Adobe Connect Blog

There is no such thing as an instant webinar.

In the age of instant gratification and technology, I have run across many a webinar producer that has made the mistake of assuming their webinar technology platform will read their mind, set itself up according to their requirements, and instantly produce a flawless event to a virtual audience of hundreds or thousands.

This is a dangerous assumption.

A mission critical event to a large audience should never be left to the last minute. For example, a producer of a live in-person event will visit the physical event venue for a site inspection in advance of the event and then show up early for the event to make sure everything is correctly set up according to specifications before the event begins.

The same is true with a virtual event.

At a minimum a virtual event producer should spend time in the virtual room setting it up ahead of time, hold a rehearsal with all speakers, moderators and hosts, and, finally, build in a 30 minute pre-conference for speakers and hosts immediately prior to the event.

Take some time to avoid virtual event disasters.

8 Reasons to Prepare, ‘Site Inspect’ and Rehearse your Virtual Event

- Test audio integration

• There are many audio options for your webinar, including universal audio integration. You can simulcast both the phone audio conference and VoIP, use the phone only, or use VoIP only. The universal integration needs to be done well in advance of the event. For audio options and integration how-to tips, please see.

- Check the speaker’s audio quality

• There are many things that can reduce audio quality. Be sure to have all speakers use the exact same equipment during the rehearsal as they will use during the live event – this includes the computer and the actual phone or headset. Wireless is not recommended for either computer or phone and, of course, using a speakerphone is a big no-no.

- Ensure speaker understands how to use the platform

• If your speaker is new to the particular webinar platform technology you are using, take the time to give him a tutorial, even if he is experienced at webinars in general. Just like it’s always awkward to drive someone else’s car, it can be equally awkward finding all the right buttons to push in a webinar room that is unfamiliar.

- Upload and flip through all slides

• Uploading slides 15 minutes prior to your event is risky to say the least (especially if it’s a big file that may take some time to upload). Take the time to upload them during the rehearsal and flip through all of them to check for any misaligned text or images. Make any necessary changes to the deck and re-upload them before the pre-conference and re-check.

- Confirm all parties know how to get to your event

• The rehearsal will give all your speakers, hosts and moderators a chance to ‘find’ the location – locating their login info, practice logging in, download the presenter add-in, and overcome any other technical issues related to browsers, etc. The last thing you need on the day-of is a missing speaker!

- Review the flow of the event and room set up

• Prepare any polls, chats, quizzes or multiple slide decks you’ll be using ahead of time using the layout functionally and arrange the layouts in order of your agenda. This will ensure a smooth flow and avoid having to ‘fish’ for polls during the live event.

- Prep your backstage and familiarize all hosts, speakers and moderators with it

• Your Presenter Only Area is your private backstage area for hosts and presenters. This is a great place for the Attendee pod, a Presenter chat (so you can coordinate amongst yourselves without interrupting the event flow), the Presenter view of the Q&A pod and any notes or reminders you might have for your speakers or moderators. Remind your speakers to keep an eye on the backstage in case you need to communicate with them while they are presenting.

- Have an emergency plan and communicate it to all hosts, speakers and moderators

• Virtual events are subject to things going wrong just like physical events. Think through what you will do if… your audio conferencing provider experiences an outage… if your speaker’s computer crashes… if your speaker accidently hangs up on herself… if you lose your internet connection… etc, etc. And, yes, with 7 years of experience running upwards of 30 webinars a quarter, I have run into all of these and more!

So, don’t leave the details of producing your mission critical virtual event to the last 15 minutes, because treating webinars casually will get you into big trouble.

Good luck and may your next webinar run flawlessly!

The Adobe Digital Marketing Summit is taking place in Salt Lake City, March 4 – 8.  It is the premium event to explore the latest tools and trends in the digital marketing arena.

Webinars, or digital events, are fast becoming a critical tool used by marketers to find prospects, nurture leads or educate customers.  Budget once reserved to live tradeshows or live events is shifting towards online webinars.  Yet, marketers find it hard to measure the effectiveness of their webinars because the analytics they get is completely siloed.

Producing a webinar can be broken down into three parts:

• Getting prospects / customers to register for the event and attend
• Engage the audience during the actual events (or post the event with a recording)
• Forward the leads generated to sales

Each part generate its own set of analytics which is not integrated.  For example, for the first part, marketers typically get insight on how many people came to the registration site set-up from the different marketing campaigns that they have run (do they come from banner ads, google ads, social media engagement). For the last part, they get an overall idea of how many total leads they generated for sales.   But it is very hard for them to answer one very simple question:  which campaign actually generated the most qualified leads? was it the banner ads, the google ads or the social media engagement?

Adobe Connect 9 provides out of the box the close loop analytics required to answer this question.  But it can do much more.  Come to the Adobe Summit to learn how you can leverage other tools from the Adobe Marketing Tools to optimize your webinar programs and integrate them within your digital marketing strategy:

• Learn how to test multiple registration form to identify which ones drives the most registration with Test and Target
• Learn how to incorporate registration within your social media strategy with Adobe Experience Manager
• Learn how to add behavioral information from webinars into your lead scoring strategy with Adobe Analytics

There are many more reason to attend the Summit.  Black Keys will be performing; Keynotes from Felix Baumgartner, or Sal Khan (from Khan Academy), and the slopes are nearby if you are a skier or snowboarder !  Register here.

The use of videoconferencing in business has been on the rise over the last few years, but it wasn’t until recently that the Department of Defense (DOD) started heavily pushing for its use in its day-to-day operations. In the past, the DOD’s enterprise collaboration tool, Defense Connect Online (DCO), which is powered by Adobe Connect, had been used primarily to supplement physical conferences.

Recently, Federal Computer Week magazine sat down with our Mike Murtha, who manages the DCO program here at Adobe to discuss the DCO program. Mike reiterated the increased demand by the DOD to use videoconferencing to replace physical meetings and conferences. “Over the past three months, we have gotten a lot of inquiries [saying]: ‘We want to run an entire conference virtually,’” Murtha said.

FCW also discussed barriers that were in place that discouraged the use of videoconferencing such as costs, security concerns, and infrastructure requirements. The article noted that an advantage that Adobe Connect offers is that its services also provide videoconferencing capabilities for both desktops and mobile devices. Mike mentioned that the DCO system wasn’t initially built for videoconferencing, but that the customers are pushing it in that direction.

To read more about how federal agencies are promoting the use of videoconferencing, click here.

By Matt Murdoch and Treion Muller, FranklinCovey

Have you ever seen, or better still, been part of a group that decides to jump off a cliff at the local swimming hole? There are at least two interesting things to watch. One is approach and the other is execution. Experience and skill affects how each prospective diver approaches the edge. Some are confident, some are cautious and some are hell bent on just lettin’ ‘er rip.

While each individual has their own experience and perceptions about both approach and execution, there is one thing that all share in common – the platform. Whether you’re new at it or it’s old hat for you, you’re jumping off the same cliff – the same platform.

Adobe Connect is just that – a platform. It offers the same launching pad for the inexperienced and the expert. It provides a place to try something new (and a little bit scary) or something you’ve done a thousand times before. The platform itself is not what shapes either approach or execution. That is the province of the person on the platform and what they will do with their launch pad.

Don’t default and abandon control and creativity to the platform. Don’t let your approach, your plan or your execution be controlled solely by the platform. It’s a jumping off point, nothing more. Your job is to shape Adobe Connect to your ends. It’s the place you start from. It’s the jumping off point. Adobe Connect has far more potential than is usually tapped if you understand how to shape it to your ends rather than being contained by it.

There are four steps you can take to ensure you don’t default:

1. Awareness: Read the Manual
We know, almost nobody starts with the manual, but a detailed awareness of what the platform offers is THE starting point. Once you know what it CAN do you can start worrying about getting that platform to do what you WANT it to do.

2. Attempt: Try the Manual
After you’ve got a reasonable familiarity with the basics of what the platform can do, put it through its paces. Design a webinar but stick to the fundamentals – don’t get fancy yet.

What you’re looking for at this phase is a clean presentation – designed to deliver a message and stimulate an engaging conversation. And, create a presentation that is simple to deliver – not too complex or too technically convoluted. Just get off the cliff and into the water – and do the same jump a dozen or so times to get comfortable with it.

3. Assimilate: Apply the Manual
This is where we begin to break away from the simple default options of the platform. This is where we start to get fancy and, more importantly, where we start to make the platform our own. We make it our own when we get the platform to work WITH us and FOR our audience. It’s where you separate and prioritize what you’ve learned in the first steps into tools and techniques that you’ll keep and use and those that you’ll ignore or discard.

4. Author: Write Your Own Manual
Now, throw away the manual and never (or at least, hardly ever) look at it again. It’s time to experiment with new jumps and tricks and to author you own handbook. This is the most important method to avoid defaulting back to the same old way of doing things.

One final thought. Conducting a webinar is as different from live in-person training or a face-to-face meeting as jumping off a cliff is to jumping off your bed. You mustn’t default to traditional approaches because good-quality online events must be designed and delivered much differently to be truly effective.

You can learn more about this and other key principles in our book, The Webinar Manifesto: Never Design, Deliver or Sell Lousy Webinars Again.

Last year, we had a very successful Adobe Connect User group for Government Customers in Wahsington DC.  To view a recap of the event, click here.  We are holding our second edition of this meeting next week, on September 19th in Washington DC.

If you are working in a Government agencies and are using Adobe Connect for telework or emergency response, continuity of operations, training or collaboration, you should plan on attending the event. We will be covering a lot of topics around the recent launch of Adobe Connect 9, how mobility is reshaping collaboration and e-learning:

• Discover the latest technical enhancements in Adobe Connect 9 and how it introduces innovations in comprehensive webinars, mobile collaboration, and mobile learning.
• Learn how to leverage your current video teleconferencing solutions to collaborate in the conference room and on your mobile device.
• Hear from and network with fellow colleagues about how they use Adobe Connect.
• Learn how to report, manage, and track to provide comprehensive results.
• Learn best practices for webcasts to enhance user experience.

But most importantly, you will be able to network with your peers using Adobe Connect and interact with the Adobe Connect Government Product Management team to give feed-back and provide input on what you would like to see in the future releases of the product.

As we know everyone is extremely busy, we kept the meeting to half a day from 8am to noon.  To learn more or register, follow this link: http://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/event?oeidk=a07e681kv3if3ec3d83&llr=y9xzrxdab

See you next week in DC !

Last week, I published a sneak peek showing you some incredible new features that will enable customers to build landing pages to register participants for their events. I’ve seen some stunning examples and these features are largely powered by Adobe CQ5.

It’s not the whole story though. When we spoke to customers about the workflow for their marketing webinars and other events, they spoke about the need to measure the success of these events. Getting people to your event is one part of the equation – analyzing the data after the event is another.

It turns out that Adobe is already an industry leader in web-based analytics through it’s acquisition of Omniture in 2009. In this sneak peek, I’ll show you how a future version of Adobe Connect can leverage Adobe SiteCatalyst to help customers analyze their events and qualify leads.

Adobe Connect has a huge number of features dedicated to helping hosts and presenters engage with their attendees. The use of polls can help capture information and guide the flow of a webinar. Chat and Q&A provide a tremendous amount of interactivity that helps differentiate a live session from an on-demand recording. Custom pods can do just about anything – including entertain and engage.

In this sneak peek, I look at a new pod under development that can help a presenter or host understand the level of engagement in their webinar or virtual classroom. Providing realtime feedback can help hosts optimize the experience for every participant.

One of the many things I’ve learned on the Adobe Connect team is that there’s a lot more to a webinar than the live event itself. How do you promote your event? How do you register unknown users for the event? How do you handle email for invitations, updates, and follow ups? How do measure success?

Adobe Connect uses the ‘Events’ module for all of these functions. While it’s always been functional, it seems most of the emphasis has been on the live event and not some of the other activities.

In this sneak peek, I take a look at some technology we’re working on to help customers create stunning registration pages for their events.

Stay tuned for more.

by Guillaume Privat, Director, Adobe Connect 

Two weeks ago, I attended the Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco.    It was a very interesting event that touched upon a lot of subjects from how to set-up sales compensation, to boosting sales rep motivation, to what CRM, lead management, analytics system companies should consider implementing.

What stroke me though was how prevalent virtual meetings and webinars have become for sales and marketing organizations to engage with their prospective customers.  Webconferencing has become mission critical to ensure sales rep can talk to prospects, to ensure marketing organization can generate leads via webinars.

Yet many organizations struggle to engage customers virtually.  Their presentation are very bland consisting mostly of voice over screen share and quickly lose the audience to multi-tasking and going back to checking email.

I was particularly interested by a presentation by Carmen Taran from Rexi Media called “Virtual Presentations Can Make or Break You”.  Carmen provided some tips on how to re-engage your audience every 2 minutes – as studies have found this is the most attention span you get from people these days.  Here is what she advocates:

1) vary the type of content frequently: don’t just present slides that follows the same format.  Vary template, add demo, video, simulation, quizzes, games.

2) use intriguing pictures instead of  words to capture the audience attention and force them to listen for the solution of the riddle set in the picture.

3) create emotional connection with the audience, though story or picture.

Adobe Connect offer unsurpassed rich experience to create this emotional engagement with an audience and I was not surprised to see Adobe Connect screen shots in Carmen’s presentation.   We also have a lot of best practices for engaging audience at our community site, www.connectusers.com.

We’ve written a lot lately about the extensibility of Adobe Connect; here’s a guest perspective from RefinedData’s Terry Shane

Let’s face it, the last thing we need is another web conferencing solution! Hardly a month goes by without yet another vendor offering a solution for “virtual meetings”.  How can you choose between a growing and bewildering list of products that all claim to offer the “best” solution? An odd way to start a post about Adobe Connect, but it’s an important point.

What makes smartphones “smart” is that they’re platforms on which third parties can build applications. Today’s phones can be remote control devices, trading platforms, game consoles, GPS systems, video cameras – anything someone can dream up – even a web conferencing interface!

Similarly, it’s this kind of extensibility that differentiates Adobe Connect from other web conferencing solutions – the ability to solve business problems with custom applications that operate inside of live and recorded meetings.

Extensibility enables business applications allowing multiple participants to collaborate in ways that are not possible outside of Adobe Connect. Other web conferencing tools are the equivalent of phones with limited functions, not supporting the ability of developers to build new tools and features.

You may be aware of extensions for Adobe Connect, tools that increase functionality and/or increase engagement. For example, there are extensions that calculate the carbon or cost savings for meetings or stream live video from external sources.

These custom pods can interact with external network services such as Google Maps, Yahoo! stock feeds, Twitter, Facebook, Salesforce, PayPal or any internet- or intranet-based API. An extension can pull data from these (and other) sources, as well as push data back. A feature unique to Adobe Connect – viewers of recorded meetings may work with these tools as well; they can be written to differentiate between a live event and a recording.

Consider what could be.

The possibilities are impressive – here are some ideas:

HR: On-boarding forms or employee surveys that are submitted directly back to the corporate database and create PDF versions that are emailed to the user.

Fund raising: Allow attendees of a fund-raising webinar to make donations within the live event or when watching the recording.

Custom shopping: Enter a product SKU and receive images, descriptions, pricing and inventory availability. Purchases executed in real-time without leaving the meeting room via integrated credit card transactions. Hosts could monitor purchases (without seeing sensitive info) and be able to offer incentives or limit the purchasing opportunity.

Sales: A viewer of a recorded event is able to enter a phone number for a call back from a salesperson or call center. The extension is sophisticated enough to recognize the user’s IP address, determine country and time-zone, check if the local center is open and average wait time, and automatically arrange the call back or generate a live call.

I’m just scratching the surface, but if you’d like to suggest some of your own ideas (via comments below or by sending me an email), I’ll present some of the most innovative in a future post. There really is no limit and I’d love to see what we can come up with.

Terry Shane, CEO, Refined Data Solutions (terry@refineddata.com)