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.