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.

Still working out the kinks with Blip.tv and embedding the show here in the blog. Sorry for any confusion this last week!

This is episode 2 of 4 conversations I’ll be having with Matt Sweet and Rene Fabre, two wild and crazy guys who work for Ticor Title Company up here in the Pacific NW.

Our conversation this time focuses on the seriously important topic of online reputation management and how we can all help make Google smarter and smarter about us and our businesses so that Google can make it easier and easier for the people who need us to FIND us online. Matt and Rene are helping Realtors make sense of how they can optimize their social media participation so that “search-savvy” home buyers can find them easily when they need them.

You don’t have to be a Realtor to make great use of the tips and tricks these guys are sharing. Any independent business person needs to know how to do these things now. So, listen up!

We had this conversation in a vYew room again and we’re all hoping the graphics help make the things we talking about clearer for you. This is an experimental format for all of us and we’d love to hear your thoughts about how it works.

Take a look/listen and let us know what you think.

For over a year, my friend, Tom Carroll, and I have been playing with free virtual meeting tools. Testing them, pushing them, breaking them, seeing which ones work best for what kinds of meetings.

My fascination with real-time virtual meetings comes from my very real, very non-technical experience as a child growing up in a divided bungalow in Chevy Chase where the upstairs bathroom of our home shared a pretty thin wall with the upstairs bathroom of our neighbor’s home.

When I was a curious little girl, I wanted more than anything to be able to “see” through that wall and “hear” what my neighbor, Don Jackson, was doing over on his side. Don was 10 years older than me and generously tolerated my crush on him by actually encouraging me to memorize Morse Code and tap out little messages back and forth with him on the bathroom wall.

I know. It sounds really silly. And it was. But that experience birthed my fascination with “distance” communication and it survives today in my desire to be able to “see” and “hear” what my neighbors around the globe are doing and thinking – without me actually having to travel around the world all the time to see them face-to-face.

Not that I’ve got anything against traveling! I love traveling more than almost anything. But I can’t live that way. After awhile, everyone wants a place they call home. But I still want to take adventures from home, too. What’s the internet for, anyway, if not adventuring?

So, from my home in Ashland, Oregon and Tom’s home in Austin, Texas, we’ve been taking adventures, using all kinds of web conferencing tools to have live, authentic conversations that incorporate all kinds of media.

Now we’ve started inviting people who have something interesting to share to join us.

About a week ago, Tom made this recording I posted today to Blip.tv. It’s the introduction to a 4-part conversation I’ll be having over the next couple of weeks with Matt Sweet and Rene Fabre.

Matt and Rene work for Ticor Title in the Pacific NW. It’s their job to help REALTORS and title people from Astoria, Washington to Ashland, Oregon, make sense of the ways that online communication has forever changed their businesses.

Matt and Rene are not quite Ren and Stimpy. But almost. They’re a couple of wild and crazy guys who happen to love exploring what makes Google tick. Their passion – and their work – is finding new ways to use social media to help professional business people make friends and influence people to buy from them. Every week they take their people into free, online meeting rooms at vYew.com to have raucous conversations about new ways they need to start  building their reputations and connecting to customers – online.

I’m still experimenting with these kinds of interviews, and Tom’s still testing out ways to record them for me, but I hope you’ll take a look and a listen to this one and let me know what you think about the format.

Over the next 3 sessions, I’m hoping you’ll get to see a little more about how vYew works and, at the same time, learn something about how you can use social media to establish a more visible/audible presence for yourself online.

Please share any thoughts or suggestions you have that will help us improve!

I don’t know about you, but I’m watching the economic news from the sidelines.

On the one hand, things look truly bleak. Some days the future’s so far in the RED that it almost looks BLACK.

On the other hand, with everything in the toilet – now including the US auto industry – there’s a lot more room for new possibilities.

I never thought I’d find myself feeling gleeful watching so many things and so many concepts we’ve considered “valuable” get flushed away all at once. But as the news gets worse and worse, I find I’m often feeling better and better.

Call me perverse.

Maybe I’m finally getting the wisdom of hopelessness Meg Wheatley wrote about after 9/11.

Whatever it is,  besides feeling surprisingly okay watching most of my lifesavings float away,  I’m also getting more and more excited about helping friends and other independent business people develop their “telepresence.” Because it’s time now. Really time!

We simply have to do some things differently if we expect to save money and save time for what’s really important in 2009. And using social media – including virtual meetings – is one of the best ways I know to augment close business and personal relationships without driving and flying all over the place all the time.

So, what is “telepresence?”

The way I use that new word, “telepresence,” is a little different than the way the manufacturers of the expensive, high-definition video conferencing systems are using it. I’m not talking about buying and installing $50-$300K remote viewing systems in your home office.

For me, “telepresence” is a way of referring to your skill at being present with people you’re not able to be in the same room with.

Understood this way, “telepresence” has nothing to do with hardware and very little to do with software.

Instead, “telepresence” is about using your telephone, IM, text messaging, and now virtual meeting rooms in ways that make people feel like you’re with them, even when you’re across town, across the country, or across the globe from their physical bodies.

Looked at this way, telepresence is a set of engagement skills. Some of them are technical. Most of them are social. Some parts can become routine. Some will remain art and, therefore, require practice. But the good news is that all of them are FREE to develop and practice.

Skype, GTalk, DimDim, Yuuguu, Yugma, vYew, Elluminate, and WiZiQ all offer free places to practice and play with people around the block or around the globe.  New places are opening up every week. Get yourself a membership in one or more of these places and let’s practice!

Instead of wringing our hands about things too big for us to change, I’d like to suggest that the year ahead is going to be a great time to practice our “telepresence.” Like Meg Wheatley, I’m ready to “journey through this time of increasing uncertainty. Groundless, hopeless, insecure, patient, clear. And together.”

What have we got to lose?