Engage and Educate Customers – How Brand24 Bonds with Clients Using Webinars

Since you are a serious marketer, you are fully aware that today’s digital marketing focuses on precise targeting and customer engagement. Did you also know that education is on the very top of internet users’ needs? The desire to gain knowledge is huge! (SPOILER ALERT – you will learn how to put this trend to action with a Product Demo.)

 

 

Yes, people search for specific keywords and phrases to LEARN, and that is one of our most important motivations. We also tend to dig into information when we decide to buy an account on a software platform.

Why?

Because we want to know:

• If we need it in the first place
• How we can use it to make our plans come true

Brand24 is a Polish SaaS company delivering a web monitoring and social listening platform, and they make the most of educating and engaging their prospects and customers. In this case study, we will show you how Brand24 uses webinars in their marketing activity.

How? Let’s dive in.

 

At a glance:

The Client:

Brand24

Their reasons for using the ClickMeeting platform:

• Product demo webinars – a series of educational video meetings for prospects who are testing the Brand24 platform
• Certificate webinars – online training sessions dedicated to a select group of Brand24 clients

 

The benefits:

• Direct contact with clients who are testing their platform and an opportunity to answer questions live
• Extends their offering with certificate training sessions via webinars
• Adds a new and efficient form of premium content to the company’s marketing strategy
• Saves time and money on traditional product demonstration

Let’s break it down:

 

Brand24 – on their way to conquering the world

They appeared on the market seven years ago, and since then they have become one of the most popular marketing brands in Poland. Their platform is a solution designed for brands to monitor their web presence on the go.

With features like mention feed, discussion volume chart, influence score, or alerts, Brand24 helps their B2B clients manage their brand awareness like never before. The company has become a success story in itself, and many businesses have gravitated to them.

However, the digital landscape is changing fast. To foster their customer loyalty, and to convert their qualified leads into clients, Brand24 needed a new tool.

Their decision was simple – webinars.

 

Webinars – answer the questions before clients ask

The company was proactive about producing content that explains the product to their clients. Mikołaj Winkiel, the Chief Evangelist from Brand24, explains:

We have invested in written content, like valuable and educational blog posts, as well as in video content. Mostly, we focused on short video tutorials posted on YouTube.

 

They are still happy with the quality of that content, and that’s why they continue providing it. However, their desire to provide the highest quality of customer support was mounting. They wanted to anticipate questions about their product and provide answers BEFORE their leads and clients could even think of what to ask.

Webinars weren’t a way to avoid questions; webinars gave us a chance to answer them before our clients asked – admits Mikołaj Winkiel.

 

How do they use webinars?

 

Product Demo – educating clients is a must

Although the company understands the value of podcasts, eBooks, white papers, and other forms of premium content, they find webinars to be the perfect way to achieve their primary goal: to educate the client.

That’s why they decided to give the green light to product demo webinars – a proven method for showcasing products online, especially when it comes to software platforms.

And it makes sense:

We want to engage people who are testing our tools by showing them every corner of the account panel. Why? Because a well-educated client is the more solid client and is much more likely to stay with us for the long term. The more a client knows about our product’s ecosystem inside out, the better their business results will be – says Mikołaj.

 

However, the biggest advantage Brand24 finds in product demo webinars is the direct contact with the user:

A person who is testing our tool can ask questions as we go along showcasing the platform. While we show step-by-step what we are doing in the account panel, anyone can chime in if something needs to be explained a bit more. That’s a huge advantage of webinars!

 

Certificate webinars for hundreds of attendees

How does it feel to gather 500 people in one webinar? Brand24 knows, and they admit that it feels incredible!

Certificate webinars are another way Brand24 has taken advantage of the webinar solution. What are they? In a word, they are training sessions organized for a preselected group of clients.

We run a short, dedicated course for them, at the end of which there is a test. After passing the exam, they receive our certificate – explains Mikołaj.

The biggest deal?

These webinars are huge – they can gather from 200 to 500 attendees!

Honestly, if we wanted to reach that number of people without webinars, it would take months, multiplying costs and our staffing needs exponentially.

 

ClickMeeting – a mature and wise decision

As a SaaS company, Brand24 uses other software platforms on a regular basis. They know which to choose and how to use them. After testing a dozen webinar solutions, they decided to bring ClickMeeting onboard.

The ClickMeeting platform is so intuitive that each of us learned how to use it in no time. After a few minutes, we were all set to start creating events and send e-mail invitations – Mikołaj recalls.

 

Favorite features?

Are there any top features that Brand24 marketers value the most while using the ClickMeeting webinar software?

I think the Screen Sharing is our number one, because the goal of our webinars is to show our platform live, and screen sharing is ideal for that, says Mikołaj.

 

He adds:

The chat feature. Maybe it’s obvious, but this feature enables us to have a live interaction with our audience. We can address any questions our clients raise during a product demo.

 

Would Brand24 recommend ClickMeeting?

Would this successful and fast-growing MarTech company recommend ClickMeeting for other B2B players?

It happens all the time that our clients ask us for tips and tricks and other software tools. It doesn’t come as a surprise, because we often share these insights on our social media channels. ClickMeeting is a fine choice when it comes to webinars organized globally – states Brand24’s Chief Evangelist, Mikołaj Winkiel.

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Watch Out For Strategy-Free Webinar Tactics

Does anybody still use the old aphorism about the road to Hell being paved with good intentions? That’s how I feel about many tips and best practices that are shared in the web conferencing industry.

I constantly hear people making blanket recommendations for things that webinar admins and presenters should do to improve their webinars or webcasts. The problem is that our 280-character, sound-bite society has lost interest in attaching context to these recommendations. TL;DR has become the catchphrase and guiding principle of an impatient society.

Let’s make a resolution for the new year to stop placing so much emphasis on HOW to implement best practices and start thinking more about WHY we want to incorporate them.

For instance… My last post suggested ways to make your post-webinar surveys more effective and useful. I gave examples of specific question types you might want to include. But such questions are only worth including if they will provide data useful to achieving a webinar improvement strategy that you have made a commitment to pursue. Otherwise you are wasting your attendees’ time. That’s a surefire strategy for reducing goodwill and the desire to interact with your company.

Webinar polls are another area where strategy is often discarded in favor of generic best practice recommendations. I constantly get asked “How many polls should I include in my webinar?” Do you really think there is a single magic number that applies to every audience, every topic, and every webinar length? I’m sorry to disappoint, but there isn’t. Are you asking about how many polls when you should really be asking about the purpose of polls? Why are you asking your attendees to do extra work for you? Will they get anything out of the exercise? Saying “polls build engagement and a sense of participation” is only true if you actually have a reason to use them and if you can clearly communicate a benefit for attendees who take part.

One of the classic old tips that still comes up every now and again is Guy Kawasaki’s famous “10-20-30 Rule.” There are people who will tell you that you should create 10 slides to be delivered in 20 minutes using a 30-point font. They have completely lost the original context of placing this recommendation in the service of delivering a business pitch to a busy venture capitalist firm! Stop worrying so much about the specific numbers and think more about the underlying strategy of how and what you want to communicate.

Appearing on camera is another area where you need to carefully consider the WHY rather than the HOW. “Audiences like seeing the presenter.” That’s often true in a general sense. But they don’t particularly enjoy seeing a motionless, uncomfortable presenter trapped in a webcam closeup for 60 minutes – undermined by poor lighting, a bad camera angle, and a distracting background. What are you trying to ACHIEVE by using live video? Presenting a more engaging, positive image of your speaker and your company? Are your tactics supporting or frustrating that goal?

Using good tactics and learning from discussions of best practices are laudable. Don’t ignore the advice of experts. Just make sure to step back and ask yourself how to best apply (or alter) those recommendations to match your unique goals, strategies, and business context.

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,online seminar,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing,web collaboration,online collaboration

      

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Woolmark’s Way to Create a Unique Learning Experience for Students with ClickMeeting

The Client:

The Woolmark Company

Their reason for using the ClickMeeting webinar platform:

Providing the participants of the Woolmark Performance Challenge with background knowledge to allow innovative thinking and design.

 

The benefits:

• Building a hub of educational resources for participants to access and reference
• Enabling international interaction as well as feedback exchange among students from different countries and universities
• Internal briefings and internal judging panel discussions

 

The background

The Woolmark Company is the global authority on wool. The Woolmark logo is one of the world’s most recognized and respected brands, assuring the highest quality and pioneering excellence from farm to finished product. In early 2018, together with top sports brand adidas, they launched a design competition focusing on the development of innovative products for the sports and performance industry.

The Woolmark Performance Challenge (WPC) is an annual competition, which opened for students in Europe and North America in January 2018. Now in its second iteration, the competition has expanded globally. It provides an opportunity to develop innovative new product applications within the sports and performance market, by applying the science and performance benefits of Australian Merino wool.

More than 500 students from 58 universities across Europe and North America registered to take part in the 2018 challenge. As of January 2019, 84 universities are on board for the second edition, with student submissions closing on 24th May 2019.

Are you ready for their story?

Let’s dive into the Woolmark’s case study.

 

Why They Decided to Use Webinars

To support students in developing their WPC submission, The Woolmark Company decided to provide educational resources for knowledge and inspiration. However, as the WPC is a global challenge, it would be incredibly difficult to visit all universities to provide similar seminars in person. In order to reach the participants scattered across the globe, the team decided to make use of webinars.

I had attended some webinars using ClickMeeting myself and was inspired by the platform and how it could help us reach our international audiences – says  Salina Janzan, the project’s Global Project Manager. – Running webinars allows us to host many regions at once and offer the same educational resources to all participants.

The WPC team ran six webinars last year, presented by industry experts, on topics such as “Blue Sky Thinking in Textiles and Apparel”, “Sustainability in the Supply Chain,” and “The Performance Consumer.”

It’s great to see the conversations that develop and we welcome the international perspectives – adds Salina Janzan. – The participants don’t often get to interact with students from other universities, so it’s great that we can offer a platform for this.

Similarly, in the case of an international team and the judging panel, it would be rather costly to bring everyone together whenever collaborative discussions were needed. Using ClickMeeting’s platform as a virtual meeting room proved to be an excellent solution.

Salina Janzan says:

The ability to see everyone, to be able to pull up presentations, share screens and so forth has met all of our requirements. It’s far superior to a conference call or sending emails back and forth.

 

 

The advantages

According to the WPC team, what makes webinars stand out among other communication channels, is their potential for engagement. They have used the webinars as the main avenue for students to ask questions and get information about the submission. In this way, the whole process was more manageable for the company, and at the same time more personal for the students.

ClickMeeting boasts one of the strongest portfolios of features among similar webinar solutions on the market. Apart from branded webinar rooms and customized invitations, it also supports webinar recording and storage.

Salina Janzan says:

The recording function has been excellent for us, both for the long-life content generation and accommodating all times zones and schedules. Students who were not able to participate in our webinar sessions could just as well catch up later.

The ability to prepare the webinar in advance was very helpful as well. The WPC team could make sure all the speakers were ready and felt comfortable that all of their content was uploaded.

 

The future

The Woolmark Company and adidas are planning to run at least five new webinar sessions this year.

Salina Janzan says:

It’s beneficial to have this long-life content created year-to-year, so it’s not just a one-off event. The new sessions will build on already existing topics and introduce some new discussions.

In addition to the WPC, The Woolmark Company is now also using ClickMeeting to enhance the education program of another of their global campaigns: International Woolmark Prize. This will involve running webinars for the finalists of this prestigious fashion prize, too.

 

Conclusion

Based on their experience and the Woolmark Performance Challenge success, The Woolmark Company would not only incorporate ClickMeeting in their further activities but also recommend it to other companies.

As Salina Janzan sums up:

ClickMeeting Platform is extremely intuitive and straight-forward to use which is ideal when you’re working with international speakers and attendees. It works perfectly for our needs.

 

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Feeling inspired by this case study? Start your own, using our webinar platform. Create a free account or ask us for a customized enterprise solution!

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Designing And Using Webinar Surveys

Webinar administrators sometimes get far too “creative” when it comes to post-webinar surveys. In all honesty, you don’t need much:

This is a perfectly serviceable webinar survey (as long as you actually read the submitted comments).

It’s important to remember that ANYTHING you add beyond this will reduce your completion percentage. So only add questions if you plan to actively use the responses to help you improve future webinars.

If you do plan to get serious about finding ways to improve your webinars, make sure your questions give you tactical data to act upon. For instance, I often see questions such as “Presenter(s): Good – Neutral – Bad.”

I don’t like this question for several reasons. First, it subconciously implies a generic approach to your “interview” with the attendee… It signals that you aren’t really asking about THIS webinar… It’s just an all-purpose question pulled from a question bank. You couldn’t even be bothered to configure your survey to match the actual number of speakers you organized?

If someone indicates that a presenter was bad, you still don’t know enough to make the response useful. I would prefer to ask a series of questions along the lines of:

Now you can provide Adam and Betty with specific, directed feedback on how they were perceived by their listeners and you can optionally develop a training and skills improvement plan if you want them to return as future speakers.

A similar strategy can be applied to other areas you intend to pursue. Maybe you want to consider how your administration and organization of your webinars are working for attendees. You could ask specific questions about Ease of registration; Clarity of communications; How well the topic and intended audience were explained.

Maybe you want to know whether it’s time to consider switching webinar platforms (or what you need to complain to your vendor about). You could ask questions about Ease of entry into the webinar; Clarity of visuals; Computer/telephone audio quality; Ease of interaction with presenters.

Whatever questions you ask, remember that results tend to have a positive self-selection bias. The people who were least satisfied will have left the webinar early and probably will not have seen any post-webinar survey. This is particularly true for products that run in a web browser (most commonly using Flash or HTML5). The majority of attendees leave the session by closing the browser or the active tab for the conference. This bypasses any automatic ability to show a survey upon exit (for security reasons, browser-based applications can’t take an action upon shutting down the browser window).

Products such as Webex or GoToMeeting that use a downloaded and installed program on attendee computers have an advantage here, in that they can recognize when the program gets closed and can pop up a survey at that time. But even in these cases, I prefer to use a third-party independent online survey application such as SurveyMonkey, SurveyGizmo, or Formstack. Setting up my survey outside the webinar application lets me include a link to the survey in follow up emails or other attendee communications. It opens up the option to ask questions such as this:

Well-designed webinar surveys can provide great information to organizers, marketers, and presenters. They can also make attendees feel that you actually care about their specific experiences and plan to use the information to make future interactions with your company more valuable and convenient for them. People are much more likely to provide feedback if they can see that your questions are well planned, specific, and actionable.

Think about what you want to achieve with your webinars and then carefully develop survey questions that will give you the information you need to take direct, positive actions. Make sure your webinar plan includes responsibility for collecting, reviewing, and summarizing the responses you receive, with someone accountable for making improvement suggestions based on the data.

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,web meeting,online seminar,online meeting,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing

      

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How to Build Your Personal Brand

Webinars are one of the tools most used by people and brands in the personal marketing niche. Webinar platforms have video and audio tools, analytics dashboards, and advanced presentation features. Entrepreneurs use webinars in many ways to strengthen their following. Here’s why you might see webinars trending in 2019 and how you can start using them today to skyrocket your professional and personal online presence.

 

How to Use Webinars for Your Personal Brand

Video marketing and virtual lectures are both popular tools for businesses. Especially ones looking to make a name for themselves on social media. If you decide to use webinars, you’ll have to be strategic in your approach. Here is how to be purposeful when creating a personal brand through webinars:

• Self-promotion. First, use webinars to promote your digital products by building great content. Send invitations to key followers and influences who align with your brand values. And don’t forget to promote your webinars in channels where your audience can find them.
• Personal branding. Create webinar topics and themes around the most popular questions within your niche. You can even use tools like live polling during the stream to gather opinions. Find out what your audience likes and get suggestions for future content.
• Build audience interest. The more content you have the more likely people will find and subscribe to your channels. Diversifying your lessons to include webinars extends your reach and visibility.

Once you’ve covered these basics, you’ll be ready to tackle these next suggestions and tactics.

Ready?

 

3 Ways to Get the Most Out of Personal Brand Webinars

When it comes to webinars, knowing your audience is key. Most personal brands should include lessons on topics like life-hacking, motivation, and lifestyle. But, depending on the demands and interests of your viewers, you should also branch out. Add niche interest topics to your offerings.

• Promote training topics.

A lot of personal brands will tell their fan base what they should do but not how they should do it. That’s where you come in. Webinars provide tools like whiteboards, screen sharing, and document storage. So your webinar content will teach your audience the skills they need to emulate your vision.

• Solidify expert status.

Almost anyone can say they’re an expert but very few personal brands actually have the content to back it up. Webinars offer proof that you know what you’re talking about and that it actually works. When choosing topics, note what questions pop up in the Q&A or chat sessions. Use those to create future webinars.

• Measure and track your success.

Once you get in the habit of doing webinars, you’ll want to set and achieve some clear goals. A quality webinar platform will offer automatic data tracking. This will help you grow and strengthen your lesson plan based on real feedback, not guesswork.

The best recipe for a successful webinar strategy includes knowing some best practices. You should also create content based on niche specific tips. And, most importantly, you have to choose a platform that best serves your needs.

So, don’t skip this part.

 

How to Choose a Webinar Platform for Your Personal Brand

Not all personal brands are created equally. Neither are webinar platforms. They tend to vary in strengths, features, and price points. No matter what your niche is, you’ll need to choose a webinar platform with certain key features. Choose one that has a mobile app component. It’s great for hosting flexible broadcasting options. For example, you may need to go outside to show the vehicle you bought from using your strategies.

Here’s a real deal:

You’ll also need to look for a webinar platform with a paid room feature. First, provide some general knowledge webinars to attract followers. Then, loyal fans can pay for your higher value, more in-depth tutorials. Third party payment apps are messy and difficult to keep track of. But a webinar tool that includes this feature can streamline the process. All you have to do is focus on your viewers.

Then, make an impact on your target audience with emotions:

The feature to look for is appearance settings. Appearance settings let you control what your webinars look like. You can add your logo, change the your background image, and more. Leading webinar solutions include free Unsplash photos you can use for your profile page and webinar room.

And finally, you should explore webinar options with time-saving extras like meeting organization. Clients can book a private sessions during your webinar without missing a beat. You can also use this branded tool for other important meeting-related tasks. Review sponsorships and organize mastermind sessions with the right webinar platform.

Build your strong personal brand through webinars (and the many tools they have to offer). It only requires a little creativity, some audience research, and your unique flavor. Learning how to master this up-and-coming channel for personal brand marketing now will continue to pay off well into the future.

Hungry for more? We have a real treat for you! What you see below is the recording of our webinar with Jamie Turner, CEO at 60secondmarketer.com. It’s a must see for everyone who wants to start developing a personal brand!

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How to Teach Developing Software Applications

Programming has become one of the most desired professional skills. It’s evident that software engineers specializing in the most popular technologies and knowing the most popular programming languages can be sure they will find a job — a well-paid one.

This means programming teachers don’t have to fear they will be jobless, either. With plenty of software development courses and coding schools emerging, you can share your skills with all those geeks, hungry for knowledge, eager to become developers.

Bartłomiej Bałdyga, ClickMeeting’s IT Director, confirms that companies are still expanding their dev teams to be able to raise their project management processes to the highest level:

 

As an IT director, I am fully aware that the dev job market is on fire. This leads to highest efforts from the companies aiming to score the most promising programming upcoming talents to build their development teams. The demand is so strong, that more and more companies, including ClickMeeting, are on the lookout for fresh developers, that they can train later on.

Also, the hype for mobile applications is not going to end any time soon. This all means a golden age for online teachers who concentrate on teaching application development.

How to get your hands on it? Well, have you ever tried using webinars to teach programming? Do you know how great webinars are when it comes to showing people how to develop software applications?

 

Although it might be enticing for a newbie to learn on his own, without a virtual classroom supervised by an experienced developer, this can make a programming student vulnerable to learn bad habits. Luckily, there’s a solution to teach and learn to code in the most efficient and agile way – and this means webinars. They give the opportunity to inject good programming practices at the very beginning of the learning path – assures Bartłomiej Bałdyga, IT Director at ClickMeeting.

 

In this article, you will learn why you should consider webinar software in your work, what to use them for and what webinar tools will support you in this new challenge.

 

Why would I use webinars to teach developing applications?

There are several features making webinars a perfect app development teaching tool, especially in a situation when you lecture or run workshops online. Let’s have a look at just a few of them.

Webinars take place in real time on the Internet. So, it doesn’t matter if your students are scattered around the country, the continent or the world – you can gather them all at the same time, in one virtual webinar room, and teach a class.

During a live webinar, you can interact with participants, and they can interact with you. You can see and hear each other, and most importantly, you can have a conversation. Attendees can ask you for an explanation of the most challenging parts, and you can immediately clear their doubts and help them better understand the topic.

As a programming expert running webinars, you make yourself available for students who wouldn’t be able to meet you otherwise. Let’s say they cannot travel to take part in a course you host at a university. Alternatively, you can’t be bothered to spend hours on a plane to be present at an industry event and run a workshop there. With webinars, you can meet halfway.

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Click’s Tip:

How to make your webinars interactive? How to enable your online students to broadcast audio-video so you can hear and see them during your class?

This is how we do it in ClickMeeting:

You can set it up during the webinar. First, I go to my attendees’ list on the right-hand side. Second, I choose a person I would like to enable to broadcast audio or audio and video. So, I click on the person on the list, and then – I click the “Turn mic on” or “Turn camera on” button. That’s it – now the host and the rest of the students can hear and see that person during the webinar – explains Rajmund Dziemaszkiewicz, Product Owner at ClickMeeting.

 

If you run an online course webinar for less than 25 students, you can switch to a Discussion Mode, and then each student will be able to be an active part of the discussion – explains Rajmund Dziemaszkiewicz.

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How can I use webinars to teach programming?

A great way to show how to solve a coding problem is running a live coding session. Invite your students to a live coding webinar so they can watch how you write code step by step. They can comment in real time as you write and you can stop any time and encourage them to suggest further steps.

You can go one step further and plan a series of such webinars. In each part of the series, focus on a different problem that needs to be solved. Show your students how to deal with the most common challenges they will have to face when they start their programming career.

If you don’t want to limit yourself to teaching only one technology or programming language, set up a series of live coding webinars co-hosted by experts in various areas of software development. Invite them to run live online workshops with you and share their expertise in JavaScript, Python, Java, PHP, Ruby, C# and so forth.

Apart from live coding, you can also use webinars to teach other programming-related topics. What topics to cover? Teach your attendees about the best practices of clean code writing. Discuss the most common mistakes beginners at software development do and tell your audience how to avoid them. Advise them on how and where to look for their first programming job.

 

What tools will help me run an excellent webinar about coding?

Webinar platforms offer a whole host of tools that will support you in your webinar challenge.

Before you plan live coding online events, make sure your webinar platform enables you to share your screen in real time. A screen-sharing tool is indispensable if you want your audience to see what you are doing on your computer.

There is no doubt that your participants are going to have plenty of questions. You can answer most of them via chat or during a Q&A session after the webinar is over. However, if you need to write or sketch anything while you speak to help them understand a topic, a whiteboard tool will come in handy.

If you find our suggestion to invite a co-presenter interesting, check whether there is a multi-user feature available in your monthly plan. It will let you run your webinar with another expert even if you are located in two different parts of the world.

Moreover, for those who couldn’t make it to your live event, prepare a series of programming webinars they can watch whenever it’s most convenient for them. Use an on-demand webinars feature, like the one ClickMeeting offers, record your webinars and make them available from your website, Facebook page or YouTube channel.

 

Conclusion

If you are a programming teacher and you haven’t yet tried to share your knowledge via a webinar platform, do give it a go. It’s interactive, engaging and fun and it’s an excellent way to build your own programming class. Future developers will be delighted to have an opportunity to take part in a live coding session or learn the best software development practices during a live online event.

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HTML5 Rewrites Proving Difficult For Flash Webinar Vendors

In the past two weeks, I have seen preview demos from two well-known, established web conferencing software vendors who have stable, flexible, powerful webinar products that can handle just about any kind of content and web event interaction my clients might think up. Unfortunately, both products rely on Adobe Flash as the underlying communications/application protocol, so the vendors have been forced to rewrite their webinar products from the ground up using HTML5.

Flash goes away completely in 2020, but many companies have already forbidden it on employee computers because of security concerns. So webcast/webinar vendors have no choice but to rewrite their code using the new communications protocol of choice for the web… HTML5. 

I have not been involved in the engineering and programming side of this forced conversion (thank goodness!), but I can tell it’s been a harder struggle than the vendors thought it would be, as announced delivery dates get pushed back further and further, with pieces of functionality promised for “a future release.” This does not bode well for power users who have come to rely on specific features of their favorite products.

What kinds of things are proving the most difficult?

Vendors that previously relied on an upload/convert step to turn PowerPoint slides into Flash animations for display in a conference now need to change this to an HTML5-compatible conversion process. Getting native PowerPoint animations, timings, and slide transition effects to appear properly in the conference is proving tricky. I have seen several vendors effectively give up, telling customers that if they want to show slide decks with effects, they should run them in slide show mode and use screen sharing to display the slides. Maybe the vendors will add the ability to reproduce animations and transitions in their upload/convert process later, maybe not. I have also seen instances of reduced functionality in direct access display of slides outside of a simple “previous/next slide” capability.

Both the vendors I just saw make a selling point of the fact that their Flash-based products can record web conferences not just as “view-only” audio/video files, but as fully interactive replays with the ability for on-demand viewers to do the same things that live attendees can do… Download files, click on interactive hyperlinks, respond to polls, and so on. That is apparently more difficult with the new HTML5 releases, and I’m hearing that it will be a while (if ever) before they can provide the same functionality. Instead, recordings are being captured as simple MP4 video files in their new releases.

Phone/streaming audio integration is also proving tricky for some code rewrites. At least one vendor has banished the phone integration they used to support, requiring presenters and attendees to use only computer audio inputs and outputs. Others seem to have conquered the issue, but users have to deal with long (10-30 second) buffer delays before the audio/video content is seen on attendee computers. This makes quick two-way interactions very difficult.

I have also noticed cases of reduced functionality dealing with chat management and question management in some new HTML5 rewrites. The most common design style I see now is made to look like instant messaging displays that mobile device users are familiar with. I am not a fan of this design style for managing large numbers of simultaneous typed interactions from diverse audience members. I want to retain the ability to delete, copy, paste, highlight, or prioritize individual typed submissions. Some of my preview sessions indicated those capabilities going away.

Then you get into all kinds of specialized functionality that may or may not be supported. Maps, timers, fancy types of polls and graphical displays may be amenable to re-creation in HTML5 and then again, they may not be. I know that in my preview sessions I heard several instances of “not in this first release” and “coming later.” These kinds of compromises and staggered functionality introduction are fine and expected for new products being designed from the ground up, but existing customers are less willing to accept them as dropped functionality in a redesign of something they are already using.

I feel immensely sorry for the affected vendors. They devoted huge numbers of person-hours in development over many years and many release upgrades to get to the current level of sophisticated, advanced functionality. Now the underlying infrastructure has been yanked away, leaving the vendors rushing to re-create their offerings on a platform that wasn’t designed to handle the same capabilities. All while continuing to support and maintain the existing Flash versions. It’s a terrible situation. But sympathy does not mean turning a blind eye to the realities of the situation for customers. If your web conferencing vendor has created a new HTML5 version of their product, test it thoroughly and make sure you know its new set of capabilities and limitations. Make no assumptions that things will work just the same as they had.

Technorati Tags: HTML5,Adobe Flash,web conference,web conferencing,webinar,web seminar,webcast,webcasting,web collaboration,online collaboration,web meeting,online meeting

      

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