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Last week, a Content Management System vendor ran a seminar on how to select a content management system.
The Webinar was entitled "Choosing Between Open Source and Commercial CMS: Options and Implications". The vendor in question is a commercial CMS vendor, so there is no guessing which way the discussion was going to be slanted.
But actually, despite this company being pulled up before over the FUD in the marketing it produces, and this webinar being much the same, this is not actually the point of this blog post.
I went to join the webinar to see what they were going to say, and the first thing that struck me was that they required the user to install RealPlayer to watch the webinar. RealPlayer?! Really?! Those of you that have ever used RealPlayer in the past will know what a pain it is. There is a good reason why pretty much everyone switched to Flash-based video delivery about a decade ago.
Every minute or so RealPlayer decided that in fact I wanted to listen to 'blank.gif' instead and I had to repeatedly start again to get it to play. Oh and the slides stuck on the first slide of the webinar and never advanced.
It seems I was not alone, as looking at the twitter hashtag for the event #cmsselected the main discussion was on how the webinar platform was failing. There were a few Open Source advocates whom were trying to correct some of the FUD. But there was no discussion at all about the content of the webinar. Throughout the webinar the hosts repeatedly encouraged discussion on Twitter, yet clearly they were not paying any attention to what was going on. They were blindly going on without any attempt to feed back any of the backchannel concerns into the presentation or even acknowledge and apologise for the failings of their chosen platform.
It was a bit like a teacher carrying on at the blackboard not aware that the entire classroom had given up listening and was just laughing at the teacher's choice of clothing.
So, social media is a great tool. I've been on many webinars, interviews and podcasts in which it has been a fantastic backchannel for communication amongst the audience. Hosts that monitor these back channels (Scott Liewehr on CMSConnected, and Randal Schwartz on FLOSS Weekly are good examples) and feed these questions in gain great trust from the audience. They are empowering them to contribute to the webinar and turn it from merely a one-way presentation to a true discussion.
Those that don't just lose the respect of the audience.
