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.