The Virtual Meeting Coach

I’ve been in a flurry of local activity for the last 10 days or so and every conversation has come back to this question:

“What are you doing to prepare yourself and your people to respond in real-time to the tidal wave of buyers, patients, learners, workers, and clients who are already online now shopping for what you have to offer?”

This little slide show does a masterful job of outlining the issues and some of the challenges facing people working in the arenas of telehealth, telemedicine, and the other domains covered by connected health.

But the issues are the same for people who want to learn from you online, people who want to buy houses from you online, people who want to work with you online, and clients who want you to consult with them online. Take a look:

So what’s your plan? How are you gearing up to serve digital consumers?

They’re already online looking for what they want. And if you want them to “meet” with you, you need to be able to meet them digitally. Virtually. Online.

If you’re not sure how to get started safely – and confidently – please let me help you start stepping through a simple way you can start using virtual meetings to serve e-buyers, e-patients, e-learners, and e-clients the way they want to be served by you!

Real-time virtual meetings aren’t rocket science, friends. And, if you’re not already using virtual meetings to empower digital buyers, digital patients, digital learners, and digital clients, time’s a’wasting… You’d better believe it: your competition is gearing up right now.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you already know I’m crazy about all kinds of virtual meeting tools. And in this economy, I’m especially crazy about helping people practice their chops using some of the fabulous new FREE tools.

DimDim is one of the best of the free web conferencing, virtual meeting, internet conferencing, online meeting tools out there. They recently published a new set of simple setup tutorials and if you’re ready to dive in and explore, you can’t go wrong using them. Go here to find a well-organized set of tutorials.

Then, when you’re ready to focus on how to think about and organize your virtual meetings so you get – and keep – the rapport you need with the folks you’re meeting with, come back and see me here. Your next step? Get yourself a copy of The Coach’s Short List and sign up for my next live – or online – training.

It’s not rocket science learning to setup and use virtual meeting tools skillfully.  It’s also not something most people want to do without some help – until they get good at both the technical part AND the relationship part. That’s what I’m here for.

DimDim just made it a lot easier to get started!

I can’t count the number of people who have asked me in the last month for a list of apps that might help them simplify their meeting scheduling processes. I haven’t had time to compile a list like that yet, but now I’m not going to bother. Readwriteweb.com just published a great post yesterday that lists 10 top apps. You can find it here.

I like TimeBridge a lot and it integrates seamlessly into DimDim for virtual meetings. I also use Doodle regularly with multi-party local and nonlocal groups, like project teams, committees and boards. Until I saw the post at ReadWriteWeb, I hadn’t heard about Tungle, but it looks very cool so I just signed up.

If you’re ready to simplify your meeting scheduling life, this list is a great place to start.

ComputerWorld tells the truth: Thinking videoconferencing is plug-and-play could get you into hot water.

This is precisely why I wrote “The Coach’s Short List.”Virtual meetings are not rocket science. But you can really screw up relationships – and jeopardize critical outcomes – if you don’t plan and practice well. And these days, no one’s got time, capital, or relationships to waste.

Ticor Title will be sponsoring an abbreviated version of “The Short List Workshop” with Southern Oregon REALTORS in about two weeks.  I can’t wait!

I worked with REALTORS often in Austin. They’re just about the most social animals on the planet! So I’ll be excited to see this bunch get a big-picture and crucial-details overview… and then take-off with it.

I’ll let you know how things go. Maybe you’d like me to bring “The Short List Workshop” to an office near you…

Live or online?

One activity ripe for re-engineering is the the way we do project update meetings which, in their traditional form, can be expensive, time-consuming, and not always terribly productive.The mission of most project meetings is to update project participants on work status.

Even today, most project meetings are organized for speed rather than quality and seldom incorporate more than basic participation. But this is starting to change. In the last few years, dispersed teams have begun experimenting with new approaches to project meetings, including the use of live, two-way and group conversations held online in multimedia web conference rooms.

Enough practical experience has been accumulated that it’s now possible to draw some conclusions about two-way and group web conferencing. The good news is that it can lower costs, save time, improve quality, and enable more people to participate more often. Taken together, these benefits have the potential to help business managers boost productivity.

Project conferences that utilize webconferencing need careful planning and may require some technical and production support. But when properly planned and implemented, virtual meetings deliver at least five significant benefits:

1. Cost savings Without the need for air and ground travel, hotel lodging, dining, and so forth, a full-service e-meeting costs, on average, about one-fifth as much as a traditional on-site meeting.

2. Higher attendance – It is totally possible to conduct electronic meetings that generate attendance rates as high as or higher than traditional on-site meetings – in the 90-100 percent range. But this is unlikely to happen unless the web conference is supported by a well-planed invitation campaign.

To some people, a “web conference” can seem less important than an on-site meeting. To get around this bias, your invitation process needs to convey the importance of the meeting and include a series of reminder communications in the days (and/or hours) prior to the meeting.

The Coach’s Short List offers a time-tested template for setting up and managing your invitation process. While web meeting setup does need to be handled carefully, experience shows that e-meetings can have an even higher rate of participation than on-site meetings because of the convenience of attending (saving traffic time, etc.).

3. Simultaneous tracking, assessing, reinforcement of group agreements and learning - Virtual meeting rooms, especially those equipped to record meetings, have built-in support for displaying and tracking the real-time participation of all meeting partiipants. Recordings can provide valuable off-line reinforcement of agreements reached as well as documentation of new issues that may have arisen during the meeting. Visual elements including slides, whiteboard sketches, and live document edits allow you to more fully engage meeting participants and can also be shared later with team members who might not have been able to attend the meeting in real-time.

4. More time and effort on task – Holding project management meetings in various geographic locations to accommodate team members can consume a great deal of travel time and cause significant wear and tear on the whole team. Sparing travel time by making it possible for people to meet from the convenience of their own offices not only saves expenses, it focuses critical human energies on crucial project tasks instead of travel.

5. Increased understanding for non-native speakers – The opportunity to share and annotate slides, sketches, documents, spreadsheets, pictures and more in virtual conference rooms can reduce or eliminate potential misunderstanding, especially in situations where one language is dominant among some project members, but not all of them. Second-language challenges are lessened when project updates take place in virtual conference rooms equipped with voice, video sharing, whiteboards, photo display, text chat and video display functions.

Real-time access to data in multiple formats can significantly reduce delays and potentially damaging misunderstandings, especially when recordings are posted so they can be reviewed at a later time to verify what was communicated.

A COUPLE OF RECOMMENDATIONS

If you’re a regular reader, you know how much I like to use the free web conferencing tools. Recent episodes of The Virtual Meeting Coach Show, for instance, were recorded in a vYew room. In addition to vYew, two other full-featured free tools I enjoy using and recommending to clients are DimDim and WiZiQ.

DimDim was designed with business audiences in mind and has a high-end look and feel that may be just what you need for your group. WiZiQ is a full-featured virtual classroom, created to make learning with others at a distance – and in real-time – real easy. (WiZiQ is also a social-network for teachers and learners of all kinds and includes a dedicated group for project managers that you can join for free and learn wit peers!)

DimDim

WiZiQ

Both tools are full-featured online conference platforms that offer real-time access to voice conferencing (with or without webcams), video and photo sharing, live text chat, desktop sharing, and interactive whiteboards that make it easy for groups to take notes together in real-time, including annotating slide presentations. Both also offer recording capabilities and the ability to embed your recordings in websites, blogs, or moodles. DimDim offers the added benefit of direct integration with Facebook and Yahoo’s collaborative messaging app, Zimbra.

You can sign up to use the free versions of both programs with no obligation for as long as you’d like. If you decide you like one – or both – both sites offer very reasonably priced premium/pro memberships that include more features, offer more seats for participants, and the option of branding your meetings with your personal or company logo. Neither will break the bank.

You can try DimDim here.
You can try WiZiQ here.

If you’re on the hunt for ways to save money and time and boost productivity in your project meetings, I recommend you try out one or both of these platforms with your team. I’ve had great success using all three – vYew, DimDim, and WiZiQ- with a variety of groups!

In future posts, I’ll have more to say about a handful of other specialty web conferencing tools that sport fewer bells and whistles than these full-featured tools but work just great when you don’t need a Full-Meal Deal.

With the economy still in fragments, lots of people say they’re too busy to investigate social media. They think of social media as too new to mess with.

In the last week, I’ve had at least a dozen people tell me they can’t “waste time” on Twitter. They say they’ve got too much to do already, running from place to place to meet with “real” people, to put up a LinkedIn profile or a Facebook page.

These kinds of conversations, both live and online, worry me. Because the thing is, as I heard my new friend, Rene Fabre, tell a room full of title agents, Realtors, and lenders yesterday in Medford, Oregon, social media technologies aren’t new.

Some of them are 10 years old!

I’ve been reporting in this blog about online medicine. And online government. And online education. And I’ve been talking about some of the free virtual meeting tools available to talk to your doctor, participate in government, and learn whatever you want – all at a distance. This stuff isn’t rocket science. And it’s not new. Yet it amazes me how many people are still operating in the dark about it.

If you’re someone feeling relatively “in the dark” about virtual meetings – or working with other people who are – here are two videos I suggest you take a couple of minutes to watch. Feel free to link back here to share them with your friends. This is Telepresence. And it’s right here, right now, and coming soon to your town and your neighborhood. Maybe your home.

The first video shows Cisco CEO, John Chambers, and Marthin De Beer demonstrating the newest iteration of Cisco’s Telepresence system for an Indian audience. This isn’t Star Trek, it’s real life, right now. And yes, it’s real expensive. If you don’t have the money to put one of these into your organization right now, I suggest you use the time between now and when you find that money to practice using the FREE virtual meeting tools available now so you’re a pro at distance education before you get your Telepresence system.

In fact, at the risk of sounding like a shameless self-promoter, I recommend that if you need some help wrapping your mind around what you need to do to prepare for virtual meetings, you download a copy of “The Coach’s Short List” from this site and use it to support your practice.  The Coach’s Short List is the  “Cliff’s Notes” of virtual meetings. I wrote it so people could have their own little “cheat sheet” to guide them.

The future is upon us, friends. The question is, “How do you want to play?”

San Diego to Singapore to Corvalis, Oregon

The second video was made TWO full years ago, in 2007. It shows Mark Anderson meeting from the HP Halo Studio in San Diego with colleagues in Singapore and Corvalis, Oregon, during the “Future in Review” Conference. This piece shows the “older” Telepresence technology at work. This technology is already at work in corporate settings, doctor’s offices, hotel conference rooms, and even some colleges. And it has been for quite some time now.

Workin’ and Practicin’ …Your Night Moves

If you can’t imagine yourself yet well-prepared to meet with clients, customers, and colleagues as if you were in the same room with them, it’s time to start workin’ and practicin’, as Bob Seeger used to sing. Maybe you’re old enough to remember this one:

SB104, a bill authorizing the use of virtual meetings for parts of state governance, passed the Delaware House today by unanimous vote, June 29, 2009, paving the way for virtual meetings to support broader participation in the democratic process across the “First State.” The bill passed the Delaware Senate earlier this month by a healthy margin.

Co-sponsored by Representative Greg Lavelle, and Senator Liane Sorenson, SB104 allows governmental bodies, including boards and commissions, to set up videoconferencing locations to facilitate participation in meetings via teleconference. If the bill is signed by Delaware Governor Markell, video locations will also be opened to the public, allowing residents who live downstate from Wilmington to participate in meetings without having to drive to the capitol.

Delaware Governor Markell calls SB104, “a good government bill.” According to Markell, ” this legislation will make it easier for members of boards and commissions to attend meetings and for the public to view the meetings without having to drive a long distance. Expanding the use of teleconferencing will help our environment by taking cars off the road, save taxpayer money and make government more transparent.”  More details on SB104 can be found here.

Some pretty exciting stuff coming our way this week from Google Voice. I’m still looking and reading, but it looks like Google Voice will allow us to package up all our “voice meeting points,” including land phones, cell phones, and VOIP phones and integrate them in one interface that manages voicemail, SMS, transcription, and conference callilng, too. How about that package?

It’s still a by-invitation-only service that requires you to be a Grand Central user. Even if you’re not one, it’s worth learning about now because the service will be open to new users in weeks.

Here’s a review at PC Mag that’s making me more curious by the second! Google Voice won’t be perfect. But it looks like it’s going to offer some terrific time-saving and confusion-reducing benefits. Take a look. Let’s talk!

What do you think?

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Last week, people started asking me for five-finger tips they could use to improve their virtual meetings. This is a tough one.

On the one hand, people want the same things from you in a virtual meeting that they want in a face-to-face meeting. On the other hand, they want some different stuff, too. That’s why I wrote “The Coach’s Short List.”

But, there are plenty of things beyond The Short List that you can do to make your virtual meetings and web conferencing more useful  – and you more popular.

Here are five-fingers worth:

1. Make your meeting guests the rock stars. Besides hearing what you have to say, your VM guests want and need to hear each others’ ideas, too. Make sure you do everything possible to “pass the microphone” and “pass the chalk” around during your meetings so your guests get to show off their chops, too.

2. Give your guests a real voice. Using polls and leaving time at the end of meetings for questions is good basic online meeting practice. But, if you really want people to remember your meetings – and keep coming back for more – be sure you give them other ways to make their wishes known and their voices heard. Ask them to help you generate the agenda at the start of the meeting. Keep checking in with them during the meeting to see if they’re getting what they came for. And, before you close, whenever it’s appropriate, ask them to tell you anything they might have wished you had covered or done that would have made the meeting even better for them.

3. Make it easy. Make everything easy. Desite the fact that more and more people are having virtual meetings every day, they’re still a very new way for people to meet. Most people still need help getting comfortable with web conferencing. Make it easy to sign in and join the meeting. Make it easy for people to introduce themselves. Make it easy for participants to add their two-cents’-worth. Make it easy for them to follow up with you – and each other – after the meeting. Make everything you can think of as easy as possible. If you can’t do this yourself, get someone like me to be your producer and get them to do it for you.

4. Make it easy to refer new participants. Once someone has located you and decided you’re a useful, credible source of expertise, they are going to want to share you with their friends. It makes them look good to have found you! Be sure you make it easy for them to tell other people about you and add them to your meetings – this one or the next one.

5. Merge online and offline communities. The best thing about virtual meetings is that you don’t have to be face-to-face to have one. The best thing about face-to-face meetings is that you don’t have to use a computer or any other electronic device to have one. Some people are more comfortable meeting one way – or the other. But, especially in this economy, all of us needto grow our social networks and build new opportunities every way we can

When you’re hosting virtual meetings, do everything you can to help your guests link their online and offline resources. When you can, record your meetings so guests can share the content with offline partners and friends. Post your presentation at an online slide sharing site like slideshare.net. And, whenever possible, help port face-to-face conversations online, too. You can Tweet Live to connect people who aren’t able to be with you at live meetings. You can scan and post your handwritten meeting notes or photos to your blog so you can share them with people who weren’t able to attend.  There are dozens of ways you can help people merge their online and offline resources. Do it. They’ll thank and remember you

What are some of the easy ways you like to help people connect their online and offline resources? Post them here as a comment and let’s share the wealth!

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photo credit: krishnamohan01

By now,  I think just about everyone in the world has heard about the “Butterfly Effect.”

But if you haven’t heard of it – or you can’t remember – the phrase refers to the enormous potential for change that can be triggered by very small acts. Like the possibility of the flapping of a butterfly’s wings triggering a tornado on the other side of the world. (Mouse over the photo above and you’ll see the photographer’s sense of humor about this.)

The concept is part of Chaos Theory and the whole idea of “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.” Since there’s a lot of chaos showing up in economic markets across the whole globe, I’ve been thinking alot about the Butterfly Effect lately. And wondering what actually triggered the whole mess we’re in…

It’s not like I believe there’s a definitive answer to the question. But that doesn’t keep me from wondering.

The funny thing is that my musings led me to a short video that makes an important point about making small changes in a sweet and funny way. Take a look:

So, what’s the point? Well, as soon as I quit chuckling, it occurred to me that what’s going on between this man and woman is the same thing that happens between me and other people who are watching me enjoy virtual meetings… and wanting some of that sweetness for themselves.

I’m always telling clients – and potential clients -  that they can have a bite for FREE, any time they like. I pass out links to different kinds of sites where they can try all kinds of virtual meeting tools – for FREE.

But a surprising number of people are still having a hard time getting the sweetness from these new possibilities without some help from me. Just like the lady needs to borrow the man’s chompers to take advantage of the Butterfinger. That’s why I started this blog in the first place.

So, for what it’s worth, it seemed useful to share the video. Not because I want to brand myself as a pair of false teeth (although that’s a pretty funny idea).

The point is that if you’re not already having your clients and your coworkers jump all over the idea of having virtual meetings with you (instead of spending their precious time and money driving and flying all over the place), then maybe they need a little more help from you so they can get some of the sweetness for themselves.

photo credit: TheTruthAbout…

Does that make sense?

If so, what small change could you make in the way you’re pitching virtual meetings to your clients that would allow you to trigger an avalanche of savings for you – and for them – in 2009?

My change-of-the-week: making an analogy, using this nutty video, that you can pass along to YOUR clients and coworkers. The analogy is a little out-of-the-box, but if you enjoy it, you could use it to open the conversation with clients and coworkers about how you could help

I invite you to share this post with every client you’d like to share a $5K to $50K savings with next year. Or pass it on to coworkers, so you can start saving your time this year for what’s most important…

What might happen if you actually did this? It can’t hurt …and you just might just trigger an avalanche of well-being.

At the very least, if you got one person to start meeting with you virtually, you would be walking your talk about reducing the carbon footprint you’re leaving with your business travel.  And that would be a valuable contribution to the whole planet!

Want to play? Tag, you’re it…