The Virtual Meeting Coach

It’s 100% true. You can use your computer and free virtual meeting tools to grow your income and enrich important relationships. Take a look:

I love these Verishow clips because they show real-world situations with real people that are easy to relate to.

(Yeah, yeah, yeah…they might be actors. But they’re behaving just like real people. I have meetings like this every day with my clients, using a desktop computer or my laptop – from my home office, a coffee shop, or a hotel room. No kidding!)

If you took a couple of minutes to watch, you saw that virtual meetings really can be like child’s play!  Fast and easy for the host – and clients love them. They save everyone time, money, and hassle – whether you’re across town or across the globe from each other.

So…. The question is, if virtual meetings are really this easy, what’s keeping you from using them for 40-60% of your work?

That’s a real question.

Your answer might be something like:

1) I can’t believe it’s actually that easy – there must be a catch.
2) I don’t want to be chained to a desk on a computer.
3) I hate the way I look on a webcam.
4) I don’t want my privacy invaded all the time.
5) To use virtual meetings with my clients, I’d have to change so many things about the way I do business … and I don’t have time to do that right now.

Or something similar. I’ve heard a hundred reasons since I opened my practice as “The Virtual Meeting Coach” and launched Virtual Meeting Startup.

Every reason people have for not already using virtual meetings with their clients holds the seed of a legitimate concern. But not one of them is a serious obstacle. Not one. Certainly there are concerns to address, and ways you’ll need to tailor your approach to make it fit your clients. But every day, I’m helping small- and mid-sized business owners – just like you – quickly work through the challenges.

So, go ahead! Take the plunge! Just sign up now so you can use Verishow, ShowDocument, DimDim or vYew – or something similar – and start doing this week what you see happening in these clips! All four of those tools have robust free versions- and there lots of others like them.

HERE’S A LEG UP, NO STRINGS ATTACHED

On the other hand, if you can’t bring yourself to take the plunge on your own… but you want to be able to meet with your clients this way in 2011 – I want to offer you a leg up right now. To get it, you can use THE CONTACT BUTTON at Virtual Meeting Startup and ask for a FREE 30-minute private consultation with me.

I’ll listen to you, ask a few questions, and make some free recommendations based on your unique situation and the needs of your clients and customers.

ONLY TWO SEATS LEFT IN THE FALL GROUP COACHING PROGRAM

The Fall session of my 10-Week Online Group Coaching Program begins the week of September 19th. I’ve got 2 seats left in this group. And, if your situation is one that could really benefit from you being part of a learning group, I don’t want you to miss the chance to sign up for the next cycle.

Cynthia Winton-Henry, co-founder of Interplay, was a participant in the Spring session of the program. Here’s something she said about her experience:

The Madhatter’s Program was great for my learning curve. In spite of personal and job time constraints, it’s proof that when the heart and mind are in the right place, things work. Meri was the perfect coach for me at this time! Her spirit of fun, play, and that its OK to fail help the change become incremental, instead of overwhelming.

I love Meri’s accessibility and the amount of practice she’s had. It’s also fun learning who the other Madhatters are and sharing with one another.

One more time, here’s a link to the contact form to request a free 30-minute private consultation with me.

C U soon~!

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.

It’s Wednesday afternoon at 3pm: you’ve got to leave the office one more time to drive across town and sit with a client to explain a complex document.

Or it’s Friday morning at 10am: your partner can’t make it back today to meet with the Board chair, so you’re scouring the office for a recorder and a mic so you can at least record your conversation.

Or it’s Tuesday at 5pm: your client just made crucial changes to your project plan. You need to alert the rest of the team to change direction right away. Only three people are out of town and so is your boss.

Just another day in paradise, right?

People who make a living selling their expertise need help saving time and reducing the costs of doing business.

The good news is that virtual meeting technologies give us the ability to do both right now.

In virtual meeting rooms, from two to two dozen people can easily share voice and visual data in real-time without anyone having to drive across town or fly across the state to do it. And, if you know how, you can do this for FREE!

When you understand how to use them effectively, free virtual meeting rooms afford you enormous freedom and save both time and money.

They allow you to conference with others over critical documents anywhere you can get on the internet. They spare you and your clients the headaches of rush-hour traffic jams and skyrocketing fuel costs, not to speak of the money you spend on hotel rooms and crummy restaurant food.

And they help you reduce the carbon footprint you’re leaving with all that business travel, too.

As you become more familiar with them, free internet conferencing tools can help you free up hundreds of hours and save from $5K to $50K – or more – a year!

Just off the top of my head, here are 21 things I know you can do just as well in a FREE virtual meeting room as you can face-to-face:

1. Update participants on project teams without anyone having to travel.
2. Train from 1 to 1000 people – presenting crucial information, taking questions, sharing answers.
3. Collect input on a critical issue from a dispersed group of stakeholders.
4. Discuss highlights in trend data with decision-makers without anyone having to travel.
5. Qualify sales prospects so both parties are ensured of high productivity from face-to-face meetings.
6. Do the same with job candidates.
7. Collaborate securely around visual data in real-time with a dispersed group of experts.
8. Include non-local stakeholders in a Board meeting.
9. Provide customers both data and personal support when they’re experiencing difficulties making use of your products or services.
10. Explain or clarify news about your company.
11. Explain document complexities in a low-pressure context so you can negotiate contracts and close sales faster.
12. Consult one-on-one with clients when you’re on the road, providing them both voice and visual support.
13. Demonstrate confusing software operations.
14. Record contributions made by meeting participants for later review – or so people unable to attend live can see and hear what happened.
15. Poll stakeholders on crucial questions and explore their responses with them in real-time.
16. Review a budget, line by line, making annotations and changes with others.
17. Elicit and capture people’s informal feelings and needs (using text chat) while moving quickly through a formal presentation.
18. Share pictures, diagrams and technical drawings in a secure environment, without delay and without travel.
19. Reduce operating costs while enhancing the frequency, efficiency, and effectiveness of coworkers’ real-time communication and collaboration.
20. Extend the reach of personal services to shut-ins and other people challenged by travel.
21. Host interstate and international conferences without having to think about airport shuttling, parking, hotel reservations and setup, catering, or name badges.

How do I know you can do these things? Because I’ve done them all myself.

And, this is really just the tip of the iceberg!

Free virtual meeting tools offer independent business people and nonprofit organizations enormous potential benefits and savings.

Of course I would never recommend that you move ALL your meetings online. But as you begin to move the right ones into free virtual meeting rooms, you can pocket huge savings… and start using all that time and money for what’s really important to you – and the planet.

Save once – win two or three times over!

If you want to learn more about how to use these free technologies, stay tuned here. That’s what I’m all about.