I always advocate preparing for a public webinar with as many backups and failsafe contingencies as you can manage. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred they will be completely wasted and you will feel faintly silly for going through the hassle (and possibly the expense) of setting up an extra computer, extra phone line, extra headset, printed copies of your presentation material, an emergency audio conference number, and preparation for having someone else advance your slides. But that 100th time, you will feel like a hero for being able to continue with your webinar even in the face of something going wrong.

But even with the best planning and safeguards in place, you can still hit a catastrophic event that forces abandonment of your webinar or loss of access for a significant portion of your audience. I have had to cancel webinars due to fire alarms in the building and safety evacuations on September 11, 2001. Oprah Winfrey and Arnold Schwarzenegger have both faced webcast breakdowns that prevented large numbers of potential participants from joining their events.

Last week it happened to Brainshark, a company that ironically enough stresses the value of creating recorded presentations in place of, or in addition to, live webinars. They were giving a live educational webinar for users of their technology. They wanted to encourage lots of interaction and teamwork in the audience, so they decided to use “breakout sessions” in their webinar. This is a feature found in a few of the biggest webinar technologies, allowing a host to segment attendees into smaller meeting groups where they can interact before all coming back to the full-attendee presentation. Brainshark was using Microsoft Office Live Meeting, which includes the functionality.

Even though they tested the functionality ahead of time, something went terribly wrong in the live event. Every attendee coming in to the session had presenter-level control of the slides! So people were moving slides forward and backward for the entire audience, making the presenter’s job almost impossible. Then when they tried to start the breakout groups, one of the subgroups found themselves locked out of their meeting room (Possibly because an early entrant with presenter-level control changed a setting… It’s hard to tell).

Many attendees abandoned the meeting as a lost cause. Others stayed, but the Brainshark organizers had to admit that it wasn’t the professional experience they wanted to provide, and they didn’t have a chance to deliver the educational value or the image of their company that they should have.

So they did the right thing. As quickly as they could, they wrote an email and sent it to all registrants for the event. I won’t attempt to reprint the entire communication in this post, but you can click here to read it.

What did Brainshark do right?

  • They communicated quickly (within 90 minutes)
  • They took responsibility
  • They empathized with the audience’s experience
  • They gave a brief explanation to satisfy curiosity without lingering on blame
  • They emphasized the positive rather than the negative
  • They said what they were doing to redeliver the promised value

Taking a fast, proactive position in this way can help alleviate a lot of pent-up frustration and anger. I saw one response email that came back to Brainshark. In part, it said:

“In spite of all the technical difficulties yesterday, I THOROUGHLY enjoyed the webinar and I feel like I got a lot out of it.  Nobody likes feeling like they are wasting time, but I could see the value of the content, and I could see that technical issues were the main issue.

But hey, you and your team did a great job of keeping your cool and working together to make the most out of it… and I’m sure anyone else who was lucky enough to get into one of those breakaway sessions enjoyed it as much as I did.  I really got a lot out of the scriptwriting session and look forward to looking at the others once they are in Brainshark.”

Your audience can appreciate a cool and calm approach to disaster management and recovery. They appreciate being told what happened. They appreciate being told how they will be able to get the benefits they were promised. And mainly they appreciate being respected and valued enough to be kept in the loop.

My thanks to Brainshark and Irwin Hipsman, Brainshark Director of Customer Community, for letting me use their problematic session as a learning experience for others.

By Ken Molay, president of Webinar Success

Originally posted on The Webinar Blog