The Virtual Meeting Coach

Whew, I think I’m starting to get social media well enough to quit kicking constantly and take a little rest. For a minute.

Truly useful insights came this week from reading John Borthwick, Marcia Connor, and Tony Karrer’s thoughts about what people are doing participating on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media — including live-tweeted seminars and webinars.

As I catch my breath and let my legs dangle for a little bit, I’m relaxing into the realization that publishing and meeting are mashing up.

As more and more of us just let go of the side of the pool and swim out into the deep waters of online relationship, we’re “meeting” and “distributing” at the same time. Human communication has always served many functions at once. But the possibilities offered by social media (including live virtual meetings) are really stirring things up.

From out here in the deep, I can see that most newspapers are gonna be gonners. No amount of refinancing will change anything. And magazines are either going to become clubs where all the members publish or they’re gonna die, too. But there’s actually a lot more going on than that.

For sure, as Karen Stephenson says, human beings have begun “storing our knowledge in our friends.” But we’re also finding new ways to store other people’s knowledge in our friends, too. And that has huge implications for all media distributors. Makes my head hurt stretching my mind around that one.

Social media is a much bigger thing than I can understand yet.

Sure is nice finding ScribeFire to support my blogging this week. It’s going to take quite a bit of writing to help me get my thoughts clear while I kick around out here so far away from familiar shores.

Right now though, I notice I’m asking myself over and over, “When we meet virtually, where are we meeting?” And, “Who are we, anyway?” I’m not talking about the tools, now. I’m talking about the place of mind we meet. Where exactly is that? Who is that “we” that’s following me on Twitter? Who are all those “we’s” I’m part of when I’m following someone, especially someone I haven’t met yet F2F? And how are we ever going to keep track of all those fluid identities?

Deep water.

Chayse and Jerry : Cisco Digital Cribs

Twitter totally rocks! In the last 48 hours, I’ve met three new colleagues there including James Corbett from Vizitant. It thrills me when I find new people whose passions overlap mine and James is one. Expect a guest post from him to show up here very soon.

Until that happens, here’s a sweet little 5-minute video produced by Cisco that James is also sharing on his blog. Interestingly, it’s not about their new high-end tele-presence systems for business. Instead, it focuses on the simplicity of using everyday laptops and desktop systems as multimedia communication devices.

This video shows actor Jerry Ying’s love affair with his young daughter, Chayse, and how their family uses videoconferencing to be together when they can’t be together face-to-face. Enjoy! (The embed from Cisco seems to be operating erratically. If it’s not showing,  please use the link below.)

CHAYSE AND JERRY

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.