The Advisor

Webconferencing 101
A Dozen Ideas To Improve Your Next Online Event
by Dale Coyner

Web Conferencing is one of the most powerful and practical uses of Internet technology ever created to optimize communications between employees, customers, prospects and suppliers. It combines the power of a live meeting with the cost-effectiveness of a conference call. Web Conferencing allows you to conduct seminars, train new employees, make sales presenations, hold press conferences and enhance on-line document collaboration with colleagues from around the world, right from your desktop! Planning your first webconference and don't know where to start? Perhaps you're a webconferencing veteran looking for ways to improve your online events. In either case you'll find value in these twelve ideas for delivering an online event.

Get off to a fast start. Don't you hate it when you attend a presentation and the emcee takes forever to introduce to the main speaker? That effect is amplified many times over in a live web event. Spend no more than two minutes to introduce your event and cover the features of your webconferencing system. Then get out of the way and let the main presenter start. This will give your event a fast-paced feel that will keep participants tuned in.

Keep it short. Live events of 60 to 90 minutes in duration are most effective. If your program requires more time, consider breaking it into segments delivered over a period of days or weeks. Identify only the three or four key messages you want to leave with your audience and build your presentation around them exclusively. A 90 minute program will give you enough time to interact with the audience, asking them questions and answering their questions.

Keep it simple. It's easy to become enamored with all the features that today's webconferencing systems offer. Avoid the temptation to try all the bells and whistles if you're just starting out or if you're trying a new system. Master the basic controls: slide control, polling and messaging. Once you and your audience are comfortable with these elements, you can gradually introduce more sophisticated features that require more setup such as streaming audio, whiteboarding, and application sharing.

Ask good questions. As you design your event, think about what you most want to get from the event. Use those goals to formulate the questions you want to ask of the audience. Don't use a live event to ask pointless demographic questions such as "Where are you attending from?" That kind of information can be determined in pre-event registration. Use your time in front of your audience to ask questions that collect critical feedback and measure the effectiveness of your message.

Use a specialist. For live events with more than twenty participants, use an "online specialist" to answer questions submitted by the audience. The barriers to participation are low in an online event, so you can expect to receive more questions and comments than in a typical face-to-face presentation.

Using a specialist means that everyone who asks a question will get a personalized response. This also allows your presenter to stay focused on delivering his or her key points without being distracted by a high volume of questions.

Pre-flight everyone. Encourage all participants to complete a pre-flight check before attending your event. Pre-flight checks are usually web pages provided by the event service provider that check the participant's computer to ensure it is capable of successfully participating in the program.

Start with the phone. To ease people into the technology, use webconferencing in conjunction with a familiar medium first, such as teleconferencing. Let the teleconference deliver the audio of your program and let the webconference offer participants a way to see visual material and ask questions without interrupting the program. Use the interactive features of the teleconference bridge such as live question and answer sessions to simulate a radio "talk show" format. As your audience becomes comfortable with the basic elements of a webconference, you can migrate some participants to Internet-based audio to reduce your teleconference expense.

Keep slides simple. Webconferencing works best when slides are formatted with simple designs and a few consistent colors. Don't use full-screen photos in your slides -- these images will take too long to display for participants. Flat colors and simple graphics, when made "web ready" for your event, will display quickly on the screen.

Need to demonstrate a computer application to your audience? Select a webconferencing system that support application broadcasting, and you can show the application directly from your computer. Practice with this a lot before your event to get comfortable with how it works and how it looks both from your perspective and the audience. You'll find that most systems require you to download and install a plug-in to capture and display what's on your screen. These plug-ins are typically required only for presenters, not for the audience.

Rent an emcee. For important events, hire a professional online moderator to facilitate your event. A moderator can add a great deal of polish to the many transitory tasks that occur during an event. For example, the moderator can serve interactive polls and talk with a presenter while waiting for results to come from the audience. This eliminates the awkward "dead air" that occurs when waiting for an audience to respond.

A moderator can also make the question and answer process happen smoothly by asking prepared questions and gleaning the best questions from the online audience to present to the speaker. Perhaps most importantly, these professionals know how to keep an online event moving when glitches occur and allow your speakers to focus on their message, rather than worry about which button to click.

Test, test, and retest. Once your event is staged and ready to go, make sure you test the "links" that will be sent to your registered participants. If the correct link isn't sent, your audience won't be able to find your event! Double-check the phone number for your teleconference for participants and presenters. As simple as it seems, failure to check links and phone numbers are the most common mistakes made in producing web events. These are completely preventable with a minimal amount of due diligence.

Use both views for your presentation. On the day of the program, set up two computers. Set up one computer with your presenter's view and another logged on as an audience member. This gives you a much better sense of what your participants are actually experiencing. Slides that are slow to advance for you may display quickly for the audience. This will also allow you to check the formatting and apperances of your visuals from the participant's perspective.

Finally, don't go looking for trouble. Glitches can happen during any type of presentation whether in person or over the Web. In web-based events, glitches are often only an issue if they are acknowledged by the presenter. For example, if you click a button to advance to the next slide and it is slow to change, you gain nothing by telling the audience, "Gosh this sure is taking a long time to come up." Perhaps you're on a slower-than-average Internet connection. Just make a mental note to advance slides a little sooner and no one will be the wiser.

Dale Coyner is Operations Manager of Communicast.com, a web events production company. He can be reached by e-mail at dcoyner@communicast.com.