How to Produce an All-Day Webcast

Production

When it comes to production, keep calm and follow the plan. You've spent months of pre-production coming up with this plan; your mission on the day of the webcast is simply to execute it. The whole point of all that pre-production is to avoid the panic that comes with a webcast for which you haven’t adequately prepared. The pre-production should help ensure so that everything on the live webcast goes smoothly.

In production, I like to follow a show flow. If you’ve never seen one you can download a template. It allows you to follow by time of day every action that's going to happen onscreen and how you communicate that with your crew.

As the producer, I like to just float. I don't necessarily assign myself a specific task or job on the day of the shoot. I like to float around so that if someone needs a break, I just jump in and do their role for a little bit. I can also check on the stream here. I can see how different folks are doing. I can act as a stage manager at times, but it's good to have someone already in that role so that at least one person that can kind of float from role to role.

Throughout the show, you want to engage with the interactive features. We were fortunate to have a few people that were dedicated to the live chat module to moderate it in case there were language problems or anything like that, to engage with viewers, ask questions, put up whole questions, or pin notices at the top of that chat module to say, “The next session is coming up in five minutes. Be sure to stay tuned,” or “Replays will be available.”

Whenever you see a lot of frequently asked questions you can kind of pull those out. Answer them right there.

You want to be communicating to the viewers both through the live chat and onscreen, so your hosts or your moderators can acknowledge the viewers when they send in a question, e.g., “Susie from Boise asked this question. Thanks so much for sending it over. Let’s see what the panelists think about it.”

Stay in communication with your viewers throughout the day. As I mentioned before, creating pre-recorded content or interstitial content between sessions was great, but it’s also good to have title cards or slides that say, “The next session will begin at 1:00PM,” and even have a countdown timer or something like that.

When they know what’s happening in the next session (and how soon it’s coming), viewers are less likely to bail. They know what's coming up next and you can even tease that at the end of the previous session so that people will stick around.

Analytics

I recommend that you don't get too hung up on real-time analytics. It's important to look at those and see how many viewers you have, what's going on with the live chat, these things, and so on, but don’t spend all your time staring at the data that's coming in.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of looking at the analytics too often. If you notice a problem--say, if viewership drops rapidly from 5,000 to 100, maybe there's an issue that you need to investigate.

Production Issues

Keep in mind that no matter how well you pre-plan your production, issues are going to come up, but your plan will help you deal with them better. In the case of our event, at one point we lost picture on the screen switcher. Fortunately, it happened during the break, but as soon as it happened, I knew--because of the way I set up the signal flow--where it was happening. I reseeded an HDMI cable and the picture came back.

Sending Out an In-House Program Feed

Part of our setup included a green room or ready room for speakers and other editors who were doing a live chat and moderating questions. We sent a program feed out to that room down the hall. It was obviously helpful for them to have their own space, but it was especially good to have it separate from our control room because there was obviously a lot happening in there, there was a lot of sound bouncing around. If there are too many people in there, it can be distracting.

Whenever possible I like to send a program feed out to another room where people are getting their makeup done, kind of having casual conversations, and maybe doing some of this Q & A moderation. That sort of thing.

The clip below shows a quick sample of one of our sessions so you can see what the production looked like:

Note that with the audio in that clip, nobody is touching the mixer. It's just wide open. The Dugan is auto-mixing. As soon as our moderator jumped in with that followup, it switched the gain to his mic automatically and switched back to Randy as soon as he answered the next question.

Having an automixer on hand helps reduce your crew count. No offense to anyone who specializes in audio mixing (or to companies who produce manual audio mixers), but in some circumstances, an automixer like the Dugan can replace that role if necessary.

Post-Event

Much like a smooth production, post-event ease comes from pre-production planning. I can't stress enough just how important the pre-production is. For example, in the first year we did this, we relied solely on the vendor's analytics and figured, "OK, they've got that. We'll look at that when we get them." It turned out that the vendor-provided analytics didn't quite reveal everything that we were hoping they would, and didn't give us a clear picture of what actually happened on the day of. We planned ahead the next year to implement more robust analytics and to have multiple sets so we could compare and contrast and get a much clearer picture of what actually happened during the event.

The same goes for replays. You definitely want to have a plan ahead of the event of what you're going to do with the replay. Are you going to make it available immediately after? Are you going to wait awhile? Whatever it might be, know in advance what you’re going to do.

In our case, we made the decision to wait a week, and that was nice because it gave us a week to prep those replays. Then we essentially relaunched the event and released one session a day for a whole week. That gave it extra exposure on our site.

It’s also good to do a post-mortem on the whole project. Sit down with everybody involved, talk about what went right, what didn't go well, and how you can improve for next time.

For us, obviously, that’s easy to do because we're all in-house. If you’re working with a client and you just want to schedule that in, I’m sure they would appreciate it. That will help with the next event that comes along.

Here are some stats from our event: We had 5,800 registrations, and about 2,800 live viewers. The average time spent was more than 4 hours, and 82% of our attendees watched 3-6 hours. 31% watched the entire thing, which I just thought was incredible, considering we were streaming for 6.5 hours.

When it comes to online video, viewership numbers can be hard to see in context. You might think, “Taylor Swift has 250 million views on YouTube, and I had only 2,800,” which doesn’t seem all that impressive.

You have to compare it to real life. We do an in-person conference every year at McCormick Place in Chicago. It’s one of the largest convention centers in the country. We have roughly 2,200 financial advisors come in. It costs a lot of money to put this thing on, and it’s a huge event. I find myself standing in the keynote session with 2,300 advisors and big-name speakers and think, "Wow, this is amazing." Then I compare that to the 2,800 viewers we had for our webcast. Imagine all of those people watching it in the same place, and then the numbers start to look a lot better.

If there’s one part of this process I can’t emphasize enough with any lengthy or complex webcast, it’s pre-production. It's incredibly important to make sure you have all your ducks in a row before the day of the event. That will just make the day go that much smoother and everything that happens after that go much smoother.

It’s also important, if your goal is to keep viewers watching for four-plus hours, to engage and communicate with them throughout the event. You can’t just let a session end and then just hope they're going to stay for the break and come back.

You have to tease what’s coming up next, show something during the interstitial or during the break, and keep in constant communication with your viewers, whether through the live stream or through the live chat--whatever medium you have available.

Content is still king. It doesn’t matter you master all the pre-production and the technical elements of webcasting; if the content is not very good, they’re just not going to watch. We’re fortunate enough to have amazing writers, editors, analysts, experts in this field, and really valuable content that they produce, so naturally, a lot of the credit for the success of the all-day webcast we did last March goes to them.

For us as producers, when working with a client or event that features strong content, it’s really our job to make things go smoothly, get out of the way, and just let the content speak for itself. After all, that’s what's going to get people to stick around watching a webcast for 4+ hours on a Saturday during March Madness, right?