Webinar Wire

The Importance of Keeping Your Audience in the Room

Picture this: You are giving a live seminar and you announce at the outset, "If anyone has any questions, there is a lovely lady named Mabel sitting right outside the ballroom who will collect them from you. So, as you think of a question, simply leave the ballroom, give your question to Mabel, and then return to your seat. I'll answer your questions at the end of my presentation."

A fellow in the front row asks you, "Sir, if you see someone leaving the room to talk to Mabel, will you stop your presentation and wait for them to return?" "Of course not!" you reply, "For all I know you're taking a bathroom break. I'll never get my pitch done if I stop every time someone leaves the room."

Would you ever conduct a seminar this way? Of course not. So why on Earth would you conduct a webinar this way? Believe it or not, I attended just such a webinar today. The vendor, a marketing consultant, chose to use Livestream as the "webinar" tool. I put webinar in quotes because Livestream is not strictly speaking a webinar platform. Now, this is where "Mabel" comes into play. The presenter invited the participants to submit their questions using Twitter.So I'm sitting there with my browser pointing to the consultant's embedded streaming PowerPoint pitch while elsewhere on my desktop I've got my Twitter client (in this case, Tweetdeck) showing me the feed of webinar questions and comments. I am way too lazy to resize windows properly so every time I look at the Twitter feed, my eyes are distracted from the presentation. It's the equivalent of leaving the ballroom to give my question to Mabel.

Adding to the oddity of this arrangement is that the consultant chose to point the audience to his web site where the Livestream embed resided, instead of pointing them to Livestream proper. You see at Livestream, you have an accompanying chat box with the video/audio feed. So, had he taken advantage of this and abandoned the Twitter idea, folks could have watched the pitch and the chat all in one enclosed location without distractions. I'm no mind reader but my guess is he chose the less effective approach because he wanted more eyeballs on his web site and he wanted to attract attention from the Twitter audience that was not actually at the webinar. He probably thought this was a genius marketing move. In my humble opinion, it resulted in a suboptimal webinar experience. Quite frankly, I was so distracted that I will actually need to watch the replay of the webinar to get everything.

There is a reason why good webinar products, such as Webex, Adobe Connect Pro, etc. put everything you need (chat, polling, white board, PowerPoint) in the same "room". It's because they know the more likely you are to switch windows, the less likely you are to pay attention to the pitch.

As a side note, if you really are addicted to the idea of using Twitter to display a relevant Twitter feed during your webinar, there is a new extension to Adobe Connect Pro that allows you to create a "Twitter pod" (http://bit.ly/cqbnMF) within your Connect Pro room. Now folks can watch the presentation and not leave the room to talk to Mabel.