Tip: Webinar with a "buddy"
Posted by Kevin Micalizzi on Fri, Mar 20, 2009 @ 08:12 AM
Last week I had a great chat with Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer at SocialFish. Maddie and I connected through Twitter. They were looking at using Dimdim for their webinars and I was interested in understanding what they were doing.
A few minutes into our conversation they mentioned that they had attended a Featured Meeting: Dimdim Live Demo I hosted a few weeks ago. I had departed the slide deck and instead addressed questions as they came up in the public chat. Feedback on that session varied widely, some felt it was a great webinar because it was unstructured and "real", while at least one person felt it was "unprofessional."
Maddie and Lindy had great feedback for me -- I needed a "buddy." If I had used the buddy system, even an unstructured meeting like this would have had a better flow. Going without the structured slide deck, it was pretty easy to follow the public chat and address the questions being asked. At one point it "went native" and chat messages were scrolling by faster than I could read them. As it was just me running the meeting, I had to frequently pause to scroll back in the chat to make sure I wasn't missing questions.
It's a good idea to have someone (a "buddy") help with your webinar by managing the chat, filtering questions, and feeding the best questions to the presenter (often via private chat.) Taking this approach frees you as presenter to concentrate on the presentation and reduces the chances of interesting or important questions being missed in the chat.
That was one meeting where I could have used a "buddy". Thanks for the reminder Maddie and Lindy!
-k
Kevin Micalizzi, Community Manager
Dimdim Web Conferencing
e: kevin@dimdim.com
twitter: @dimdim
facebook: dimdim.com/facebook