If PowerPointless is trance-inducing in person, imagine how much less compelling it is when the presenter resides on the opposite end of a phone line and the viewer is alone in a cubicle or office with two days worth of work on the desktop and needy colleagues hovering about the entrance. Rallying geographically distributed management team members around your company’s mission and vision under the heading of “Quarterly Financial Update,” can be a challenge, but with careful agenda preparation and dynamic presentation, you can turn make these anticipated rather than dreaded events.

There are five keys to developing an effective webcast agenda.

• Present unique information – If all you are going to do is read the audience a published report – send them a link to the pdf and let them peruse it over lunch.
• Provide context – If the information that needs to be presented is quarterly financial results, distribute the numbers in advance and use the webcast event to provide context that helps members of the team understand the why behind the what.
• Reiterate common goals and give examples of how seemingly disconnected departments have contributed to achieving those goals. What recruiting and/or training successes has HR had that have contributed to the ability of R&D to develop or sales to sell the latest version of the product? What market intelligence did sales provide that enabled manufacturing to deliver a more successful product?
• Involve multiple presenters in the storytelling – Rehearsal is mandatory, but when the team hears the same message from multiple voices in their own words, it more quickly becomes the company’s story.
• Celebrate success – Share both corporate and personal achievements to connect geographically distributed team members.

The delivery format is equally important. Make technology work for you by choosing a delivery platform that enables you to keep the presentation moving without having to wait for files to load or awkward hand-off of presenter control. Allow the audience to see the presenters. Add pictures and video to demonstrate your points. Solicit opinions from the audience in the form of polling and invite questions through email or phone submission. Practice.

With compelling content and dynamic presentation, your management team will not only be informed, they will be energized.

Click here to learn more about Quicksilver's webcasting experience.

Kathy Morris has spent the last 10 of her 35 years in the communications business with Quicksilver. Her unique ability to rapidly ramp up on a client’s business, then present targeted information through the creative efforts of the production team she manages have been key contributors to the growth of Quicksilver’s live meeting and webcasting offerings.

People have trouble differentiating between webcasting and web conferencing. While participation via the Internet makes them similar, their optimal audience size and event impact make them different.

You are an executive for a global corporation. Your company is tightening its belt but you must still pass important information on to employees so they can achieve their goals in the coming year. You need to create excitement. You need to move seamlessly among presenters and prerecorded content. You need the wow factor. You consider using the Internet and are about to experience your first webcast.

A webcast is equivalent to a TV broadcast, in which a live (or prerecorded) program is sent from a central location to an unlimited number of viewers, streamed over the Internet as audio and video and received within a branded interface. Savings come from eliminating venue booking and travel costs. Participants still experience a high-end, branded meeting with consistent content, seamless transitions among presenters and prerecorded media with a live-meeting wow factor. The webcast is typically viewed using your computer’s web browser and Windows Media Player or RealPlayer. Different connection speeds can be used based on network needs. Presenters can use PowerPoint as well as pre-recorded media–all in real time. Interactivity can be achieved through audience questions and polling. A webcast retains the live-meeting-style production often provided by a production company. 

Ever get invited to participate in a WebEx, or Live Meeting event? You accept the invitation, dial into a phone conference bridge, connect to the Internet and login to the Web portion of the conference. You and a small group of participants share PowerPoint slides; have discussions; review white papers, etc. Perhaps you view a video or two, exchange control of the meeting and vote on issues. It is a good meeting and all for a reasonable cost. Sound familiar? You just experienced a web conference.

Web conferencing is similar to a face-face meeting or seminar, with multiple degrees of presentation, interaction and collaboration among a smaller group of users. These user-driven Web conferences are generally interactive with the ability to share presentation rights and control of applications among all group members. Attendees generally dial into a conference bridge to receive the audio in real time and access the internet to view the presentation. This technology continues to advance and some leading Web conferencing services such as WebEx and Microsoft Live Meeting are now offering versions which deliver the audio, presentation and video playback as a single Web connection. A Web conference is normally driven by the client who owns the licenses needed for everyone to participate. All media must be pre-loaded into each participant’s computer prior to being viewed making it difficult to ensure that all participants are receiving the same content at the same time.

Webcasting and Web conferencing each have their place in the world of corporate communications. It really depends on who you want to reach and with how big a bang.

Chris Bartot is a Senior Producer with Quicksilver who this past winter helped Right Management reach their leadership over three days using webcasting.

If you browse the web while you are at work, you have probably heard the term firewall. A firewall is a special hardware and/or software package dedicated to monitoring data transmitted from inside the company and received from the outside World Wide Web. Through a series of filters or rules, certain data is allowed to pass through the wall, while other data is dropped. In this day and age where computer viruses and hackers run rampant, a firewall provides a much needed and sometimes massive measure of security, protecting your company's data from outsiders while preventing users from visiting malicious websites that are equally damaging. Here’s how it works:

Let's say that there are 500 employees in your company. The company will have hundreds of computers with network cards connecting them together. In addition, the company will have one or more connections to the Internet through something like T-1 or T-3 lines. Without a firewall in place, all of those computers are accessible to anyone on the Internet. A hacker can probe those computers and make connections to them. With a firewall in place this cyber intrusion is less likely.

As much security and safety as a firewall offers, events like webcasts are often blocked, too, because they involve an active and on-going data stream from an unfamiliar source. If a large number of internal users are logged onto the webcasting stream at one time, your company's overall network usage and speed can be burdened. Imagine those 500 employees using 500 kbps (kilobits-per-second) or 50,000Mbps of simultaneous streaming. If your company only has one T-1 line, your network could be crippled for those employees who are not participating in the webcast.

If you are considering webcasting, it’s important for the content developers to form a close partnership with your Information Technology team. A firewall is not a piece of technology that can be toggled on and off like a light. Pre-webcast preparation involves testing all segments of the webcast's path from the point of origination to a viewer's computer. Knowing the path and pitfalls will ensure that critical messages reach your employees without disrupting your day-to-day operations.

Click here to find out about Quicksilver's experience with webcasting.