online, using modern webinar technology. Just last week, they hosted their first two VIPs (Virtual Investor Presentations) for SPO Medical (SPOM) and VUANCE Ltd. (VUNC) Attendees included people from all over the United States (and some internationally as well) ranging from System Integrators, to Current Shareholders, and to the target audience, Potential Shareholders.

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When Does A Password Make You Less Secure?

Many years ago I had occasion to visit a bank headquarters on a programming job. We went into a secure computer room and I noticed a computer terminal on a table all by itself in the middle of the room. My host said that this was the sole access point to look at account information for any of their customers and that I shouldn't touch it. And there, scotch-taped to a pole next to the table, were the logon instructions with the incredibly complex password needed for access. Nobody could ever remember it, so they had written it down for reference.

I was reminded of this blast from my past while working on a client webinar today. They had set up their conference in Microsoft Live Meeting and let the software default to picking the attendee password for the event. If you do that, Microsoft chooses a password comprised of upper and lowercase letters, numeric digits, and punctuation marks. So all attendees were supposed to log in using something like qP{4,X as their password.

The problem with a password like this is that it makes your event less secure, rather than more so. Passwords of this sort are designed to thwart "brute force" hacking programs that try sets of common words and birthdates in an attempt to access a protected area. Do you really think a competitor is going to programatically attempt to break in to your meeting with a sophisticated password hacking generator? No, they are going to look for a piece of paper with the entry password written on it. That is the method of choice for the vast majority of security breaches in the world.

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I Don't Like Mondays?

Webinar attendees: This one's for you!

Are you tired of seeing web seminars scheduled for times that are inconvenient to you? Why do they all seem to take place on Wednesday or Thursday at 1pm Eastern?

Take a stand. Make your voice heard. Let those companies know when YOU want to see their presentation! Or at least let them know it's safe to schedule events at other times.

This survey will only take you one or two minutes to fill out. Just click a few checkboxes to indicate days and times that are generally good or bad on your calendar.

The survey doesn't ask for your name or email. We don't track you at all. You aren't signing up for anything. The only results will be a community consensus that will help companies schedule web seminars that meet the needs of more people like you.

What if you work for a web conferencing software vendor? You can answer as an individual for your own personal preferences and calendar, but please don't supply answers based on your opinions about general preferences. You might be wrong in your assumptions... That's what we want to find out.

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ReadyTalk Releases New Event Manager

Event management is a fairly common feature among web conferencing products. It encompasses functionality to let users set up events in advance, collect registrations, send login instructions and reminder emails, and track attendance. This is in contrast to an ad hoc meeting which require no registration or advance notice.

Given that lots of vendors offer event management, is there anything that differentiates one product from another?  At ReadyTalk, we were faced with that dilemma when designing our own event manager. From our research, we found out two things that would help us differentiate our product.

First, we found that quite a few companies required customers to use a different, higher priced product version or purchase a separate module if they wanted to make use of event management. We decided to make event management a core component of the basic web conferencing software. All customers have access to it and they can choose to use it for a structured meeting, or ignore it for an ad hoc meeting as they wish.

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Don't Go Greyhound - Go Virtual!

Here's a fascinating article by John Buchanan in Procurement Travel. Apparently some corporate travel agency websites are starting to add automated business rules to their booking systems so that employees planning certain types of business travel are given an option to set up the meeting via web conference instead.

That's a wonderful idea in theory... as long as the employees have been trained on how to use the conferencing software or have access to a services moderator who can help them. Otherwise they are going to become frustrated on their first experiment with the meeting travel alternative and never try it again.

Web conferencing is still in a relatively early phase of awareness building, usage growth, and acceptance. We in the industry can help make the technology more inviting and rewarding for users by working with client companies to ensure that their employees get support and education to go along with the software. Remember the old adage: "You never get a second chance to make a first impression."

Education and support is particularly important when virtual conferencing is provided as an online service rather than as a locally installed software application. Suddenly the corporate IT department is out of the loop and users can find themselves on their own. I hope that the business rules on those travel systems note when a businessperson is using the conferencing application for the first time and offer a services contact as an option to help with meeting setup, conference software training, and assistance with connection problems at meeting start time.

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Will ISPs Kill Web Conferencing?

There is a fascinating article in today's Xconomy opinions forum. It was written by Rich Baker, the founder and CEO of Glance Networks.

Rich points out that some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) may put artificial limiters on data flow over their networks in order to load balance or improve performance for some types of applications at the expense of others. The ISPs sometimes (Often? Usually?) don't tell their customers about the throttling and may even deny that the action is in effect when it is. You can reach your own decisions on whether this is due to willful lying or just a general lack of internal communications about what policies are in place.

Rich points out that the algorithms that at least one Canadian ISP used to identify high volume data transfers (put in place to slow down peer-to-peer file sharing such as BitTorrent) affected his company's screen sharing data bursts in a live web conferencing session. So some Canadian customers of Glance thought that Glance was not working properly when it was actually a hidden change to the way the network was carrying the traffic.

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Another Oprah Apology

Oprah is back at it again trying to mitigate the negative feedback from her webcast with yet another e-mail apology. In an earlier post, I linked back to the first apology. Here is the second apology. There are two things I find interesting about this apology.

One, the service providers, Limelight Networks and Move Networks, continue to insist it was not a capacity problem. In one sentence Oprah says "there were a historic number of users" and that "capacity was not an issue". My question is: If this was the first time they had capacity like this how do they know capacity is not an issue. The apology continues into a very vague explanation of what happened; that is, no explanation. She leaves us with "we are good to go for another try". I had to do some searching on Google to find out what the real problem was. Apparently, it was a coding error that was only uncovered when the system was put under stress. OK, being an employee for a web provider, I can understand this.

The second thing I find interesting is that even Oprah is not immune to the backlash which Web 2.0 can unleash. A cursory search on Google using "oprah's webcast" returns an enourmous number of hits. Spend a little time browsing them and you will see a number of them are people complaining about the webcast or bloggers (like me) writing about its technical difficulties. No doubt, Oprah felt this backlash and it lead to her numerous apologies both through e-mail and on her site.

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It's Not How Big-It's How Effective

Lest this post show up on the wrong search engines, let me clarify here. I'm talking about an issue more and more of our clients are complaining about- small turnouts at their webinars.

Besides all the "webinar marketing 101" advice you'd expect me to give them, there is another piece of advice I them. Stop worrying about attracting the biggest possible audience.

This might seem strange advice but think about it. How many invitations do you get to attend webinars in a week? The average manager in a poll of Cranky Middle Manager Show listeners shows that they are getting 3-4 invitations a week. More webinars to the same audience means you're fighting for a shrinking part of the pie. But that's not all bad news.

Webinars are no longer a novelty- they are part of every smart company's marketing plan. Most of your audience has attended webinars before and are becoming more selective which ones they spend precious time on. No one sits around with a bucket of popcorn saying, "who's doing a webinar today".So why isn't it so gosh-awful if fewer people show up? Because the ones who show up actually want to be there.

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How To Drive Adoption Of Web Conferencing In An SME

Premiere Global Services gave me permission to post this collection of tips for small and medium enterprise (SME) companies wanting to introduce web conferencing into their operations. It was written by Stephane Guiblin, a Netspoke Product Manager at Premiere Global. I thought our readers would benefit from the concepts and recommendations Stephane lays out.

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Web conferencing has come a long way over the last few years. What was once seen as a tool for the huge Corporates to streamline their internal communications is now finding a new market; the SME.

SME’s are now also experiencing the business benefits that Web conferencing offers, not internally but for their external communications. Offering a powerful audio and visual medium, web conferencing is being used to communicate more effectively with customers, prospects and suppliers. The result; cost savings, greater productivity and a closer relationship with customers.

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