As the United States shut down earlier in the year due to COVID-19, most of us moved to having remote meetings instead of being in person. Zoom meeting and Zoom webinar applications are a very popular tool for that. Here you’ll learn a bit about each application and how best to use them.
Transcript of Zoom Webinar vs Zoom Meeting
(00:01):
Hey everybody. It’s Kim Shivler. Welcome today. I want to talk to you about the difference between zoom webinar and zoom meeting. Now, where we are still wrapped up in the COVID social distancing and all. Many of you have probably been in a zoom meeting. As the United States shut down earlier in the year, most of us moved to having remote meetings instead of being in person, and zoom meeting was a very popular tool for that. The zoom meeting, if you’re not sure, I will have a link to my blog post that shows you how to use zoom meeting. But for those of you who know, that’s where everybody logs in and you can see like the Brady bunch view of everybody’s picture, even if someone is not on screen, there is still a box for where they would be. And, then sometimes if you don’t have it on what’s called gallery view, which is the Brady bunch view, then what you might see is just a few people on screen and different people coming to the forefront when they’re speaking.
(01:13): Webinars work well for group presentations
Now, that’s probably the most common one for networking groups, et cetera. Webinars are a little bit different than meetings. In the sense of, if we think of the traditional webinar, it is usually where you have one, two, maybe up to four or five presenters, and then a lot of students or people watching the presentation, the discussion, the panel group, whatever the situation is, you can have these set up different. You can run a panel discussion, you can have a single instructor or just a few instructors. So I’m part of a group that I get invited onto a podcast every once in a while. And they’ll have four to six people discussing, uh, events from that week in WordPress, which is a piece of software to build your website. So in that case, in the webinars setting, you might have a hundred people watching, but the only people who are going to show up on the screen in pictures and voice are going to be those presenters that can sometimes be better, particularly for a training, because it’s not as distracting.
(02:34): Zoom meetings have host and attendees show on the screen, while Webinars show only the presenters and panelist.
If you’re just going to have one person speaking, it is less distracting to not, you know, to have just that person or one or two people, instead of all these other little blips, where for example, even if you aren’t presenting a lot of times, you can see people what they’re doing, they’re moving about, et cetera. So that is a webinar. And, zoom, something a lot of people don’t know is that zoom actually has a webinar option. So there’s zoom meeting and then there’s zoom webinar. I’m going to in a few minutes, hop over, we’re going to move into screen sharing mode. And I’m actually going to show you what that looks like. I actually do have zoom webinar as well as the zoom meeting. And I have a few other pieces of webinars software also that, and I’ve been teaching online for a lot of years and they’ve just kind of accumulated over the years. And in the future, I will be talking and writing about those also. But for today, I just wanted to start with understanding the difference between zoom webinar and zoom meeting. And as we go in, I’ll show you a few more options that, that you’ll notice that are different. If you’re in the webinar versus the meeting, let’s go share our screens.
Transcript of How to Host a Zoom Webinar
(00:00):
Hey everybody. Welcome back. It’s Kim Shivler. I wrapped up my last video where we had created a zoom meeting and also a zoom webinar. Talking a little bit about the difference between the two. I have gone ahead and created a sample one for us to actually launch. So I’m going to now show you back in my zoom here. I’m going to go ahead and start this webinar. I’m also going to show you in the blog post the screen that if I’m trying to get in, what I see that is letting me know that the host hasn’t started the webinar yet. That’s similar to the meeting. That’s what people see if they’re waiting. Now, when I start this webinar, I’m opening it.
(00:53): Preparing to go Live, Attendees, Panelists and Polling
And, here I am, now if you notice, practice mode only, attendees cannot join until you broadcast. So I am actually looking over here at my second computer and it still shows waiting for the host to start the webinar. So they don’t see anything yet. So this is my chance to check my makeup, make sure that my side here hasn’t fallen over because it does sometimes. And, uh, that I don’t have too many things behind me. All those little things I can just check. And, then when I’m ready, I can actually start the broadcast. Now, what I see here, if I click on participants, I’m only gonna see one for right now, because again, they’re still hidden, but I will, they will show up as attendees. They’ll only show up here as panelists. If I bring them up to panelist, if I promote them into the panelist area. And then here, you’ve got at the bottom, the area of polling. So if I had a pole, I could launch it here.
(02:12): Taking and Answering Questions
And this is where I would show, um, questions and I would see them. And if I choose to dismiss one, cause someone asked the question that I’m just really not going to answer. I can go ahead and dismiss it. You can see where questions are asked, answered, and dismissed. And then remember I showed you that I had it set to where the attendees only see the answered questions. They don’t see all of them. And sometimes it works out fine to let them see all of them; know your audience. Okay, so what I’m going to do then, let’s go ahead and broadcast and you will see, I am recording. I can stop that, pause that, et cetera. I’m going to go ahead and broadcast that. And the webinar is now broadcasting to everyone. So if I’m looking on my other screen, I’m actually seeing the webinar.
(03:05): Be Aware there is Short Delay from Presenter to Attendees
This is true of all webinars software. I have found there’s a short delay anywhere from 10 to 20 second delay of what they’re seeing and what you’re actually saying. And if you’re just in your office or room alone, you don’t know that cause you’re not seeing what they’re saying, but if you can watch yourself on the screen next to you, you will notice there’s a slight delay. I always like to let people know that. So that they know if you know if they’re asking questions, et cetera, it’s taking me time to get back to them. It’s the delay that I’m a little bit ahead of, of what they’re going to be seeing. So, what I now see, if I look at attendees, is this is my Kim user account. So I keep two because if I tried to log in as myself, it gets all confused because I’m the host.
(04:03): Webinar Interaction Options – Chat, Raise your Hand, Questions & Answers
I have a free account that I use to test for this right. Now. You’ll notice that people are asking while raising their hands. Then I can allow this person to talk. I can, uh, remove them. So if somebody is here, shouldn’t be here we can remove them. We can rename them and I can promote them to the panelist. Now it’s not going to be really exciting cause you’re just going to be seeing me from the side, but you can see what it looks like. So now I’ve got my core video, it’s up here, this is me. And, then she got something to have her video on and it’s, I’ve got the audio over there right now. Right now. That’s fine. See if the video,
(04:57): Other Video Options
I would have to allow her to have video. Let’s go ahead and allow that video to work. So the way I do that is I click down here, and see here where it says, this is on. More on that participants row, a panel, where you can see, allow the panelists to start their video. So now over here I could start my video. Not very exciting, but what you can see here. So, if I put us into gallery view, you’ve got me front on as the host and me over here as the panelist. And, then I can also, say somebody wants to come on and join for a few minutes, but then I just am going to put them back to attendee.
(05:46): Practice Makes Perfect
So what you can see here is there’s more flexibility with zoom webinar and working with your groups. And, particularly if you’re going to work with a large group, but it is quite a bit pricier. So that is the highlights or overview of zoom webinar. There also, if you’re going to play with zoom webinar before you run a webinar, any webinar, any webinars software. Run through it yourself several times, just with you. Get to know it, because as you see here, there’s even more functionality. There are different options. I can lock the webinar. Um, I can show the actor speaker view, which I was doing or the gallery view. There’s just more options. You don’t want that to be a surprise when you actually have people in the webinar. So, what I recommend, any time you’re learning to do webinars, practice, practice on your own, then a couple of friends and then get a small group and maybe even do a beta with 15 people, 20 people, 30 people, and see how it works, letting them know that oops, we might accidentally break something fall apart. I might accidentally stop it for everybody. That kind of thing. Uh, just so that you’re comfortable with it, particularly before you’re going to go and do a marketing webinar to 80 a hundred people when maybe you’re trying to actually engage them to become customers. We want those to go as smoothly as possible. I’m Kim Shivler. I’m going to end this webinar. I will see you next time as always, if you have questions, ask them in the comments on this blog post talk to you soon. Bye.