"There's nothing wrong with failing if you learn from it, and I've failed out here plenty." -Trent Dilfer (SuperBowl Quarterback)

There must be over 100 quotes related to experimenting, failing, and ultimately succeeding.....today we opted to deliver a best practices session by experimenting with break out rooms. If you attended, you'll know what I'm talking about. This was the first time we used these sub-groups within Live Meeting. Our hope was to provide you with a best practices overview and then enable you to choose the topic you were most interested in (scripting, audio, slides).

The good news is 250 people registered making it one of our most popular customer facing webinars to date (over 150 attended). The bad news...the meeting did not logistically go so well and many of you abandoned in frustration.

We use Microsoft Live Meeting for web conferencing and although we rehearsed this particular session multiple times, we were not able to rehearse with 150 people. In summary here were some of the challenges during today's live event...

1) For this type of meeting, Live Meeting allows anybody to take control of the slides. Therefore some of the attendees took control of the slides at various points in the session. This made it very difficult for the presenter and confusing to the audience.

2) When it was time to move people into their breakout rooms, some of the attendees transferred successfully and others simply did not for a multitude of reasons. While we're working with our Live Meeting provider to investigate all the issues, we certainly won't be planning any break out sessions in the near future.

Thankfully we still have Brainshark! We will be recording this series into Brainshark presentations for on-demand viewing. These should be available next week and I will send them to you personally in a follow up email. I hope that you have a better understanding of what we were attempting and what went wrong.

We are starting to plan the Q2 webinars and if there are any topics you would like us to cover or presenters to suggest please let us know. I look forward to seeing you at a future event....Irwin

Irwin Hipsman
Director of Customer Community
Brainshark, Inc.