Webcasting reaches into the afterlife – Funerals on Demand

When my father passed away earlier this year the funeral home worked with our family to create a tribute video with a photo montage of dad over the years.  They burned a video CD which we shared with those who couldn’t be there, and it still brings smiles. 

Now it seems social media and webcasting have also crossed that final chasm into the great beyond.

While doing my daily scan of webcasting news, I came upon this article about an Australian funeral home that now offers webcasts as part of its funeral services offering for those friends and family that can’t attend the ummm… live event.

They are also offering  real-time messaging so those attending remotely can email a friend, post a message of condolence or light a tribute candle on the family’s web page.

Whoda thunk it?

Webcast Fail: Speaker no-shows

The other day I was moderating a webcast for a large technology company, and as usual we all dialed in a half hour early to make sure everyone’s phone was working, the presenters were comfortable pushing their slides, and generally just to ensure we were all set to go at our allotted start time.

As the clock was ticking to the top of the hour, one of the members of our team was MIA.  Unfortunately it was our featured presenter, who was giving a very detailed technical presentation that only he was familiar with.  So, his “handlers” reached out via email, cellphone, called his manager, used the company’s internal IM system – nothing.  He had vanished with just a few minutes to go before start time.

We began frantically looking for a substitute presenter – ANYBODY who might have seen his slide deck before and felt comfortable presenting on this topic.  No joy there either.  So our production team and the marketing folks from my client got ready for Plan B, which meant telling the audience our speaker had an emergency and that we’d have to reschedule.  As we hit our scheduled start time, I posted a message to all the attendees asking them to stand by for a few minutes as we were having technical difficulties (OK, I lied to buy time).   Attendees began streaming in – hundreds had registered for this event – and everyone on our pre-call began to panic as we hit five minutes past scheduled start.

Just as we were about to pull the plug on the event, someone located our missing presenter.  Where was he?  Was he OK?  He had simply had the event on his calendar for an hour after the actual start time, and was rushing to a phone where he could dial in.

He joined the call at 10 minutes past the hour, flustered and without benefit of logging in to the console to view the webcast live.  I told him to get ready, took my time with the introduction so he could gather his thoughts, and then I began to push his slides, letting him know what the audience was seeing as he presented from a printout of his deck.

We had planned for an hour webcast and now had to cram it into less than 50 minutes, so I gently rushed him along, quickly moving through his slides and managing to get to the end with about a minute to spare.  One audience question and we wrapped up.

Although the worst case scenario was avoided we lost several attendees waiting for him to arrive.  Our post-event email will invite all those who had to leave to view the event in archive, but certainly some damage was done.

SO… Best practice number one:  Contact your presenters 24 hours before the event and make sure they know when to be on the live call, and re-contact them once again an hour before to remind them.  If possible, have a backup presenter waiting in the wings to take over should an emergency arise.  And keep the aspirin handy.

Animating Webcasts: Flash, Video and .PPT Builds

Most webcasts entail a slide deck created in PowerPoint and accompanying audio – one ore more presenters sharing their sales, marketing or training presentation with a remote audience.  Until recently many of the major webcast platforms utilized a static version of your slides with all animation and builds removed.  To effect a build you broke the build slide down into a series of slides that each showed the next stage of the build.  It works, but it’s a pain if your deck is already created WITH the builds.

And as webcasters strive to engage audiences further, the demand for videos – whether to entertain, show a demo or have a busy executive make a “guest appearance” during an event – has put pressure on webcast platform companies to deliver a richer media experience across a wider variety of browsers.

I recently had the chance to speak with Mark Szelenyi, Director of Product Marketing for San Francisco-based On24, one of the most popular platforms for large webcasts and the one I’ve used for hundreds of Ziff-Davis Enterprise eSeminars and PCMagCasts over the past several years.  As On24 continues to expand beyond simple webcasts to virtual trade shows and virtual briefing centers they have recently added Flash capability to their arsenal of technologies, resulting in a host of benefits for presenters and audience alike.

Moving to flash offers better compatibility for different web browsers.  Older On24 versions relied on either Windows Media Player or Real Player, but flash is universally available across all popular browsers.

The flash-based platform also allows PowerPoint transitions and animations to be incorporated easily.  As presenters bring up the slide in the present console, they see how many builds each slide has as well as the build they’re currently on.  This way there’s no guessing what happens when they press the advance button.

Flash also improves interactivity in a key way.  Before, On24 interactive polls were delivered as pop-ups, so attendees would have to disable their popup blockers to participate in polling questions.  The flash version eliminates that drawback and can increase the percentage of attendees who actually respond to the polling questions, and more interactivity is always better.

Pricing for the new Flash-based webcasts is slightly higher than their non-flash counterparts, but may be well worth it if you are ‘build-heavy’ or looking to broaden your webcast’s reach.

Web Conversations: Making archived presentations interactive

Most webcasting platforms have the capability to archive your presentation so people who couldn’t attend live still get to see your presentation.  But viewers of an archived presentation have had very limited ability to interact with you or the information you’re presenting.

PresenterNet’s new Web Conversations feature allows you to not only embed your presentation into any web page, but adds interactivity features that create a conversation between your content and the viewer, allowing them to rate interest on specific features or benefits using a sliding scale, answer questions, complete forms and get the sense of being more connected to the content being presented.

You can see a demo of how it works at their website here.