Archive - Observation Deck RSS Feed

August 26, 2009

Ken, thanks for the kind comments on the book

You know what’s cool?  Watching people improve.

As a dude with a teacher’s heart, there’s nothing I love more than helping someone have an AHA! moment, and as a professional I spend a lot of time teaching people who may not have studied my webinars and presentations as much as I have.  They say nice things, which I appreciate, but…

…when the compliment comes from a fellow pro, it’s particularly uplifting.

As I predicted in my New Year’s Day post, this year has certainly seen an increase in self-proclaimed pundits.  It’s like people on Twitter calling themselves gurus.  You can’t swing a dead feline without…

So let me return the favor.

Ken Molay is the real deal.  He does production work (that I don’t do) with a keen sense of professionalism, but he also teaches and coaches.  In that sense he’s my competitor.

But here are the truths I rest on:

The web conferencing/seminar industry is a trend, not a fad.  I just finished a study about the use of web conferencing for training in Australia/New Zealand and another on best practices in online presentation skills.  Most people have barely touched webinars, and few feel like they got this stuff down.  Learning to effectively communicate virtually is a skill folks will be learning for a long time.

It’s a big world.  If there’s room for thousands of traditional motivational speakers and PowerPoint pundits, there is room for Ken and me to work together in a sense of “co-opetition.”

Finally, Ken’s good for this industry.  Most people don’t know what they don’t know, and that’s not wrong…it’s just the stage of the market.

Ken’s comments about The Virtual Presenter’s Handbook were fair, even down to the typos (we discovered too late that Blurb’s software is quite buggy has a mind of it’s own – and typos NOT in the manuscript showed up in the final).

So, thank you Ken.  Here’s to you and Webinar Success continuing to rock…for you, for the world of virtual presentations, and the benefit of webinar audiences everywhere who sit through one less crappy presentation.

Posted in: Content, Observation Deck Continue Reading »

July 22, 2009

Plans for a season

One of my duties when at PlaceWare, Microsoft, and then as a VP at Corvent was to forecast demand for services.  This need led to exhaustive analysis of the use of web seminars over many years, including how many events we’d produced every week of every year for years running.  LiveMeetingSnowman

What I found was that web seminars have seasons that are parallel to the face-to-face events business.  Fall and spring are busy, and the dead of summer and winter are slower.

My question for you is this:  what are your plans for the slow season?

Life cycles are good… we plan, we plant, we water, we harvest, we rest.  It doesn’t mean that we get nothing done in August or January (in the northern hemisphere), but the tasks are different.

Here are a few ideas for taking advantage of a slower season to take your web seminars to the next level:

Plan interconnected programs. Ever go to a movie and see a trailer (advertisement!) for another movie?  If you do it with integrity, you can share with one web seminar audience about other upcoming events.

Rewrite some copy.  Great copywriting is painfully time consuming for most of us.  Invites, landing page copy, confirmation/reminder emails, and post-event surveys often need some touch up but don’t get it during the frenzy of “harvest season.”

Host some “lunch and learns.” Bring in a subject matter expert like a sales engineer to a customer-focused hands-on session or three.  They take a lot less to promote, they can be very live like a radio call-in show, and with heavy use of desktop sharing may take very little PowerPoint production.  Customers still have to do business, and goodwill is huge (trust me – I architechted a monstrously successful program based on this).

If you’re like most, you’ll have peaks and valleys that will constitute your own seasonality.  Take a peek at some of the “nice to haves” way down there on your to-do list and ask, “What one thing could I do that would have an impact on many seasons to come?”

-R

P.S.  Two things, since you asked:  one, the snowman is from last winter when Portland, Oregon had its greatest snowfall in 40 years…the hat says “LiveMeeting,” a relic from my pleasant days there.  Two, my downtime plan…work on the book that succeeds The Virtual Presenter’s Handbook.

Posted in: Content, Observation Deck Continue Reading »

June 26, 2009

Twitter, presentation audiences, and the “size” question

As an active Twitter community member, I’m an amused observer of the various ways people (“tweeps”) approach the quality vs. quantity question.

Some say, “There’s no way you can connect with thousands, so why follow that many?”

Others, “More is better.”

Me?  “Both.”

There’s a fundamental marketing exercise that most Twitter participants aren’t thinking about – many of which are even marketers.  It’s called…

Segmentation.

Marketers of web seminars are always concerned about the size of the audience, and a VFAQ (VERY frequently asked question) is “how do I drive attendance?”  To do this, you need to reach people, even a lot of them.  But focusing only on quantity is a very 1.0 approach (and if you give away free guitars, you’ll get a LOT of attendees).  You need a way to figure out which are qualified prospects and how to separate them so you can communicate differently to them.

The reason I don’t focus ONLY on a small group of tweeps in Twitter is for the same reason that marketers segment their lists…I don’t want to communicate only with a small group (you don’t know when someone will bubble up out of the broader group – and it happens regularly on Twitter), but I DO want to FOCUS primarily on a smaller group.

I use Tweetdeck to create a sub-group of about 200 people out of the ~5800 I’m connected with on Twitter.  I follow almost everyone back, and I’m not drawn to the ego trip of unfollowing 5600 so it looks like I follow 20 and have 5600 more following me.  It’s too easy to do the same thing AND have an ear to the ground with a broader audience.

Final proof point:

I once followed back a gal whose profile screamed “housewife and mom.”  When I did, though, she sent me a message saying that she was a happy escapee from the corporate world and knew all about online presentations and elearning.  And guess what… in NETWORKING that’s called someone who most definitely knows someone else I might want to know given my line of work.

So this post isn’t to disparage anyone else’s strategy, but it is to encourage putting aside ego trips, using tools, and practicing a simple, powerful thing marketers have been doing for a long time:  segmentation.  It’s not ‘quantity versus quality,’ it’s managing ‘quantity and quality.’

Thoughts?  What’s your strategy?

Posted in: Business, Delivery, Observation Deck, Promotion, Strategy, Web Seminar Promotion Continue Reading »

June 13, 2009

Tribute to Quinn

I didn’t know Quinn Driscoll, but my business partner Scott did quite well.

Quinn was Scott’s son.

Word completely fail in a moment like this, when a 13 year old young man suddenly collapses and dies.  My heart bursts for my longtime friend and business partner.

Let me tell you about Quinn by what I know about his father.

His father loved being his father.  Coaching, exploring, learning.  Scott’s an involved dad, a precious commodity we can all learn from.

His father has a generous heart.  He gives his time, he gives his money.

His father is a visionary.  He understands the implications of circumstances, statistics, trends.

His father is an encourager.  He loves coaching kids’ ball teams, realizing he has a rare chance to be a strong male role model in the lives of many kids who may not have that.

And his father is a friend.  He has given me encouragement, vision, and a belief in myself one values more highly than money.

I’ve little doubt that Quinn would have been all this and more, standing on the strong shoulders of his dad.

Peace~

-R

Posted in: Business, Observation Deck Continue Reading »

January 25, 2009

Video hot, webcasts too

Ten years ago, nobody knew what web conferencing was.  The closest proxy for them to associate with was video, which over a 56K modem sucked.  Just saying.

Now broadband adoption, easy-to-use tools that boneheads like me can use, and cheap cameras put everybody in the video biz (remember what hard-drive recordings did for musicians in the late 80′s/early 90′s).  onlinevideo2009

When I look at a chart like this, I’m thinking three things:

1.  Makes sense.  Marketers want to go where the people go.

2.  “Webcasts” get lumped in w/podcasts, which is missing a key distinction that web seminars bring to the table (along w/social): live  human-to-human dialogue.  POWERFUL for influence.

3.  Prognosis is good for this jumpstarting many, many new people to have interest in the world of presenting online.  When I speak live the polls show that people attending their FIRST webinar is still well into double digits.

The good news:  this is solid growth in many categories.  And given the source of the study, no doubt delineating the power of live dialogue wasn’t part of the questions they were asking respondents.

The best news:  I like presenting virtually because I can kiss my kids goodnight and sleep in my own bed.  And I can interact with 500 people in ways you can’t do in person.

You?

Posted in: Content, Observation Deck, Strategy Continue Reading »

January 12, 2009

“Meet now” – the legacy and the lesson

This post is at once a history lesson, a cultural observation, and a practical.  (Of course, if you hate stories as part of learning, you’ll hate me as a teacher and can save some time by changing the channel now :-)   Let me help with something random.)

First, the history lesson.

Many web conferencing tools have a “meet now” function that will take you directly into a meeting, bypassing the need to schedule and log in.  The very first function of that type was invented at PlaceWare (later acquired by Microsoft and becoming LiveMeeting), and the product manager who invented it was an industry old timer named Scott Driscoll.  Oh, and he happens to be my partner at 1080 Group.  Nice.

Second, the cultural observation.

Early adopters of web conferencing were marketing, sales, and training departments for reasons I’ll spare you here.  Therefore conferencing marketers placed ads in marketing pubs, rented lists from training sites, tried to influence-the-influencer in various thought leaders of those fields, all that.  Years ago when PlaceWare put ads on the radio and CNN, the sales team complained the leads were unqualified (and I imagine Webex‘s crew did too).  But the broad, SMB market isn’t affordably reached when you’re selling a solution for hundreds of dollars instead of thousands or tens of thousands…

So the application story is a continuation of the previous thought…

My dad calls me.  Computer problem.  Never mind that I’m not a hardcore geek, but I “work in the computer industry.”  While on the phone, I fire up GoToMeeting (instantly) and ‘look over his shoulder’ while he shows me the problem (and we fix it).

He quips, “Hey, I’ve heard of them on the radio!”

Now his nutrition business doesn’t need conferencing, but thousands of others do, and they’re not on a list from Web Digest for Marketers or Chief Learning Officer.  Those radio ads are reaching a whole new group of businesses.

More importantly, the use-case envisioned by Scott comes full circle.  Adoption will occur when we reduce clicks to make using this stuff happen at the speed of thought.  An inbound sales call becomes a presentation.  An outbound call goes from telephone chat to full collaboration.  Ad hoc conversations, part of our every day life in the terrestrial world, now can have that visual component just as easily, even when we’re virtual.

Explode your productivity.  Get hip to “meet now.”

Posted in: Life Skills, Observation Deck, Strategy Continue Reading »

January 9, 2009

1080 Group whitepaper wins Reader’s Choice vote

Time to be proud!  And very thankful.

I have learned that a whitepaper that I wrote for Citrix Online (the GoToMeeting/Webinar wizards) was voted “Best Download of 2008″ by the readers of TrainingZone UK.

If you want to read Five Keys to Getting Started with Online Training, please support Citrix and Training Zone by grabbing it here.

best-download-20081

Innumerable thanks to Beth, Kineon, Eric, Clare, Todd, Kelley, Kristin, Rhonda, God, my wife and kids, my mom, the 1080 Group crew, Stevie Wonder, …

Posted in: Business, Observation Deck, Points of Interest Continue Reading »

January 2, 2009

Predictions, ’09, sort of

I’m not much for predictions, but I do a lot of trend watching.  A couple thoughts on where I think the world of web seminars and online presentations are developing…

Additional consolidation in the conferencing industry

As our industry matures, cheap and free are nearly non-existent as differentiators (e.g., cool free tool ShareItNow from Eventbuilder.com – formerly Encounter Collaborative – shut down in ’08).  Theoretically, that usually means evolving toward a few primary vendors while others must niche or die.  It won’t happen overnight, but this stuff isn’t free to host and support, so small vendors relying on adoption before having a real revenue model will continue to be challenged.

Increased focus on soft skills

I’ll admit a bit of bias here, but here’s the Roger-mantra:  Microsoft Word doesn’t make you a writer, and a web conferencing tool doesn’t make you a promoter, presenter, or producer.

Remember what happened in digital recording of 20 years ago?  It became affordable for everyone, and two things happened.  One, anybody with a PC could produce a CD – no need for a record company to front you a contract – so the volume of crap increased exponentially.  Two, many real artists evolved because they didn’t need a contract.

Web seminars are in crap mode right now, but progressive practitioners are figuring out that a unique medium requires a unique application (of the fundamental skills of storytelling, persuasion, et al).  And where is everyone else going to learn this stuff?  Right now it’s mostly trial and error.

Increase in punditry

“Hey, I did six webinars when I was the marketing/training/sales manager at Company, LLC, I know more than everyone else!”

Ironically is pretty true, and as overall adoption of webinars continues on a solid growth rate, so will the supply of self-proclaimed experts.

One side note:  the vendors themselves do a good job of explaining the value of reminder email and making it easy to execute, so this isn’t where the value is going to be added by the indies…  back to the argument for the need for true talent in soft skills development (e.g., promotion, copywriting, presentation design and delivery skills, project and people management skills, etc.).

Increased adoption of collaborative VoIP

Audio over the web is old.  Quality, usable VoIP is maturing.  Quality, usable VoIP in a multi-point conferencing setting, reliable enough for use in business-critical communications, easy enough to encourage behavioral change?  It hasn’t been there.

But a number of years ago when I was at Microsoft I was on a conference call with the CIO of the big three consulting firms (at that time 130K employees worldwide), and he emphasized, “I spend more on global audio conferencing alone than all my Microsoft apps combined).

That’s a business problem that vendors have been racing to solve technologically, and I think we’re poised for a shift behaviorally.

Ad-supported free or cheap services

I don’t know if it’ll work, but we’re seeing the beginnings of conferencing being ad supported.  I’d imagine at least one big company will take a stab at it for web conferencing like we’re seeing in other apps (online free apps like Google provides, in-product ads such as what Adobe puts in a .pdf now, etc.).

Mobile webinar noise

Until the iPhone got everyone off their duff, the web on a mobile device has still largely been a less-than-satisfactory experience.  But now that real web surfing and audio connections are effectively happening on mobile devices, somebody’s going to try to make some real noise about their own ability to deliver a web seminar in that way (and I don’t mean webcast/streaming, I mean interactive/collaborative).

BTW, the penetration of mobile devices worldwide now exceeds PCs…  a stunning market opportunity.

So, there’re some top-of-mind thoughts on trends that I think we’ll see in ’09.

Your thoughts?

Posted in: Business, Observation Deck Continue Reading »

October 27, 2008

We ain’t in Kansas no mo, Toto

Watching Monday Night Football – ESPN.

Following MNF – online.

Live, play-by-play updates, online, are a few plays ahead. Sometimes one, sometimes a couple plays, sometimes a couple minutes.

2008 weirdness: watching the “live telecast” on TV and finding it the lesser up-to-date content.

Observation: the online “gamechannel” doesn’t have a chance for a wardrobe malfunction unless I were to actively navigate to some NSFW site…

Where are your customers? Are they drifting somewhere else?

Posted in: Content, Observation Deck Continue Reading »

December 22, 2007

Strategic thinking is not…

A division of tasks is not a strategy…

It’s a chess game, it’s figuring out which moves outflank your opponent and get to the endgame, it’s figuring out the underlying principles that help you win, it’s the plan or pattern or process or people that give you the leg up.

But it’s not a blanket statement that states what you own or who you are…

Know thyself. Know thy strategy.

Posted in: Observation Deck, Strategy Continue Reading »

Page 2 of 3«123»