Adobe Connect Introduces Some Cool New Features

Anyone who talks to me about web conferencing knows I am a big fan of Adobe Connect Pro. No, I am not on their payroll. I just find the interface incredibly elegant and unlike anything else out there. So it was with great anticipation that I attended a webinar yesterday announcing their new release, 7.5. As the webinar host noted, while a "dot" release, it still provides some pretty good bang for the buck.

Now I must first offer the caveat that I haven't yet tested the new functionality but I think you'll agree with me that it is mouth watering.

The first concept introduced was "Universal Voice". Prior to 7.5, you could use "integrated voice" with Connect provided you maintained a separate account with an approved provider such as Premiere Conferencing. With integrated voice, the moderator can maintain software control over the teleconference aspect of the webinar. If you didn't subscribe to one of the approved vendors, not only could you not exercise software control, you could also not record the audio portion of your webinar. (The recording work-around involved hardware that bridges your phone to your PC sound card.)

With universal voice, you can now "train" Connect to dial into any toll free provider of your choice and the audio of your webinar will be recorded in sync with the visuals. You still will not get software control of the audio but I don't find that too big a hit. What's more, you can have Connect dial into your teleconference, and then broadcast what Connect "hears" over IP. As a result, you can instruct your audience to use their PC speakers for the audio portion of your webinar, while you provide a reliable phone based audio feed. I have always found phone fed audio more reliable than VOIP so you get a quality boost here and you get cost savings by not having everyone dialing up your teleconference provider. Overall, a great enhancement. And for those who prefer the integrated audio provided for the select set of vendors, that's still there. In fact, they've added InterCall to the list for integrated voice.

Another big announcement with 7.5 is the introduction of the Webcast function. This function utilizes a slightly limited variation on the typical Connect user interface but extends Connect's capacity to 80,000 users. It is a separate offering with its own pricing structure. I personally found the pricing quoted on the webinar a bit daunting, starting at $5,000.00 for a 600 attendee webcast, with the price increasing in 100 attendee increments to a limit of 80,000 attendees. The $5,000.00 includes the services of event specialists who guide you through the hurdles of an event in much the same way I do (gotta get a plug in there somehow!). When I say the user interface is limited, one example is that you cannot dynamically change the screen layout during a webcast the way you can with a typical Connect webinar. Whether or not the Webcast offering is right for the small business owner remains to be seen.

With 7.5 we also see a security enhancement. In earlier releases, you could centrally restrict access to desktop sharing on an enterprise wide basis. Now, the security is more granular in that you can white-list certain applications eligible for desktop sharing such that everyone across the enterprise can share those applications (such as Visio for example) but not share any others. A nice enhancement for security minded IT shops.

PDF's get the PPT treatment for the first time in 7.5. In other words, when you share a PDF document in a share pod, it now gets translated into Flash, making the visual fidelity near perfect and allowing full PDF control (page advance, magnification, etc.) by either the host in synchronized mode or by the individual attendee. When the host gives attendees control of the displayed PDF, they also get the option to download it to local storage. Pretty cool stuff. The demo that was done demonstrated how magnification of the document did not result in the pixilation that was prevalent in the prior release when the PDF was translated to an image file.

There were other enhancements and bug fixes discussed but I'll leave you with one more goody. They're planning an iPhone client for webinar participants. This depends on the release of an iPhone friendly version of Flash which should be ready by year-end.

If you want to attend the webinar that explains all this, they've got the recording here.

I think there were some who might have been afraid that when Adobe took over the Macromedia Breeze product that it would collect dust. On the contrary, Adobe shows a full commitment to this product, reincarnated as Connect, and I think it's paying off.

The Only Legitimate Opt-in

Although webinar production is my bread and butter, I have a strong interest in social media. A few weeks ago, I saw the following "tweet" on Twitter:

"Convert Twitter followers to an email list automatically."

This was followed by an URL. The tweet bugged me from the moment I saw it but I only today got around to clicking the link to confirm my suspicions. Although I am tempted to tell you the URL simply to discredit them, I won't because it would perversely bring them more traffic, and perhaps more sales.

Their pitch starts with "Is it immoral to make money this easy?" In a word, yes.

The product scrapes email addresses from Twitter and builds a contact list for you from that scrape. It purports to make buying a car, a house or anything else you desire just a click away using their software.

Now, these scams are nothing new but there is a very specific ethical issue here that deserves highlighting.

There is only ONE legitimate way to build a contact list and that is by telling people who fill out a form on your web site (often called a "squeeze page") that when they supply their email address to you, they are opting into your mailing list. This disclosure needs to be obvious, not in tiny print at the bottom of your page.

When someone joins Twitter, even if they follow you on Twitter, they are not authorizing you to start e-mailing them on a regular basis. The same goes for any other social network venue. A page that I am comfortable with from an ethics perspective is the page I use on my own web site http://www.vellgroup.com/Meeting_in_Cyberspace.html. You'll notice that I offer access to a free course and I tell folks that when they request access, they will hear from me in the future. I use an email marketing software that makes it easy for anyone to opt-out of future communication from me.

If you want to maintain a good reputation on the web and in business in general, don't fall for the easy solutions. There is no turn-key method to success. It takes hard work and solid ethics.

Web Conferencing in an Economic Crunch Time

There are a few topics that I love to talk about. Politics, music, TV and .... web conferencing and webinars!

I had the great privilege recently to be invited to speak on a panel discussion of web conferencing's emergence as a solution for economically strapped companies. My co-panelist, Lauri Elliott, is an expert in organizational behavior and dynamics. She proved to be the perfect yin to my yang as I focused on implementation issues and she articulated the business issues that arise with web conferencing.

Our moderator, Josh Gingold, was the perfect foil to get the best information out of us. If you weren't able to attend the live webinar, here is a link to the replay. I guarantee you'll get a lot out of it!

Another Cautionary Tale

I would estimate 95% of the webinars I attend go off without a hitch. Of those 95%, the webinar rises or falls on the quality of the content. Sadly, in the other 5% the content is forgotten completely because of a major glitch and more often than not these glitches could have been mitigated somehow.

Such was the case yesterday when I attended a professional development webinar. This webinar was high stakes for two reasons. First, it was not free. Second, the webinar was being taken by folks wanting to earn credit toward professional certification.

I'm going to present the cause and effect in reverse order. The effect: Webinar kept crashing. Some folks could see slides. Some folks could not. Some folks who could see slides were told to leave the webinar and re-enter anyway, at which point they could no longer see the slides. This went on for 25 minutes worth of what was supposed to only be an hour long webinar. The featured speaker finally told the moderator (amid the strong support of the audience) that the webinar would need to be rescheduled since there was no way he could present 60 minutes of material in 30 minutes.

The non-profit giving this webinar is now faced with a rescheduling nightmare since they must accommodate everyone who paid for the webinar or grant refunds (which this organization seldom does). Of course, they also have a major credibility hit and at least a small ding to their reputation.

The sad fact is this disaster could easily have been averted. The cause: The webinar moderator was running the webinar from a laptop connected wirelessly to a LAN in a corporate conference room. The wireless connection kept dropping. Now, in defense of the non-profit, they are a volunteer organization and the moderator was a volunteer, not a professional webinar moderator. My heart sunk for him as he told the audience "please wait while I get reconnected. This has never happened to me before."

When the webinar was over, I promptly jotted a note off to the organization's leadership with the following two key pieces of advice:

1. Never (and I mean never) run a webinar from a wireless device. First, wireless connections almost never offer the same throughput that a wired connection does. Second, wireless connections are notorious for encountering interference or going down altogether.

2. Just because you are wired, does not mean you are home free. If at all possible, have a backup computer logged into the webinar (or ready to be logged in) so you can make a quick switch if your primary device fails for any reason. Be sure to have the presentation materials on that backup computer in case you need to upload them again to the webinar space. Failing that, see if you can have a backup moderator logged into the conference with moderator permissions, to whom you can throw control should a catastrophic event occur.

Some folks, particularly when they hear advice item 2, say "wow, isn't that a bit overboard? How likely is it I'll have a complete computer meltdown?" Well sadly in the case of the non-profit's moderator, his odds for failure were 100% and the failure was devastating.

Don't let it happen to you.

Webinars as Social Media

When I say the phrase "social media" to you, what is the first thing you think of? Probably Twitter or Facebook or MySpace or LinkedIn. What if I added "webinars" to the list?

What?

Think about it a minute. During a webinar we do all the things that are achieved in social media. We impart information (often for free). We build relationships. We obtain valuable feedback from customers and prospects. In fact, to the extent that our webinars don't do this, we have somewhat failed, haven't we?

Why don't we typically think of webinars as social media? Corporations have been using web conferencing software for ages now to facilitate internal communications. When the software began to be used externally, it was likely viewed as simple advertising. It was likely viewed as one-to-many communication which really violates the tenets of social media. Since that is the root history of webinars, I think people have been slow to change their view of them.

Now, as web conferencing software has grown in sophistication, implementing chat rooms, polling features, breakout rooms, and interactive white boards the one-to-many paradigm has been broken. Even webinars with large audiences have become two-way communication events. Webinars have become a way for you to get to know your audience and for them to get to know you. It has become a relationship builder, the essential element of any social media.

As you implement a social media strategy for your business, do not overlook webinars as a key component!

Webinar Public Chat -- Be Careful What You Ask For

I just finished attending a webinar that at least by certain measures was an unmitigated disaster. Let's put aside for the moment that the attendance information did not arrive in my inbox until an hour before the webinar was to begin (I registered early yesterday) and I only found it in my inbox 10 minutes after the webinar had started!

Once the three minute process to "retrieve the client" software was finished, I entered the webinar to find a major distraction. The webinar moderator had enabled public chat and in this case, there seemed to be more chat than webinar. The chat session had taken on a life of its own.

There are of course benefits to public chat within a webinar.

• Attendees can learn from each other during the webinar.
• Webinar hosts, moderators and producers can obtain valuable feedback.

The problem arises when the public chat goes into overdrive and folks are exclusively chatting or the feedback is abundantly negative. Both were the case on today's webinar. First, the attendees were given a poll on what social media venues they used most often. Here is just a sample of what was said (chat names redacted to preserve privacy):

linked in
twitter,
A and C
none
FB, Blog
none
Facebook and MySpace are worthless
a, b, c
none
All of the above
none
Answer using the feedback box please
Linked In, Twitter, Faceb ook
Twitter, LinkedIn
all the above
All but MySpace
thinking about YouTube
I cannot choose more than one ...
b,c
a,b,c I could only select one answer
and the question?
A,B,C, & D
The feedback box is only allowing one choice (radio buttons vs checkboxes)
This polling is SO cumbersome!

As you might be able to infer, the polling mechanism was not intuitive so people resorted to typing their choices in chat instead of clicking on the poll. I've bold-faced some of the more telling comments. Folks who wanted to choose more than one poll answer could not but also didn't understand the poll asked for the "most often used" which really only requires one answer. To make matters worse, the poll had no words in it ... just choices A, B, and C so some audience members forgot what A, B and C corresponded to.

While having the public chat open allowed the audience to vent, it was a major distraction from the pitch that was in progress.

The public chat then degenerated into a gripe session about poor audio on the webinar (one of the speakers was on her cell phone ... a MAJOR no-no in a webinar but supposedly unavoidable on this one). This then segued to a discussion of the pros and cons of various webinar platforms.
Mind you, the webinar was about using social media but the chat session was about anything but! The audio debate culminated with this comment:

Very dispointing that audio is so bad, and it clear that there a lack of planning for the webinar. I would have enjoy this if you didn't have a such a time rush and if we could hear most of the words.

As the webinar came to a close one of the attendees wanted to collect the names of all the companies that presented so that he could warn people AWAY from them on Twitter.

The bottom line here is that you take a VERY calculated risk when you enable public chat in your webinar. Even a minor glitch can go from molehill to mountain once it becomes fodder for the chat session. Then, instead of your presentation, the chat session becomes the main event.

Why Social Media and Inbound Marketing Make Sense

Do you remember back when you graduated from high school or college and you were looking for that first job? What did you hear more often than not?

What experience do you have?

It was frustrating wasn't it? If you're lucky, at that point maybe you had a few part time jobs you could point to. Bottom line, you were looking to get your foot in the door, to get that first big opportunity.

Well when you think about it, how is that any different from the way you relate to potential customers? When you were looking for that first employer, they wanted to know what they were getting before they brought you on. Similarly, your potential clients are no longer satisfied to see empty braggadocio in the form of your advertisements and press releases. Your potential clients want to see what you can do, concretely, before they invest in you.

Using social media as an inbound marketing method achieves this purpose. Using Twitter, potential customers get to know you. They can judge you by how you interact on a minute to minute basis.

When you put that "squeeze page" on your web site, you're not simply collecting an email list to send empty advertisements. Hopefully, you are offering something of value. An appetizer, so to speak, that shows your potential paying client what you can do. Now they can vet you much the same way an employer wants to vet a potential employee.

It may be hard for you to break out of the mold of the old advertising paradigms. You have to understand that consumers are more sophisticated nowadays and your ad, which is really just an opportunity to brag about yourself without proving anything, isn't going to pull people in as it once might have.

View your courtship with each potential client as a job interview where you have to provide concrete evidence that you've got "the right stuff". Social media is a key ingredient in making that happen.