It’s not easy to keep the names and affiliations of a large panel of speakers straight.  Not only is this confusing to your local audience, it can prevent them from asking directed questions to specific members of your panel.

When Coreography webcasts an event, we place the current speakers name and title on the live video (called lower thirds). But unless we send our program feed to the main projector, this does not help the local audience.

So what can you do?

If its a group panel discussion seated behind a table, consider using name placards in front of each speaker’s microphone.  This takes a little pre-planning to execute, but should eliminate your local audience’s confusion.

Tags: event recordings, event video, video recording tips, video webcasts.

When you are considering a purchase, who do you ask for your advice?

If your like me, you start with your friends. And you will probably seek out the ones who have some experience or passion related to your purchase. If I want to buy a guitar, I’d seek out a cousin who is a musician. If I want a new telephone system, I’d ask a half dozen of my friends that are consultants, managers and business owners  – the ones that make their living on the telephone..  Depending on the purchase, I would do more research online, on industry sites and forums, and visit your web site.  At this point, I’m ready to buy – for big-ticket items I’ve got a short list and will now call a company rep.

By now your starting to realize that in the early stages I may not spend much time on your site – in some cases I may not even visit it.  So as a marketer, you need to find a way to reach me through the mediums I am using.

Webcasts – audio and slides or video -  not only are good at educating the prospects you know about, but can be a compelling way to help your customers (my friends) and your evangelists (the ones commenting in user groups, message boards, and industry forums) share your story.

You can continue to deliver your webcasts live, but make sure you create an archive in bit-sized chunks and share it with the world – in your newsletter, on your site,  with user groups, on message boards.  Make it easy for your fans to share it too.  Its a great way to keep your name in the conversation and help your friends spread the word.

Tags: archives, conversations, live event recordings, Marketing, On-Demand, Promotion, Video, video webcasts, Webcasts.

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.

I just finished reading Malcomb Gladwell’s Blink, which is another fun read. I found two chapters in particular relevant to delivering effective video presentations.

For the record, I am not a psychologist, so if you are, and what follows does not make sense, please set me straight by leaving a comment.

In essence, modern psychology is giving our “adaptive unconscious” more and more credit for making sense of what we see and hear and filtering the information without the need for conscious, higher-level thinking. This is both good and bad. It means we can effectively process and evaluate situations readily using only “thin-slices”, but we also unconsciously impose cultural bias and situational influences into our judgments.

What do I mean?

First, the research shows that we are pretty good at judging others in just a few seconds to a few minutes. We can read faces and tell when the delivery is sincere and truthful, and when it is fake and deceptive. We may not be able to tell you why, but our unconscious will sense a disconnect between what we see and what we hear. Video gives us both the visual and audio input to make that judgment.

Now the bad news is that we also bring a lot of bias – cultural, experiential, and situational – to these judgments. Gladwell uses the example of the performer that was praised as the most outstanding trombonist in a blind audition. When this happened in 1980, orchestras were still dominated by men, and it was commonly believed that you could tell the difference between how men and women played the same instrument. When they were introduced to Abbie Conant, a woman, they were in disbelief. Clearly if it had not been a blind audition, Conant would not have been selected.  This is one case where visual, video communication can work against you.

And how receptive we are is impacted by other, situational circumstances. In fact, you can influence other’s behavior by “priming” them with words. Gladwell cites an NYU experiment where two groups of students were primed with words and then sent off to reception to get their next assignment. One group was exposed to words like “aggressively”,”rude”,”bold”. “bother”, and “intrude”. The other group was exposed to words like “respect”,”considerate”,”patiently”,”polite”, and “courteous”. When they arrived at reception, the attendants were engrossed in a personal conversation with a fellow employee. The group exposed to the aggressive words interrupted on average after 5 minutes, while 82% of the group exposed to the polite words did not interrupt at all. (The experiment was stopped at the ten minute mark.)

Now I understand why they start playing good, upbeat music 10 minutes before the band takes the stage.  And how music lead-ins to presentations can ‘prime’ you to be more receptive to the presentation.  It makes you think we ought to be doing more than show dial-in telephone numbers before our web seminar’s start.

For more information, I recommend reading “Blink” or visiting Malcomb Gladwell’s website.

Tags: effective presentations, interviews, Video, video presentations, video webcasts.

While learning about ‘Getting Things Done’ I discovered this great blog – Merlin Mann’s 43Folders.

He has been blogging for a long time and 43Folders started out focused on productivity solutions like GTD.  Although his focus has changed, his blog is still a good read.

He uses a presentation style that we also are putting into practice.

What’s really exciting is that this presentation works so well both for the live audience and the video webcast – the slides add to his message without taking your focus away from him as the speaker and what he is saying.  And from a technical perspective, the slide imagery avoids small text fonts that video does a poor job of broadcasting.

Take a look at this video of his final presentation: Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: effective presentations, GTD, live event recordings, Video, video webcasts, Webcasts.