Category — Points of Interest

I recently had the pleasure of connecting with Michael Fitzpatrick, co-founder and CEO of ConnectSolutions for a sneak peak at their new Podium 2 platform (just announced today)

What a pleasure!  Michael’s a fellow old timer with a strong sense of what he wants to accomplish in a world increasingly crowded with remote communications solutions.  He has a clear idea of where he wants to differentiate for the market(s) they’re pursuing and how intends to, interestingly, avoid being a “me too” product developer.

That said, there are some familiar features peculiar to webcasting that are absent in Podium 2.  But don’t let that stop you from taking a peek.

On the cool list are some well-designed features that will challenge potential users to imagine new ways of connecting with and engaging their audiences.

Announcements

Perhaps the best way to describe this is by analogy… you know how CNN or a sports program on ESPN might have that scrolling tape at the bottom with additional news?  Imagine something like that in your webcast to reinforce your message, provide supplemental data, or the like.  The net of it?  In a multitasking culture that’s accustomed to both splitting their brain between what the newscaster is saying and the other stuff scrolling by, this could be a powerful tool to keep around many types of viewers.

Social Media Integration

Okay, this isn’t unique, but the product does it well.  I’m a SM fan and user, so the elegance of the solution caught my eye.  Webcast to a Facebook audience?  Not with your average conferencing solution.

(Shareable) User Notes

Event participants can take notes (which isn’t new), but the interface is well designed to have that note-taking experience be a good one.  Think, “my participants don’t have to go to Word or try typing in a box the size of a Twitter post.”

<Fanfare here>  User Video Responses

Now this is just dang cool.  Want to gather real time feedback or testimonials at the end of an event from participants who can record themselves from their own webcam?  They push a button, make a recording, and hit “submit.”

One of the things in the ‘to-be-determined’ category is whether such a tool can find widespread adoption within an organization, but of this I’m sure…it certainly will if Michael has anything to do with it.  If you’re looking for a fresh alternative in the world of webcasting, ConnectSolutions might just be worth making your short list to take a look at.

Recently I had the pleasure of speaking with Rachel Levy, founder of webinarlistings.com.  An enthusiastic fan of webinars in general, Rachel saw an opportunity in the burgeoning field of webinar promotion services.

Simply, webinarlistings.com is a place that organizations can get their webinars in front of more eyeballs, and those eyeballs, of course, are visitors to the site looking for content that’s relevant to them.

This is good news.  A common challenge for many organizations is where to get additional exposure for their webinar.  And the basic service is free.  Nada.  Zip.

As you’d expect, a business can’t give away everything for free and still be a business, and webinarlistings.com does, indeed, have premium services to increase the reach and frequency of your message getting out – especially to sources beyond the website.  There’s a long list of services from email to social media to premium positioning for you to choose from.  You can learn more about that here.

Given that most webinars could always benefit from more “butts in seats,” it’s likely that most webinar promoters could benefit from an extra place to get exposure, and webinarlistings.com might just be an opportunity for you to explore.

Save yourself a little time reading this blog post and just go buy the book.

Or if you’re so inclined, here’s why I’m making the recommendation:

As the old saying goes, “If I had a nickel for every time…”  In this case, it’d be every time I’ve been asked or have seen a post on Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., asking, “How much can I/should I charge for a webinar?”

The question makes me near nauseous.  To be fair, it’s usually asked with the right intentions, but the reason I think it’s a sign of not necessarily thinking things through is that a webinar is a delivery mechanism.  It’s your virtual room.  And you wouldn’t ask “how much would people pay to attend my hotel conference,” right?

My friend Lee Salz (with Jenny Hamby) has done a fine job of tackling this question in Stop Speaking for Free! The Ultimate Guide to Making Money with Webinars.  And as the CEO of Business Expert Webinars, he knows well the (secret!) numbers behind the scenes of what sells and what doesn’t.

Here’s a brief outline of the book with a couple teaser nuggets thrown in:

Chapter one assesses the market opportunity for attendee-funded webinars.  I won’t say much other than this:  live, instructor-led training has always had a market for which people will gladly open their wallets…if the goods are what they want.  They buy content in books, videos, mp3s, and a a hundred other delivery forms for content, so why not webinars?  There’s no good reason at all.  In fact, they will.

Chapters two through four are DA BOMB.  This is where people need help…creating content that someone else will pay money for.  Lee answers the “what people buy” question and offers practical advice for how to transform your content to get where you want to go.  In short, are you delivering skills in a tightly-focused and immediately actionable way?  Lee offers some killer advice here that you’d be a fool not to consider.

Chapters five through eight cover the essentials of marketing your virtual training.  Nothing here is revolutionary, but if you need a solid method for getting the word out, here it is.  BUT, if you’ve never stopped to think about how your audience is viewing your message, this is good stuff.

Chapter nine covers the basics of how to choose a webinar solutions provider.  To be fair, this can be a radically deep subject, AND given that my own research suggests that still about seven out of ten people in North America have not hosted their own webinar, this is a great place to start.  This chapter will get you started.

Chapter ten (written by a guest author) is about creating presentations for webinars.  Well, it’s about creating presentations.  Call me a little biased, but this is the weak link in the book.  If you have no idea where to start, this will get you started, but then I’m guessing if you’re getting ready to tackle getting people to pay for your content, this isn’t the first time you’ve touched the subject of PowerPoint and presenting.  The challenge is that many “best practices” for presentations change in the world of presenting virtually, and this chapter doesn’t quite get you there.

All in all, if you’re thinking that you want to charge for webinars, you’re pursuing thinking like a pro.  And pros do certain things like making sure that they’re better tomorrow than they were today.  And they buy books like Stop Speaking for Free!

A couple years ago I had a conversation with a friend of mine at a large conferencing company who secretly confided in me that he didn’t use said company’s web conferencing solution.  Instead, he confessed, he used a little screensharing app that ‘just gets the job done.’  A very brief summary of the conversation is this:  “sometimes you just need to show your desktop.”

True enough.

I recently had a brief but wonderful chat with Andrew Pearce, CEO of UK-based Powwownow (they also offer a solution for users on the west side of the Atlantic).  Like many conferencing vendors, audio conferencing is where they keep the lights on, and web conferencing is a convenient add-on for those who need more than audio-only communication.

In Andrew’s words, “Free doesn’t have to mean cheap,” and Powwownow has an uber-simple way to get started.  To be straight up, Powwownow is built on another platform (they don’t list it publicly, so I won’t), but that in no way diminishes the offering.

Here are a few things I liked:

Chat integration and presence
For those collaborating with the same team regularly, Powwownow has business-class chat/instant messaging that would make it really useful to detect a team member’s availability and quickly bring them into a sharing session.  While not alone in offering this, the small-medium business market that they target may indeed find this a useful addition.  The fact that Powwownow’s chat integrates with the major instant messaging platforms increases its potential usefulness.

Simplicity
The upside of “not many features” is “quick and easy.”  If you want to present, both PC and Mac users have a small download to install, and while I didn’t test this from an attendee’s perspective, I understand that end-users don’t have to install anything to participate in a web meeting.  I do think that if you don’t have the extra tools at hand that you’ll never learn to use them, but I also know that you’re not going to use them all the time.

iPhone app with a nice twist
One pretty cool “problem solved” is that those with iPhones can download an app that will let you instantly jump into a conference call without having to enter passcode details.

Andrew mentioned the availability of video “later in the year,” and given their thoughtful use of the iPhone app, it might be interesting to see what happens now that iPhone 4 is out.  To be sure, if you just need to share your desktop with a “straight out of the tin” solution, Powownow might be worth a peek.

In my webinar handouts I include additional links that you might find useful, and apparently in my latest handout the link was corrupt.  So rather than making you dig through my blog for where I posted that in the past, here it is again…  http://bit.ly/CfG69

And one thing to consider…why would you want to pay for images?

I happily use istockphoto and a few others in lieu of searching for free images simply because of time.

One, 100 sites is a lot of sites.

Two, many have restrictions such as the ‘free’ image only being low resolution or a small one (and they may not look good when you expand them to fit an entire slide).

Three, the search engines for paid sites tend to be better, and this is the biggest reason for me.  The reality is that finding just the right image can be time consuming, even with a good search engine.  As a professional speaker and trainer, I figure it’s worth it to me to pay for quality images that I can find much more quickly because of both the search engine and familiarity with the site (it’s like knowing your favorite grocery store…you know where to go for what you want).  But that’s just me…I count it a cost of doing business.

Enjoy!

A repeated mantra of mine is that it’s incumbent upon us in live events to “talk with, not at our audiences.”  With the ease and quantity of sites enabling online video exploding, it’s no longer a difficult thing to be in the personal broadcast business.

The challenge is twofold:

One, the “asking price” (even for free webinars) is high when measured in terms of time.  “Be sure you show up at 10am on Thursday” is going to have less respondents than “view this now.”  To be sure, it’s a lot less cost than travel (and all the other arguments), and I’ve blogged about their unique place in the communications mix before.

Two, “content marketing” strategic plans aside, the world probably doesn’t need more noise to sift through.  This means that if you’re not going to strive to take advantage of the live-ness of the connection, you’re probably asking people to show up (at a specific time) for what otherwise could easily be an on-demand bit of content.

And that leads me to Telenect.

If the challenge for many presenters, especially those broadcasting/webcasting using video, Telenect has done a great job of making it easier for presenters to respond to their audience.

Simple and focused
The interface, both for the presentation team and audience alike, is simple and on-task.

Audience members see the video and slides, can choose which they want larger, and can make the video full-screen if they wish.

For presenters, the interface is delightfully suited to how I prefer to present…seeing the audience questions/comments so one can respond in realtime.

Moderated, but self-serve is coming
At present Telenect offers their services only in a full-service model, meaning they provide the moderator and production.  I understand that a self-serve model is coming for those who are more comfortable producing their own events.

As a business, Telenect is focused on serving speakers and speakers’ bureaus, but I believe that that’s more a focus of go-to-market strategy for a segment.  The same value of connecting presenters and audiences would be useful for many corporate clients as well.  For those who want video and the ability to more personally connect with their audiences, Telenect might just be another to add to the “need to investigate” list.

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Joe at onlinemeetingrooms.com, and after more than a decade of doing this, I’ll confess I’m still amused with how small the world can be for realtime communication (Joe’s in Dublin, Ireland).

As always, I’d encourage you to check out any vendor directly, but here are a few things I liked:

No downloads
This isn’t critical for everybody, but given that Macs have had resurgent market share, Windows users are mixed in their usage of operating systems, the erosion of dominance in the browser wars, and the increasing number of organizations that secure their desktops, Flash has become the most-common denominator in terms of reaching people.

Low bandwidth requirements
If you want/need to use video, onlinemeetingrooms.com is with the pack of vendors who note that video doesn’t have to be hoggish to be useful.  Why is this important?  If video is important to you, know that live video for synchronous communication is a radically different thing than the nice clean experience you have with YouTube.  On demand video can “buffer” so your experience is good, whereas when you want it to be live, a choppy or latent experience is annoying at best, denigrating and distracting at worst.  And you can’t control a critical part of the end-user’s experience…their own internet connectivity and computing environment.  Onlinemeetingrooms.com gives the host the chance to control the quality of video streams to allow more control over the experience.

Most of the bases covered
Before you think I’m saying onlinemeetingrooms.com is incomplete, let me assure you I’d probably not hand out a perfect score in this category to anyone.  Why?  There’s no such thing as the perfect software solution – there’s only what is best for YOU.  Most users expect to have chat, whiteboards, polls, etc., and onlinemeetingrooms.com has you covered.

Think about how you buy a vehicle… you assume many features, right?  It’s how it works for you that is important.  As the market evolves, many times it’s not that a feature exists in a web conferencing solution, it’s a question of preference, usability, and style.

There are many reasons to choose a provider, and I’d argue many have nothing to do with technology.  Sure, it has to get the job done, but for many it may be more that they value a reasonable price, or a vendor with commitment to technological excellence, or a European locale, or… you get the idea.  For many, onlinemeetingrooms.com just might be a vendor to investigate.

A VFAQ (VERY frequently asked question) I get is “what’s the difference between web conferencing, webinars, and webcasts?”

The short answer, these days, is “not very much and a whole bunch.”

Seriously, the lines have blurred from the days that “webcasting” was akin to broadcasting (using streaming media) with virtually no interactivity, whereas web conferencing was (and remains) live, totally realtime (you don’t want any delay when you’re talking on a phone conference, right? In many use cases, you don’t on the web either).  Webinar is simply a portmanteau of web seminar – arguably a use case rather than a technology.  That is brief, but it’s as deep as I’m going as I introduce IVT and their enterprise video communications.

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Mitch, Hugh, Jim, and Ryan, all at the same time.  In addition to the knowledge and passion and history (Hugh’s a fellow ex-Microsoftie with some common connections), what I’m most enthused by is their clarity of mission.

Hello software

First, IVT’s a software company.  You can host the software, but for reasons I’ll not get into, you want to take advantage of the fact that they host the software for you.  What’s interesting here isn’t a “right or wrong,” it’s a commitment to a business model.  Many (if not most) companies who have solutions for webcasting also provide professional production/event management services.  IVT is committed to their robust partner community who deliver value-added services atop the IVT platform.  Again, this isn’t a right or wrong, but you have to appreciate focus.

Hello production tools

It’s hard to tell you how important the backend of a product is.  It’s what economists call an “experience good” …you have to have been there to get it and appreciate it.  As it just so happens I spent many years running organizations in the production business, let me say the two words that will bring any accountants to their needs and get the producers all excited:  labor and labor.  Labor is expensive.  Technology, especially over time, often gets less expensive.  If you’ve ever produced an event, let alone a bunch of them, you know that the project management time can create a big sucking sound in your budget.  This is where producers get excited… not only will they find the flexibility on the back end of IVT’s platform a joy when meeting numerous and disparate client/stakeholder needs, but it’ll save them time.

Hello customization

Okay, so many different solutions offer degrees of customization, but far fewer have down-to-the-pixel capabilities.  When clients demand that, you’ve got to deliver.  Further, there’s customization of user experiences, such as different tools you might make available to a presenter versus what the marketing department sees when they need to pull down a report.  And then there are web services for the data integration geeks (I say that with love, mind you).

Hello remote presenters – but wait, there’s more

A point of differentiation here is multiple presenters, each with different camera types. One can have a webcam in Sydney, one can be standing in front of a hi-def broadcast camera at a conference in a New York hotel…you get the idea.  Need to switch back and forth like a television newscast?  Can do.

As is my style, my goal isn’t a vendor-by-vendor shootout, to talk about price, or make a recommendation.  I’m excited and privileged to be independent, talk to great people with their own angle on the market, and share with you my own spin on it.  It sounds like IVT has a solution if you need to reasonably reach 100 people and the horsepower to reach 20K if you need.  If you need flexibility and reach and a commitment to knowing their core biz, IVT (or one of their partners) might be someone to add to your must-investigate list.

eLearning is a beast unto itself.

First, it’s a broad subject.  Arguably, the “e” should be removed.  Learning is learning, and trainers have long been hip to thinking about how to adapt learning to various media for optimum impact.

Second, did I mention it’s a broad subject?  For instance, I focus exclusively on synchronous communication skills (adapted into a remote audio/visual environment), but “elearning” covers writing, instructional design, presentation and facilitation and collaboration skills, testing/surveying/statistics, understanding of intergenerational learning styles, group learning dynamics, systems thinking, and on and on.  In other words, it’s hard to be broadly expert.

In light of this, I found my recent conversation with Jennifer De Vries, President and Chief Solutions Architect at BlueStreak Learning a refreshing chat.  As an ex-analyst-turned-hands-on-strategist, Jennifer clearly gets the big picture and what it takes to get things done with her small-but-highly-qualified team.

A few things of note:

Custom course development
Jennifer mentioned that a good chunk of her business come from custom course development.  Given a huge need in the market, this isn’t surprising.  From what I see, many (if not most) organizational learning programs underutilize their resources and opportunities.  Outside pairs of eyes and hands can be pure gold.

Outsourcing
It might be a bad word to a lot of people, but not to me (it was my life from Envoy Global to Microsoft to Corvent).  In my own market studies, organizations outsource because they 1) don’t have the expertise internally or 2) do have the expertise, but need additional expert assistance.  Or both.  BlueStreak can develop, implement, and manage the planning, programs, and assessment on behalf of clients.  (Note:  1080 Group does NOT deliver outsourced services – we’re in the ‘teach a person to fish’ business – and it’s part of why we share resources such as BlueStreak Learning with you.)

Web/audio conferencing
While not their mainstay, BlueStreak offers a solid web/audio conferencing service that completes their ability to provide a complete synchronous/asynchronous  solution to their clients.  This is important – no communication strategy should be all of one or the other.

A large number of organizations simply do not have the time to scope, design, and implement projects as important as supporting the knowledge and skills of their teams.  This often isn’t a literacy issue, very often it’s an allocation-of-scarce-resources issue, and it’s laudable to know and stay focused on your core competencies, which is why an organization like BlueStreak Learning might just be one you need to add to your investigation list.

With a conferencing background in full-services, I appreciate those who tackle all the details.  Now that I’m in the teaching business rather than the web event production business, it was with amusement and glee that I finally connected with Dan Roche, Vice President of Marketing at TalkPoint and learned more about their business.

Dan’s a fellow industry veteran who’s seen the world of web seminars evolve quite a lot.  I appreciate his passion for helping customers execute flawless web events (and the experience to know all of the little things that have to be attended to!).

A few things of note:

Full service
Companies tend to outsource for one of three reasons:  they don’t have the expertise, they don’t want to mess with something that’s not part of their core competency, or it’s less expensive.  Sometimes it’s all three.  Talkpoint has a staff dedicated to ensuring web event success for those who’d rather focus on content than production.

Ecommerce
Content that’s of value deserves a price tag, but often the pain of figuring out how to take a credit card or get different systems talking to each other.  Talkpoint has you covered.

Video
If you read my stuff, you know that I have a love/hate relationship with video.  Mostly it’s from talking to marketplace folks who 1) like the idea because “it’s hot” but really don’t know what they would do with it or 2) want high quality production values AND have it be simple as posting last night’s party video to YouTube (live video is a different beast).  This does NOT mean you shouldn’t use video, but it might mean you talk to someone with direct experience and a service team to assist.

Experience
2009 has seen a veritable explosion of self-proclaimed “webinar pundits” (I even predicted it), and I’d encourage you to dig a little deeper.  Your brand depends on it.  For instance, I saw a recent post where the presenter claimed “more than 20 webinars” as experience.

One of biggest challenges, Dan agreed, is that service is an experience good.  Differentiation between the real players and the wannabes is hard to put on a data sheet.  What’s important to you is unique, and so what’s important to you in conferencing service provider is likely unique.  And you might find that TalkPoint is right for you.