Pandemic + Recession = Webcasting: Cost-Effective Streaming for Public Health Communications

Hi, thanks for joining us for today's webcast. I'm Erica St.

Angel, and I'll be moderating for you today.

The title of today's presentation is, "Pandemic

Plus Recession Equals Webcasting: Cost Effective

Streaming for Public Health Communications.

And I'm delighted to have our presenter Matt

Duffy here with us.

He has over 20 years of experience in IT, having

worked in the private sector, multiple state agencies, and

the Wisconsin state legislature.

He now manages a staff that does desktop support, IT

security, telecommunications, videoconferencing, and

webcasting using the technology that you're

watching right now, Mediasite by Sonic Foundry.

A few bits of housekeeping about the player experience.

You'll see in some players an I button which is for

information, or in some a links tab.

And that will take you to some links about the presentation

today, and also a link to the Mediasite catalogue for the

state of Wisconsin, if you'd like to check that out.

There's also an ask button, a little speech bubble, and you

can click on that at any time to pose a

question to our presenter.

Please do include your email address, that way if we don't

have time to get to your question during the webcast we

can follow up with you afterwards.

This presentation will be available on demand.

You can watch it again right after the presentation's over,

just click on that same link.

And with that I'll turn it over to our presenter Matt.

Erica, thank you.

I need to thank Sonic Foundry for allowing me to come over

here and speak.

A couple things in the beginning, I was a part time

auctioneer, so I can start talking really fast. And if I

do, hit that ask button and let me know that I'm talking

too quickly.

Also, as you see from the title, it's "Pandemic and

Recession Webcasting, a Cost Effective Streaming for Public

Health Communications," that's the start of this.

But again, I'm going to go into a couple of different

things about how we got to where we are and tips for

having a successful webcast.

I think it's neat, most of my world is actually behind the

camera over there with Chops, and I have to

thank him for this.

So it's different being over here, so I'm going to try to

go as quickly as possible, but yet

getting everything included.

And again, any questions at all please ask them.

And also, if you want right now go ahead and hit that ask

button, let us know you're out there, where you're from, and

get used to using the ask button.

So with that I want to just step into this.

As Erica said, I work for the state of Wisconsin Department

of Health Services.

We have been doing, and Erica pointed this out to me, we've

been doing webcasting since 2003.

And if I could get the page down to work I would show you

how that would work on this.

And again, this is an example.

I'm doing this on purpose, because this is what could

happen in a webcast, or you could use the arrow key.

So again, some of the challenges, make sure the

equipment works ahead of time.

What started this, or what started my conversation with

Erica, is because we're using Sonic Foundry's Mediasite Live

to communicate to our partners and providers

during this H1N1 crisis.

This started in the fall, and the way that they had planned

to do any communications with local health departments,

hospitals, clinicians, and first responders was just

doing your regular bridge conference call using AT&T and

having a little poly com in the middle of the table.

And the first month's bill for that was $30,000.

And if you think about it, if you have close to 500 people

to 1,000 people on a conference call you get dinged

by calls by minutes.

And so you're trying to figure out how in the world can we

still address to communicate about our response, about the

state's response for H1N1, and not ring up cost like this?

Let me go back one more time.

So my staff was doing the webcasting for a long time.

Last year alone we had over 365 webcasts in the year.

So it averaged more than one a day.

We've had over 90,000 viewers watching this stuff.

So we realized that this is a great technology to

get the word out.

So we talked to Dr. Seth Foley, who's the head of the

Department of Public Health, saying, we could use this to

reach more and have richer content than just doing a

conference call.

So a little bit of history.

This started back in 2003 when we had monkey pox.

You may not remember this.

We had a huge scare in 2003 and it came in

with prairie dogs.

A cute little story, a friend that I work with, Brian

Wagner, was talking to our public information officer.

He said, we've got a small problem.

We need to get the word out.

We're going to have a huge press conference, but we want

to use a bridge call and record it.

How do we show most people about the problem with the

prairie dogs?

And my buddy Brian says, how do we know the prairie dogs

don't have a problem with us?

Sorry, I'm deviating from this.

Anyhow, how do we do it?

In steps Sonic Foundry, Joe Plasterer was working for

Sonic then.

Came over and we scrambled to get this press conference out

on the web.

And it was an amazing event.

We were so happy that we had almost 100 people

viewing this thing.

We thought, that's the best thing ever.

What we recognized is the savings in money, the savings

in travel time.

Right now in Madison, Wisconsin we're bracing for a

huge snowstorm.

We're doing this from here, I hope somebody's watching from

California or Florida, which, by the way, the Badgers are

going to beat them in football.

But I hope they're watching this.

You can be at the convenience of your desk, at your home

office, participating in these types of events.

So back to my H1N1.

The key was how do we get accurate information out to

our business partners and less costly than

this $30,000 a month.

So right now they're doing one webcast a week to over 1,000

people and it doesn't cost a dime.

Granted, we have the initial investment of our equipment,

we have our hosting fees, but that's already built into our

infrastructure.

And we're able to reach more people with richer content.

Also, it's available afterwards.

Let's say somebody can't be here for that event, and I'm

sure you guys are going to want to send this webcast to

everybody you know of, even my mother.

Remember, the camera adds 10 pounds and I have

two cameras on me.

OK, sorry, moving on.

A good example of what I said about different content.

When we did this over a poly com and over a bridge machine,

somebody would hold up a graph for each our H1N1 responders

and try to show the trends of the disease and track it.

Now how are you going to do that over a poly com, or over

a regular bridge conference call?

At least here they're able to show graphs like this.

I have no idea what this means.

The other important thing is you notice the dip in the

graph down on the far right, I think that's a good thing.

But again, you don't need to.

I'm not the content expert.

I have staff that are experts in running this technology.

We're able to come in and get the content experts out there

to the people that need to see it.

Again, here's another graph.

We're able to incorporate some the GIS stuff.

It's adding so much more to just a conference than the

hand puppet, if you will.

Also, how it works.

This is an example.

This is Ed Robotsky of my team setting up for a webcast. What

you'll see is a mixer here, and you'll see the screen for

our Mediasite Live unit.

We don't have a studio, so we make stuff mobile.

Albeit it's H1N1 right now.

It could be monkey pox, we've had other things, lead, lead

in venison.

We've had other things with safe traveling in snow, E.

coli stuff.

We're able to run this stuff into any

conference room or mobile.

The key is having great staff to do this.

Now myself and Ed Robotsky do this, but the real key person

is Deb Steinbach, she's back home in the office.

She schedules, keeps us on track and on time.

So again, you can see this is how we're set up.

There's a big mixer in there.

If you're using this technology now you'll

understand what I'm saying.

But it's straightforward, it's easy,

we've had a huge success.

I wanted to show you this, how it really works.

That was how it works.

This is how it really works.

Look at these two guys, here's Gary and Ed acting like, oh my

gosh, I made the mistake of saying I wanted to show them

on this webcast. So that's what we did.

So these two guys can talk to me at work afterwards.

OK, just a quick overview of the technology.

Again, back in 2003 we had no idea what we

were getting into.

What's neat about the stuff from Sonic Foundry and

Mediasite Live, you get a box, an appliance if you will, that

will put the video in the audio and the Powerpoints, and

it'll put it all together for you.

So you don't have to have many different technologies.

You can just go in, set it up in a room similar to like we

have here and similar to my other shots.

You can do this recorded or can do it live.

This is a live event, this will be available afterwards.

Sometimes we just do recordings and make them

available for training programs.

We at the Department of Health Services are lucky enough to

have the Department of Administration house this

content for us, and all for other state agencies.

We have a lot of content out there, as I said.

It doesn't cost as much as far as disk space.

So the benefit, going back again, this training is

available live or on demand.

We don't have to schlep trainers all over the state of

Wisconsin to help people out with whatever the needs are,

birth to three, aging, H1N1 in this case.

We can just have people stand in our building, and yet

getting the word out to so many others.

Here's just an example of our catalogue.

We just went from 4.3 to 5.2 and we're just trying to

figure out the catalogue.

Great sources of training out on the Sonic site.

Great resources, the user's group is good.

And so we're learning as we go, but we're also still

delivering as we go.

Even this morning alone we already had a webcast. I

shifted gears.

I was so excited on our first monkey pox, we

had almost 100 on.

We've had webcasts that have close to 2,000 people

viewing them live.

So just think about that for a second.

The benefit of reaching that number of people that quickly

in an hour's time.

They don't have to travel, we don't have to travel.

So this is a huge thing for our future.

And it just shows right here.

A little side note, one of the most watched webcasts that

we've done is for our retirement service, and it was

about state employees retiring.

And that was huge.

That was over a three year period of time.

I think we have close to 4,000 people have now viewed that

thing, and I thought that was really pretty cool, until this

H1N1 thing came about last spring.

We had, like I said, close to 500 to 1,000 people on there.

In a two week time period over 7,000 people had viewed that

web cast.

And when you think about it, that you have small clinics in

Florence County, up in Wisconsin, that we're now able

to give them access to some of this high tech, real time

information using this technology that I don't know

how they'd get it before.

They could get it by snail mail, but who knows how long

it would take.

Also, I don't want to tease any of the stuff in Florence,

I think Florence just got the internet last year.

I have friends up there.

Building a team.

One of the things that's key in doing these webcastings,

webinar, webcasting, using the Sonic Foundry's Mediasite Live

equipment, you have to have IT, you have to have

communications, and you have to have

subject matter experts.

With my IT staff we rarely have problems. But when we do

we have to have somebody on the other end like Chops.

Do we call him Chops?

That's right.

That are able to troubleshoot, know what they're doing, can

figure out some of the basics from the audio and the video,

and the VGA connection to get the Powerpoint.

The other key thing is communications.

Because of the format that you can advertise these webcasts,

of course I showed you the catalogue, you can send people

directly to the link that you have for

whatever the event is.

And again, that link stays the same for the

live event or on demand.

So somebody, however they wanted to store it, could get

back to prerecorded ones or the live events.

Also, the key thing, subject matter experts.

One of the reasons that this succeeds at the Department of

Health Services is our subject matter experts don't have to

know the technology.

It's pretty straightforward and pretty easy

once you're set up.

So the subject matter expert will come in, they know their

program, they know their constituents, and they know

what they need to say and do.

They don't have to understand this technology.

We're able to get it for them and package of for them, and

then a lot of them have their own web sites and they can

provide links to these webcasts from those sites

themselves.

Again, I mentioned about my staff.

I have to keep going to this.

Again, these guys are dedicated, hard workers, and

they're acting like they're pointing to a mixer like

they've never seen it before.

Deb Steinbach is key.

OK, IT.

When we first brought in this technology, and I can make fun

of IT because I came from the IT, I'm a

coder from the beginning.

They thought the world was going to end when you plugged

this thing into your network.

Says, oh my gosh.

They thought bandwidth issues were going to be huge and

security was going to be a mess.

It's not that way.

I'm not sure, I don't understand all of it from the

Sonic Foundry side of things in the Mediasite, but we've

never had any security issues, bandwidth issues, or anybody

with any download issues.

We've had over 1,000 people viewing these webcasts and we

haven't had problems.

Some of the problems that we do have, I've noticed, is that

in some of the counties that we do business with, they

block video.

And the only way that I can say to address that is they

have to get over it.

I think that the way the technology is today, the way

that people want to communicate, the way that

these young people are coming out of colleges, and in our

case these clinics throughout the state, throughout the

nation, they need to be able to watch video.

They need to be able to watch rich streaming content that

Mediasite does with this product.

Again, viewing problems. What we found also, that some

people didn't have the current version of either Real Player,

the IT department blocks it, that was our biggest thing.

Or one of the worst ones is they click on the link twice,

they have two of the windows open and they hear it echoing

when this thing's going on.

So if you hear any echoing now that means you have two

viewers open.

Couple of things.

One of the reasons that we started working with the staff

early when they're doing webcasts about what to what to

wear, don't let him wear shirts like this.

This is the only thing I had ironed.

You want solids.

Now Erica has a solid, if they zoom back over to her.

You don't want to have-- see if I move it's, sorry about

that, OK, it's going to be goofy.

Again, I wore this to give you an example of what not to do.

What's kind of neat, when we when we started to introduce

this into the department people weren't

so sure about it.

Now they're getting to the point of when they schedule a

webcast they want to make sure the coloring's right.

They want to make sure that their suit or their jacket

works with what they're discussing.

They even coordinate it with the other people that are

presenting.

And it's neat to have these subject matter experts take

ownership in that to get a better and a more successful

webcast.

It's funny, before we started this thing there was a

scurrying of activity.

I forgot my laptop, I was able to get another laptop here,

just the things that you go through in regular business

days, as well as IT.

Not a big deal, you're able to function, get these things

connect, it's pretty standard.

This is what's neat.

One of the reasons we do over 300 webcasts a year and we

have that many viewers is we recognized early that you have

to have key technicians and people organizing it.

I can't say enough about Deb Steinbach.

She's the one who does the first

contact with our customers.

She helps get them scheduled, get it coordinated with other

webcasts that we have, and helps to make sure that they

have their content, they know that the email's going to get

out to their constituency, or their viewers or their

business partners, getting all that set ahead of

time, that's key.

Also having great technicians there during the webcast, also

doing tests before hand.

We just upgraded to 5.2 and we're having some problems

now, but that's more on our end and on the security part,

because you just want to make sure you test

it and get it working.

We're at the point where now we usually didn't do any

pregame warm ups, if you will.

We usually started our webcast 5, 15 minutes early.

That's always a good thing to do, to work out any audio

problems, internet connection problems.

99% of our webcasts go just fine without any problems. The

other 1% of that usually is human error.

So we've had a great, great success rate.

And my staff will tell you usually that human error was

me back at the office.

Back to some serious stuff.

Out division administrator, they, at the secretary level

of our department, recognized web casting as a core

communication tool that our department's going to use.

And so because of that, that's another reason why we have a

great success with this.

Having the buy in from the leadership is key.

And I think it's an easy buy in to get.

You have to have successes and it has to work, and that's key

on your IT staffing part, like Ed Robotsky and Gary Roth that

do this for me.

They're just wonderful to have and do the work.

That's why our division administrators are saying this

is a core communication tool that we are just going to use.

Moving on, I mentioned about this.

Getting people to participate, we do trainings where we have

multiple people in the room.

We're doing less and less of big trainings where a lot of

people are in the room.

They found that they can watch this training, or content,

when they have the time to do it.

So when it's more convenient for them, when they're not

stressed at getting phone calls.

So that's another huge thing.

We do have some people come in the room, we

make it a big event.

We also have a room that has three cameras

so we can get questions.

Here was an interesting thing.

This is a good gauge to see if your constituency, or your

viewers or business partners are getting the technology.

When we first started H1N1 we got a few questions.

And hopefully you guys are asking questions or hitting

that right now.

I think the last H1N1 that we did, webcast, we had close to

200 questions.

So they're really getting it, they're really getting the use

of this technology.

That's a gauge to see if it's working well.

We've reached every county with this.

We've had over 72 counties, and as I said, first

responders, and hospitals, the bigger Aurora

Healths down in Milwaukee.

What else?

Think about going back to the $30,000 that we spend on

bridge conference calls, that's just a business, I

think, that needs to change.

Don't get me wrong, I think that there may be a need for

that, but you have to think about it.

When you can use this type of a content, reach more people,

have it available on demand, and actually show stuff in

screens versus just trying to describe it over the phone,

and there's a savings.

I think that this equipment has paid for itself I'm not

sure how many times over in our department, just on things

like that alone.

OK, here's another cute little example that

you can do with Mediasite.

I'm not sure if you can do it with other technologies, but

it's a great example of how we the state, working together,

can do things.

We have common goals and good apples, I'll tell you about

that later, and if you stay focused.

Those that are as old as me, remember Johnny Carson, he'd

do the great card act, hold an envelope, just a little thing,

just stay with me.

This is another example.

By the way, how we do a successful webcast?

We do little things like this in the beginning to make sure

that the audio works, the video works, and the

Powerpoint works.

So that's why I'm showing it here.

So I just want you to look at a card.

Just simply pick a card, stare at it, know what that card is.

Alright.

What was that card?

Think about it, see it in your head three times, picture it.

Everybody's got it?

Now I'm going to pull your card that you were looking at

out of this thing, out of the deck that we had, this second.

I'm going to pull it out right now.

There, your card's gone.

Again, using Mediasite

technology makes this possible.

Alright, so long handed, long winded auctioneer type voice

on that, that's a summary of what we did at the Department

of Health Services using Sonic Foundry's Mediasite technology

to do webinars and to do webcasting to our H1N1

response, to many other responses, to many other

trainings and just quick meetings.

We've had it from 10 people on to 1,000.

So hopefully you have some questions for

me, my email's here.

I think that's what we need to do,

especially now in a recession.

I think that if you guys have good ideas out there that you

can share with me to help me do better with technology, I

would love to know that.

And same with me, if I can share anything in any of my

successes, or failures, we learn a lot from that.

So with that said, are there any questions of you that

you'd like to ask me at this time?

Thanks Matt, and great presentation.

And we do have questions coming in.

And as a reminder, there's a little speech bubble on the

Mediasite player.

In the classic it's in the upper right, and in the

silverlight player it's in the lower right, I believe.

And you just click on that and ask a question.

Again, if we don't have time we'll follow up with you

afterwards.

So before we get started, you had mentioned Mediasite Live,

and it's interesting.

That is the name of the product, when we very first

brought it out it was called Mediasite Live, in case you

were wondering.

And it was really because the emphasis, we thought, was

going to be on doing live webcasts like what you're

watching live right now.

But you also said you've moved more to on demand, that

sometimes you do both.

I wondered if you could talk about the difference there.

Great point.

It's so funny, like you said, I started this long enough

that that's what it was.

Most of the state agencies who we work with, a lot of them

just do on demand only.

And it's funny that when we first started this our goal

was live broadcasts.

And I thought that was the best thing ever, I thought

that was just the neatest thing.

However, not really quite understanding until we got

further into it, the value of having the stuff on demand.

You'll know this as soon as you either remove some of

these from your catalogue or take it off, you realize how

important it is, that people really, really do come and

watch this stuff afterwards.

Great reporting tools in this new version of 5.2 to see how

many people are watching stuff on demand.

So yeah, I'm sorry, MSL, Mediasite, I'll say

it the right way.

But we have a ton of stuff, and as I mentioned, the H1N1,

three weeks ago we had 500 people on live, which I

thought was great.

One week after that we had close to 3,000.

So do the math.

There's a huge benefit to people doing it live, but the

real benefit, I think, is there's a lot of stuff on

demand that you can get.

And it's a great note taker.

And for the live then it's more of a both/and

proposition, so you do the live and then share it after

the fact, right?

And something else you mentioned was your customers.

I thought maybe you could explain a little bit about how

you work for the state agency but you

still mentioned customers.

It's interesting.

We have a lot of government to government, government to

business, and then government to people.

I call them constituents.

A lot of our business partners, if you will, are

government to hospitals, government to counties, which

is government to government.

I still call them customers, partially because my group

does customer service, but again, you want to think about

how can you meet the needs of your

audience, of your customers.

So that's what we do.

Like I said, we'll have counties call in and clinics

call in just wanting to know when we're going to do this on

various topics.

And they just look at it as a regular way of

doing business now.

And how difficult was it to coordinate all the people to

attend, you mentioned the H1N1 webcast, but you've had other

pandemic issues and other training issues.

Do you find people go to a central location, a designated

station, and watch there?

Or are they watching from their home office?

How do people watch?

It's funny too, when we recognize counties that don't

have real good internet, a lot of them will watch it together

in a room, conference room, get a projector and put

speakers on the PC.

What we would do when we do some of these H1N1s, we'd ask

in the beginning.

Like I said on this one, hit the ask button, gets them used

to using it, and then please tell us where you're at, who's

watching, how many are in the room.

I'd venture to say more people are just watching it at their

desk versus going to a conference room and having

multiple in there, but we do have both.

And that leads into one of the questions we had, which is

about the slowest connection speeds.

Because Wisconsin does have a lot of rural areas, are you

finding any issues on the viewing end with bandwidth,

not so much the push, but the pull?

Well that's a good question, too.

I don't know.

Because of the capabilities of 5.2 in Mediasite, that you can

stream in various speeds, that was one of the other problems.

People that still had dial up, for those that do in Florence

county, they still have dial up.

That can be an issue.

One of the other neat things you can do with Mediasite is

you can do a publish to go.

So worst case scenario, you can burn the stuff to a CD and

ship those things up and they can watch it if they have

real, real slow internet connections.

When we started in '03 that was a pretty big problem.

Right now, in '09, it's not that big of a deal.

And there are two, just from a technical side, you can set

the settings to detect what connection speed you have, so

it'll automatically dial itself down for people.

But often people will decide, for whatever reason, the video

isn't crucial.

If you know that you're going to be streaming to a--

give you an idea there.

I was going to say, exactly, that's why we're

here, stuff like that.

Most of us, the time there is that added component of being

able to watch, but there is a way to turn that off so you

just have audio and slides.

I'll have to get out to her blog to know that stuff.

It's a very good blog, by the way.

And last question I was going to ask you that came in was in

terms of getting this adopted.

You obviously have some early adopters, people who are

comfortable in front of it.

But you mentioned you began with the

bridge on the H1N1 calls.

How did the whole idea to use webcasting, was that them

coming to you or you going to them, how did that come about?

The first thing, you have to have somebody who's gutsy

enough to go out and try this stuff first. And when we did

it in '03 I'd like to think that that was when it--

When did Sonic Foundry start?

We've been around since '91, but this is about 2000.

2000, OK, so three years into it.

So you have to have somebody who's gutsy enough to try it,

but it's been out there long enough.

It's a proven technology.

And you don't have to do Ernst and Young, I think they're out

of business, do an analyst on this thing, or

Deloitte and Touche.

It's here, it's working, so that's key, that's the number

one success.

And then to be able to come in with a tool that you already

know will function well, you have to have somebody in IT, I

think, or in the business area, that'll champion it to

get the stuff in.

And then once you have the base of individuals that know

how to use this technology, then we went and discussed

with the areas.

In most departments you have a big communication group.

And if you can get to that core communication group and

tell them you have this technology, then I think it's

an easy sell.

Get a couple successes, and then, as I showed the division

administrator, this is the core communication tool that

we're going to use.

So the early win, find the right, find the gatekeepers.

And the key is get the wins.

Don't get this all set up and don't have it fail, because

people will come and say, that technology never worked.

The key is key individuals around you, Ed and Gary and

Deb, have it succeed, and then they keep coming back.

And they keep coming back to this technology.

Well, we're out of time.

If you do have other questions just click on that ask button,

even in on demand mode, and those questions will come in

and we'll route them to Matt.

I want to thank you for presenting for us today.

And if you'd like to watch again you can just click on

the exact same link.

There's also a share button, there's a

little email envelope.

If you want to share this with someone else just click that

link and you can put in their email and that'll

send it on to them.

Thanks again for watching, have a great afternoon.

Thank you.