When planning and delivering your webcast its critical to know how much Internet access bandwidth is available. When in the planning stage, we use this information to recommend the right solution for your event. We will test this before your event as well, and use that information to make sure we have set-up our streaming encoders optimally.

So how do you know how much bandwidth is available? Listen to this screencast to learn about the free tool Speedtest.net:





View the Speedtest.net screencast in its own window here.

Tags: bandwidth, event management, LinkedIn, Streaming, video quality, video webcasts, webcasting.

The question “How much time do I need?”  comes up alot in the context of preparing for a webinar.  What tends to happen is the presenter has a slide deck in hand and they wait until the week before to really start considering the audience needs and reviewing the content.  It’s not until the webinar practice session a few days before the presentation that they see what others are presenting and get any feedback on their slides.  Due to time constraints, there is only time for slides corrections.  So how much time should you spend on presentation creation?

Presentation authority Nancy Duarte, author of the book Slideology and principal at Duarte Design (clients include Apple, Cisco, and Al Gore among many others),  puts it this way;

“The amount of time required to develop a presentation is directly proportional to how high the stakes are.”

Duarte goes on to provide this guidance:

• 6-20 Hours Research & collect input from the web, colleagues, and the industry
• 1 hour Build an audience-needs map
• 2 hours Generate ideas via sticky notes
• 1 hour Organize the ideas
• 1 hour Have colleagues critique or collaborate around the impact the ideas will have on the audience
• 2 hours Sketch a structure and/or a storyboard
• 20-60 hours Build the slides in a presentation application
• 3 hours Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse (in the shower, on the treadmill, or during your commute)

Total Time: 36-90 hours

At first glance this may sound like too much time, but when we started tracking our own content development time for new presentations we found this to be fairly accurate. When you already have a presentation, tailoring it for a specific audience will eliminate some of the up-front time, and in many cases you will be able to re-use slides/slide layout with only minor modifications.  Still, you will be looking at 30 hours to put together a quality presentation and be comfortable with its delivery.

Tags: create a presentation, create a webinar, effective presentations, LinkedIn, PowerPoint, practice, storytelling, time, web seminar, Webcasts, webinar, webinars.

Is it time to use Twitter as part of our webcast strategy?

Twitter has become a true social phenomena.  As the eMarketer chart below shows,  Twitter’s popularity continues to grow:

ComScore reported 4 million unique visitors in February 2009 while Nielson Online reported 7 million. Both services show the growth rate above 1000% year over year. Twitter is heavily used within tech and has surprisingly strong adoption by the older tech demographic.

So will this community (or more accurately, federation of communities) be interested in educational or informational-oriented webcasts? According to a MarketingProf’s survey of Twitter users,  both the statements “I find it exciting to learn new things from people” and “I value getting information in a timely manner” were rated 4.5+ on a 5 point scale.

I know companies that are using Twitter today as a promotional medium for video webcasts, and you can easily integrate Twitter into an event or webinar to replace or augment an integrated chat capability.  I have seen Twitter used  at conferences as a means for the panelists to engage with the audience and as a tool for submitting questions.

In the examples above Twitter is being used for promotion and engagement.  To fully tap into  the word-of-mouth power of Twitter,  we may want to re-think presentation formats – short form content that can be quickly accessed and shared (e.g. video) may be a better choice than traditional webinar technologies like WebEx.    I can see the day when we use our event recordings and create discrete “highlight” video segments that can be shared with our new Twitter followers so they can propagate the message!

So are you planning on using Twitter with your webinars? Can you see using it with a live event that is webcast?

Tags: LinkedIn, tweets, twitter, Webcasts.

Richard Mayer

We recently wrote a post on Richard Mayer’s ‘Ten Multimedia Design Principals‘  citing his book Multimedia Learning.

I wanted to share another point from Mayer’s research that Cliff Atkinson drives home in his book Beyond Bullet Points called the Redundancy Effect.

Mayer’s research shows that reading text displayed on the screen actually lowers retention.

Mayer conducted experiments using two multimedia presentations. The first was your typical PowerPoint presentation that used bulleted text and the second had all text on the screen removed.

The result; viewers of the second presentation retained 28% more information and were able to apply 79% more creative solutions using that information than viewers of the first presentation.

Bottom line: Stop putting bullet points on your slides! If they need that detail, create speaker notes for download after the event.

Tags: Cliff Atkinson, effective presentations, LinkedIn, PowerPoint, Richard Mayer.

Richard Mayer is a professor in psychology at UC – Santa Barbara. Mayer is considered the authority on educational psychology, publishing over 18 books and 250 articles and chapters on the topic.

Mayer and his colleagues conducted numerous experiments and studies into how we learn best through-out the 90’s. The result of their efforts was the landmark book Multimedia Learning.

Following are some key conclusions and principals from his work  to guide your multimedia development, including your webinar presentations.

Multimedia Works!

People do learn better with words and images, versus words alone.

Bottom Line: Ditch the conference calls, go online for greater effectiveness.

Redundancy Principal

We comprehend explanations better when words are presented as verbal narration alone, versus both verbally and as on-screen text.

Bottom Line: Don’t read you slides – if they are text heavy use them as notes and a handout and put relevant graphics on your slide.

Segmentation Principal

We learn better when information is presented in bite-sized chunks.

Bottom Line: Break your content into clearly defined segments, like chapters of a book.

Signaling Principal

People learn better when information is presented with clear outlines and headings.

Bottom Line: Agenda/outline slides and progress indicators/sign-post slides do help your audience. Slide titles matter too.

Personalization Principal:

We learn better when information is presented in a conversational style rather than a formal one.

Bottom Line: This theme is why we like to record your company’s thought-leaders and subject-matter experts, rather than produce a canned, professional narrative.  Your presentations are naturally the most authentic and genuine. For presenters, it means you should practice your presentation so that you can simply use notes to guide you. You already know the subject matter. Being comfortable with the presentation structure allows your expertise and enthusiasm for the subject to come through naturally.

Spatial Contiguity Principal

We learn better when related text and images are placed next to each other.

Bottom Line: Don’t make your audience guess which images and titles go together, put them next to each other.

Coherence Principal

We learn better when any extraneous information is removed from a slide.

Bottom Line: If it isn’t critical to your point, delete it. I know some presentation experts even recommend ditching the ubiquitous logo, tagline, and date information from your footer since it is superfluous to your point.

Modality Principal

We learn better from animation with audio narration than from animation and text captions.

Bottom Line: We need to engage both the audio and visual “channels” to the brain. Voice narration with your images is the best way to go.

Temporal Contiguity Principal

We learn better when narration and animation are synchronized versus asynchronous.

Bottom Line: You want your narration and animation to reinforce one another. Animations or screen motion need to happen in sync with what you are describing.  This is particularly important for demonstrations and takes some practice to do correctly.

Individual Differences Principal

Each of us will interpret a presentation uniquely based on prior knowledge, visual literacy, and spacial aptitude.

Bottom Line: We each learn a little differently. It is important to consider your audience profile when creating the presentation, use examples and stories to clarify your points, and gather feedback from your audience whenever possible.

You can learn more about Richard Mayer and his research here.

Tags: effective presentations, LinkedIn, Multimedia Learning, PowerPoint, Richard Mayer, web demonstration.

Webinars. You know they are out there, but inevitably when the topic in question becomes a priority for you, you just can’t find them. Google is your first stop, but the results are just lost in the mass of content they provide. You may visit key industry hubs, but you wonder if your missing anything.

For you there is now a solution:  Webinar Today – the webinar search engine.

Webinar Today Search

We have been busy compiling an index of web seminars, starting with security, storage, marketing, and VOIP.  We invite you to try it out and see what you think.

If you know of webinars that should be added to this index, please suggest them by following the link at the bottom of the page.  As long as they are educational and informational, we will add them to the index.

Now we consider this a beta release, but please let us know what you think!

Tags: LinkedIn, search, Web Seminars, Webcasts.