In my last post, I mentioned the almost perfect webinar platform ‘Adobe Connect Professional’. If only it had an event manager to collect user registrations. Such an event manager exists. It’s called Online Registration Center (ORC).
What ORC allow you to do:
Create a registration page for your event, with a unique web address
Collect leads from this page. Qualify these leads through additional registration questions (turnover, sector, function, …)
Send automatic confirmation messagtes upon registration
Send up to 4 automatic text reminders prior to an event
Send up to 3 automatic feedback requests as follow-up
Issue manual e-mail messages to registered users at any time
With the launch of Adobe Connect Professional, webinars have become much easier. A few pointers why we are so enchanted by this solution:
Unique web addresses for meeting rooms that are always available: you can set up permanent addresses for a room to have weekly team meetings, weekly webinars, …
Easy access for users at a single click from a browser, without the need to install a plug-in (unless you’re a host or presenter). Installing such plug-ins is often a barrier for large organisations.
Excellent Voice-over-IP integration, which does not only avoid telephone dial-in, but also allows recording events. It gives speakers the comfort to narrate their presentation with a headphone.
A streamlined user interface, which makes all the difference for event organisers for managing professional events. Layouts are available for sharing information at events, discussing information during meetings or developing content through collaboration. If these layout do not suffice, it’s easy to add others.
Best of all, for meetings up to a 100 participants, Adobe Connect Professional comes with a relatively low-cost of ownership, compared to other enterprise webmeeting solutions. Beyond 100 participants, cost increases steeply.
Three recent books introduce a refreshing style for doing presentations and running meetings.
Dan Roam’s “The Back of the Napkin” invites its readers to give up slides altogether, and use flipcharts and blackboards instead. The central idea is visual thinking, drawing graphics as you explain them, rather than taking audiences through endless bullet points. The book is full of practical advice for doing this. A must read.
Garr Reynold’s “Presentationzen” is a plea for preparing your presentation offline. Rather than a method, it introduces a presentation philosophy, heavily influenced by Asian culture. The central idea is simplicity. While obviously influencing many of today’s speakers, the concept of presentationzen is relatively unproven for complex subjects, such as science or technology. Nevertheless, a must read.
Well - time flies, and it’s been quite a while. So to rejoin the blogosphere, I probably owe you some entertainment. Hereby a video which is worth a few minutes to watch before the next time you’re making a presentation.
Bloggers post articles, and readers - more often than not also bloggers - respond. What could be simpler? Then why are things so complicated?
Commenting in the blogosphere, and managing those comments is one of the many things in life to which no perfect solution exists.
The blogger’s perspective
Most serious blogs moderate comments, and so they should! Even when you’re convinced to give up control of your message, spam comments can be a multiple of genuine comments, and you need to filter these out. Wordpress’ Akismet module deserves a thumbs up here, as it does most of the work for you.
But often even non-spam comments can be of limited value, like the ‘great article’ comment with a link to the commenter’s blog. Comments can be off-topic, badly spelled or self-serving. Across cultural boundaries, they can also be perceived as offensive, even when not intended. Therefore, as a professional blogger, you should have a blog policy, acting as your contract with the user. Whatever you put in them, the most important article in your blog policy is the last one, where you announce that the terms of use can change without prior notice. This is needed as one can never imagine all the ways how users will interact with a blog.
Company A needs to develop a website. As good practice prescribes, a project manager and team is established. A budget for content & website development is allocated. The team meets a few times, and develops a specification. Development is outsourced. After x weeks, the contractor comes back with a prototype of about 50-100 screens. A printout is made for review. Comments are made, and after a few iterations, the website is ready for the big launch.
Nobody has thought of promoting the website after launch (and the launch was actually a press release). No web statistical package is in place to track visits. After a few months, when this is put in place, company A checks the server logs and finds out …
Or … company A’s first website is well received internally, and a department manager also wants one of those. A micro-site is set-up for a public relations action. Then another for a product launch. Very quickly, company A has a proliferation of websites, using different templates and technologies, with a high cost of ownership, and almost impossible to maintain. Nobody wants to touch or own the system, and it lingers on and on.
If these stories sound too familiar for comfort, then pray that web-based marketing does not matter much in your sector. The good news is that you can make spectacular improvements.
Thanks for your vote on our quick poll how you, as reader or blogger interact with the blogosphere. Tick all the options that apply to you, except for the ones where you are only marginally involved:
Mindmapping is an essential tool that merits more use in many business processes. It increases quality and productivity. Whatever you’re currently using mindmapping for, you’re not using it enough.
This article could easily become a ‘40 uses of mindmapping’ list. It could be a mindmap. But I’d rather focus on a few examples, leaving the rest to your imagination.
Example 1: meeting management
(source: Mindgenius)
The lifecycle of a meeting lends itself well to be managed by a mindmap as a live document:
Announcement of the meeting, with meeting objective, practical information and agenda. You can add reference documents, necessary preparation, …
As confirmation of attendees come in, record them in the mindmap
During the meeting, you can use the mindmap for notetaking. At the end of the meeting, or shortly after, add actions and decisions. You now have a full documentation of the meeting to circulate the next day, rather than cold and sterile ‘minutes’ a few weeks later.
As an option, you could transfer the content of the mindmap into a narrative report, if you need to circulate it more widely.
Mindmaps can be used for a variety of management tasks. You can use them to define your organisation (especially its informal portion), define a business plan, plan a campaign, develop a roadmap, for planning & managing projects, … Continue Reading »
Many conferences are great communities. But they are also hard work. It appears a pity that all this energy is dispersed after the event, only to come back together at the next edition. Meanwhile, assuming quality papers on relevant research have been developed for the conference, it seems a waste to hide it in printed or CD ROM proceedings, rarely opened, or worse, drown it in a scientific repository among thousands or millions of other papers.
For conference participants, especially those presenting papers, the story is equally sad. After spending all this time to write and review a paper, and develop a presentation, it gets only a casual audience on the 3rd parallel session in day 3.
It’s almost as if conferences are designed to spend 80% of effort on 20% of the potential results. So how could we harvest the remaining 80% when the effort is already spent? Continue Reading »
I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. - Richard Stallman
This is a stolen article from Zenhabits. Feel free to steal it forward.
The open-source movement for software has created impressive applications, such as some of the world’s leading content management systems. It has spinoffs on the internet and blogosphere , where Creative Commons offers various licences to authors enabling them to release their work while protecting their author rights.
The benefits of having knowledge in the public domain are paramount. Free access allowing everybody to build upon knowledge takes control away from governments, media, companies and institutions. It improves democracy, empowers individuals and develops the world. It enriches us all. It should be the default option.
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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