Once upon a yesterday I worked at a company where reserving a conference room in the building required sending an email to an admin. It’s not like it was a hard task, it’s just the way it was. And if you needed to get a room quickly and they were at lunch or out for the day, well…

Webcasting, for many organizations, is a lot like that. 

Webcasting serves a broad set of requirements. There are plenty of times that a “big production” event is planned well in advance so as to coordinate the lights, cameras, and action, and there are many valid business reasons for outsourcing production.

But there are also plenty of times you need need reach without the associated cat herding.

I had the privilege last week of getting a sneak-peak demo of Talkpoint’s new Convey product, a self-service tool that both focuses on ease of use and has a couple of nice twists. Here are a few things where I think Convey will raise the bar in the webcasting industry.

Well-designed feature taxonomy

If you need it fast, there’s a simple, five-step process to walk through. As you grow, however, you can drill into multiple areas to have greater control. Kudos to TalkPoint for balancing what’s exposed at the top level with the ability to go deeper.

Scalable management model

Are you a solopreneur who needs to hold a webcast? A pay-by-the-drink model isn’t totally unique, but it’s also a pain for many of you. Are you part of a larger company who needs to manage at an administrative level? Define how you want to empower users and enable cost-center based reporting.

Live, on-demand, or somewhere in between

I recently wrote about the business case for pre-recording part of a presentation, and the reality is that each use case has its place. Convey actually looks like it was designed with “all of the above” in mind from the ground up. I like the fact that you can enable questions in any of them – again, not entirely unique, but critical to better engaging  your as you employ multiple ways of using content.

Built-in Camtasia-ish editing

This topic could have been a whole blog post – this is one of the most robust in-solution editing tools I’ve yet seen. In an interface that will look familiar if you’ve ever used Camtasia, you can see your audio/video on one timeline, and “split” it where you want (so you can delete, re-arrange, etc.). You see your slides on a separate timeline, and drag them where you want to adjust them…or take one out and swap another one in. It’s not Camtasia, but it’s dang cool stuff for a webcasting tool.

Reporting built right

I confess a wee-bit of bias – when we started Corvent years ago, we envisioned a robust drill-down type database that lets you do a lot of work online before you export the data when we built AMP (Attendee Metrics Platform). Database peeps will recognize the power of exploring and filtering data when they dive into Convey, both for analysis and decision-making/tactical adjustment over the life of a piece of content or program. Trust me, this will save you time and improve your efforts, and you don’t have to be a database guru to use it.

As usual in reviews, I avoid commenting on price and/or features that everybody should have (e.g., a WYSIWYG text editor that lets you italicize registration copy). Commonly it’s the latter (the features) where your personal preferences often become a critical part of your own vendor evaluation – not just that the feature exists, but that it suits your style and workflow.

TalkPoint has a venerable history in webcasting and webcasting professional services, so they’re intimate with the needs of hands-on users. If you’re looking for self-serve webcasting, you might just find their new Convey product is worth being on your short-list for investigation.

The saying goes, “You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.” In a short attention economy, this may be true for many marketers.

But if you’re evaluating virtual events vendors, it might be time for a “First chance to make a second impression” for omNovia.

Don’t get me wrong. If you look at their website, their “solutions” are about the same as what everyone else says, but there is one hint of change on the front page…webinars and live event webcasting.

To me, this shift in focus is huge.

I recently had the pleasure of catching up with omNovia’s Lou Sanatore (@LouSanatore), and this was the first thing he brought to my attention.

The reason I think this is huge is because it’s better for YOU, the buyer/user, when a company finds a refined focus of what they do. And, frankly, we get paid the most to solve big problems, and hosting a meeting online isn’t a big problem any more.

To this end, omNovia has made some nice enhancements that solve the problems (or anticipate them) that communicators have with broader audiences in webinars/webcasts/hybrid events.

A few of these include…

New Q&A manager
My favorite feature of any platform, to be honest, and there are some nice enhancements here. omNovia already smartly integrated Twitter, including bringing a hashtag stream into the Q&A interface, but they’ve enhanced the ability to manage behind the scenes significantly. This is the stuff you don’t see in a product demo, and inexperienced presenters/producers fail to appreciate the power of the ability to assign/prioritize/easily view and respond to help you draw your audience in by creating a sense of presence.

One other tidbit. When you answer a question (via text), the attendee has a five star rating system where they can rate the answer (“Was this answer helpful to you?” or something like that). A nice touch in some circumstances.

Mobile support – Android and iOS
No, most communicators aren’t taking mobile attendees into account when they design virtual presentations. But get ready or get caught with your pants down. Their mobile version doesn’t support H.264-based video (yet), so an iOS viewer wouldn’t see the Flash-based video of the presenter, but you can use the YouTube feature. Read on.

YouTube integration
If you want to play a video from YouTube, there are two benefits. One, you aren’t uploading anything, so two, the end-user is hitting YouTube’s servers directly. Less bandwidth problem, better experience. To be fair, you can easily accomplish this in other solutions with a web slide that takes them there (or even by chatting out a link), but it is a nice improvement from the producer’s point of view.

Participant notes – like WordPad for attendees
Participants can take notes inside the console. While not unique to omNovia, there are many platforms that don’t offer this, and if you want to keep the attendee’s experience focused inside the platform, quite useful.

Closed captioning for 508 compliance
Lou pointed out a big government contract win they had recently, and if you serve the public sector, this may be a critical requirement for you.

One other note…omNovia has long had an integrated ecommerce solution, a challenge for many in the hybrid events biz as they seek to extend and monetize trade show or equivalent participation.

The bottom line

As I preach often (if not ad nauseum), your behavior and goals should drive technology and vendor choices, but there is always a tradeoff. In today’s more mature marketplace, “show your screen” and “collaborate with people around the world” are aging news, and it’s the smaller things that tend to differentiate choices. If you’re doing webinars/webcasts/hybrid events, omNovia may well be worth putting on the short list.

Got dream? You have milk, thank you very much, but there’s nothing like an excellent conference to kick you into gear for not settling into mediocrity. National Speakers Association’s Winter Conference was just such a butt kickin’.

Here are a few points to ponder…

Face-to-face and virtual are better together than ever before

I teach people to engage in virtual presentations, but I oft quip that webinars aren’t the answer to world hunger. The converse problem, however, is getting hung up on what you can do face-to-face that isn’t as effective virtually (there are many). They work together. Search out the #NSA12 hashtag on Twitter…these folks get it.

Social media, without effort and focus, is just media

Randy Gage (@Randy_Gage) noted that he spends two hours a day with social media, and at least one Twitter protest asked, “Who’s got two hours?” (Love you, Gina ).

Interpretation: If you’re looking to build your business, two hours a day of focused sales/marketing/relationship time is reasonable. The question is, “Where are you going to spend it?” If you’re already busy enough, good for you.

Learn how the brain serves to help – or hurt – your selling

Colleen Stanley (@EISelling) delivered an insightful session and made the point well that the amygdala-driven emotional side of the prospect is the gatekeeper in the conversation. Grow your emotional intelligence skills to avoid triggering fight-flight-freeze.

Follow a repeatable process in book-writing and publishing

Publishing wizard Dianna Booher (@DiannaBooher) outlined a systematic approach to nailing the process of getting your book off to a good start. Of note, care to guess how books (in mainstream publishing) are pre-sold? 59%. You can do it yourself, but she makes a convincing argument for why working through a traditional publisher still has merit. My paraphrase of her steps:

Know your market
Study the problems, trends, issues, gaps, questions and research what’s been done.

Find your pitch
Find a unique angle, new market, perspective, or format. Develop a brief pitch as your roadmap, and get feedback from trusted colleagues.

Create your pitch
Write your proposal, a query from that proposal, and select agents appropriate to your topic/market.

Create your content in advance of the sale
Begin writing your book while the agent sells it; self-publish if you don’t get a good offer.

Serialize with an expanded outline

Stan Walters (@TheLieGuy) notes that media forms aside, the foundation of monetizing your message with serial seminars is to expand your content outline.

My interpretation on that thought…your schema or schemata is critical to knowing how “high or low” to hit your audience. In other words, you don’t want to talk over their heads or at a level of detail beyond where they’re at, and you won’t get there if you don’t understand which details go where.

BTW, this is critical to executing the product- or line-extension strategies Dianna Booher talked about.

Get (freakin’) uncomfortable

Lisa Sasevich (@InvisibleClose) had many nuggets of wisdom, but I needed to hear it (again…and the “freakin’” is my emphasis). As a professional speaker, I’ve been blessed to have achieved a level of “made it” that many aspire to (do it full time, small staff). Lisa was a shot in the arm to speakers or corporate workers alike…the least safe place to be is “safe.” Get freakin’ uncomfortable.

You? What were your takeaways?

Just a quick heads up today…

Sometimes the best thing we can do is ask.

Share your experiences about attending webinars, and you’ll see the survey results at the end when you’re done. If you wish, you can opt in to get the final report.

Take the survey here…

Are you a trusted advisor?

If so, hang with me here a bit…sometimes a poll is the worst thing you could do.

This week I had the privilege of doing a 90-minute session for a private client’s 150-rep annual sales meeting, and as I await a connecting flight I’m reflecting on some of the successes and failures of my 90 minutes with them yesterday.

Let’s start with the failure.

I often do an exercise with a webinar audience where I work with one participant whom I unmute while everyone else does the exercise at their desk (it’s how you manage with 400 people on the line). Given that it’s been a really popular exercise, I decided to use it during this in-person meeting.

Except that I didn’t think ahead (we’re all learning and growing, right?)?

When I asked 150 people to do the voice exercise (in a room) what I normally have one person do (virtually while others do it on their own), the room was so loud they couldn’t hear themselves.

Roger = Fail.

On the other side of the ledger, one of the many little successes I had with this crew of sales reps was saying, “I don’t know about you, but I’m not pushing a poll when I’ve got four people on the line for demo.” 

They laughed.

Interpretation:  We’ve been told that “the way to engage your virtual audience is to push a poll at them because this shiny feature is cool-beyond-telephone-alone and it’s what we do in web conferencing to engage people to be engagingly engaging.”

What they related, to, however, was that their web conferencing environment (Adobe Connect, in their case), has all kinds of ways to interact with and engage beyond just a poll. I illuminated a number of those, and the lightbulbs went on…”This could be waaaay better than a plain telephone call.”

Here’s a challenge for you:

What’s the difference between…  …a conversation and a meeting? …a meeting and a sales demo?  …a sales demo and a training session or workshop? …workshop and a broadcast?

If you don’t know, there is ZERO shame in saying, “It’s time to figure it out.”

Your next big opportunity to create value, however, might just be in being the go-to person because, even if you’ve only done ten “webinars,” you’ve done 900% more than the person who’s done one.

Richness in life is in the details. The strong oak-vanilla finish of that merlot you just sipped. The way your kid just said something a little smarter today that they said it yesterday. The “aha!” you found when analyzing data for the quarterly business review that nobody else caught.

When you start to see the subtle-but-important differences in how people communicate in different situations, you’ll get better at helping them in ways they haven’t thought about yet.

Sales people don’t push polls at people when they can just ask the three others on the call their opinion. Trainers realize that there’s more to imparting knowledge and changing behavior than giving a quiz. Marketers realize there is more to creating and advancing a pipeline than getting an email address.

The richness of live audio-visual communications at a distance is that there’s not a right-or-wrong any more than in any other version of communicating.

Which is exactly why I say, “You have to use a poll in your web conferences every 5 1/2 minutes. It’s the only way you’re going to “engage” your audience.”

NOT!

Help others dissect communication and behavior. You’ll get better at helping them adapt to web conferencing/casting tools…and become your tribe’s trusted advisor for virtual presentations.