Webinar Wire

Web Events vs. Web Meetings

Posted by Ken Molay November 19 2007 12:37 AM EDT

| 2 comments

The last year or so has seen a huge shift in the public perception of web conferencing. It used to be that the marketing push by WebEx, Placeware, Raindance, and others concentrated on the benefits of reaching many people at once... For training, information dissemination, and especially for lead generation. But now all you seem to hear about is small group collaboration.

WebEx gets press not for Training Center or Event Center, but for MeetMeNow. Citrix advertises the heck out of GoToMeeting, but you hardly hear about GoToWebinar. Microsoft tied almost all of their Live Meeting 2007 product announcements to how it fits with a fancy conference room webcam and their Unified Communications suite of hardware/software for interpersonal communications. Adobe made big waves by announcing Connect as an easy way to collaborate while viewing a PDF document.

Meanwhile, every week brings a new press release about a low cost or no cost alternative for simple screen sharing or slide sharing in a one-to-one or small group online meeting. The concept of web conferencing is being promoted to the masses so strongly as a collaborative meeting tool that I fear we are losing important momentum in the events space.

I firmly believe that collaborative meeting software is quickly becoming a commodity. People will expect basic meeting services as a free offering, analogous to the instant messaging software they use now (and which is being tied to basic meeting software by numerous companies). If that usage starts to define the web conferencing market, it's going to be difficult to reestablish online events as a justifiable expense. 

The pity is that we are just now getting to the point where web event software is really stable and useful. Cross platform considerations are being addressed. Vendors are adding lead tracking and lead scoring mechanisms to satisfy marketing requirements. Performance and reliability are better than ever. It is easier and less expensive to offer international audio options that can include both streaming and telephone connections. Recording and playback of events is ubiquitous. And there are many options for handling both synchronous and on-demand webcasts to reach larger audiences.

We also have more services available to make life easy for event producers. Companies are packaging event production and promotion as part of overall marketing campaign assistance. Search and syndication providers (such as Aperio's own EventSpan) create new ways to publicize and organize events. There are third-party software integrations that allow event producers to add advanced registration, security, and payment processing.

Yet I continue to get calls from companies unsure of what can be done with web conferencing to help them reach large groups of people. They think about creating a YouTube video or building a MySpace page. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but we need to continually educate the business market about the benefits and availability of formal web event software to meet their needs.

As an industry, we need to do more to promote the use of live and recorded events. Last week we ran a piece by Katie Hasse that summarized some benefits of online training, with real world examples. She also managed to get a link in there back to her company! I challenge you vendors to follow Katie's lead. Let's make sure that we are reaching out to the business market just as strongly with an events message as we are with a small meetings message. WebinarWire will help promote and distribute the information beyond the boundaries of your own website.

Perception is a powerful market force. If we promote and publicize low price limited functionality as the hot ticket for business, that's what the press will cover and that's what businesses will request. It's time to take back some ground from the recent unified communications hype and remind businesses that they have valuable, stable, and validated business tools available right now in the online events space.