Webinar Wire

Web Conferencing Terminology Still Tricky

Posted by Ken Molay August 12 2008 11:02 PM EST

2 comments

I continue to get calls from people saying, "I want to do a webinar. How much does it cost?"

Forget about the money part of that question for the moment (although it's worth a column on its own). When I dig down a bit, sometimes I find that they really want to create an on-demand recorded presentation. Sometimes they are thinking of streaming an audio/video feed. Sometimes they want to hold a collaborative team meeting. And every once in a while, they want to do what I consider to be a webinar... Something with registration, audience management and reporting, primarily one-to-many communication, but including audience interaction.

All of us in the industry are familiar with the loose application of terms to different types of web-based collaboration. I'd guess that each of us with a blog has written about it at least once.

My personal preference is the following, but I can't pretend to speak for the industry as a whole:

Web conference: An umbrella term for any type of collaborative session held over the internet. May also be used to indicate a collaborative informal meeting, usually one that doesn't require advanced registration.

Webcast: Used to indicate a streaming audio/video presentation going out to an audience. Audience interaction is typically limited to type-in chat questions for the presenter and perhaps some polling. Usually includes video of the presenter(s). May also be used to indicate a pure one-way broadcast (similar to a TV show) watched by a passive audience.

Webinar or Web Seminar: Most often a live event featuring PowerPoint slides and/or screen sharing, accompanied by voice narration. Can also include video clips or "talking head" video of the presenter. Allows more audience interaction methodologies, including white boards, live annotation, co-browsing, and other features. May use a separate telephone audioconference for sound.

You'll notice I had to put qualifications even in those little summaries, and I still haven't dealt with a universal term for recordings (On Demand Presentation, Recorded Presentation, Archived Webcast...?).

Mike McKinnon over on the ReadyTalk blog just put up a post saying that their upcoming Fall release was (among other things) going to eliminate the distinction between "web meetings" and "web events." They ran into the same kind of confusion I mentioned above, with people using the terms interchangeably. So ReadyTalk decided to just give everybody all the features and stop trying to make them buy one version or the other based on the event type. Probably a good idea.

I don't know how we're going to get around the terminology morass, but until we do... don't assume you know what a customer or prospect is thinking when they use one of these terms. Ask a lot of questions until you feel confident you are talking about a common goal.