The Virtual Meeting Coach

Okay friends, here we go. I’ve been promising some new material for The Virtual Meeting Coach Show for the last several weeks. I’ve got a window of time today to post the first in a series of conversations I’ve been having with virtual meeting pros. The series is called Virtual Meeting Masters and I intend to use it to provide you with cutting-edge advice from the pros so that you can become a “virtual meeting master,” too.

I’ve been talking with people who fully understand the tremendous potential of virtual meeting tools, web conferencing, online meetings – whatever you want to call real-time dialogue with your coworkers, clients, customers, suppliers, students, patients, and other people who you’re working with.

Hunting up these folks and finding new ways to capture our conversations has been a blast! Thanks in large part to the ingenuity and persistence of my partner-in-crime, Tom Carroll, of Evolutionary Learning, we have a new kind of video format for you to enjoy along with some high-quality audio-only podcasts.

This first show is a short, powerful conversation with best-selling author Sharon Drew Morgen. Sharon Drew just released a new book last week on Amazon called “Dirty Little Secrets: Why Buyers Can’t Buy and Sellers Can’t Sell and What You Can Do About It.”

I’ve been following Sharon Drew’s work for many years now and this is, without a doubt, the best book she’s written. It couldn’t be more timely. The book elegantly many things we all need to bear in mind as we work together to help each other move ahead in this crazy economy.

Sharon Drew is famous for helping people speed up the process of long-term or complex sales but the real wisdom she has to share in this particular book goes far beyond sales. She understands the process of change and her way of looking at change makes it clear how we can either help or hinder people we’re working with as they make their best decisions about incorporating new solutions into their systems.

Whether you’re looking to speed up the sales cycle on a complex sale, train or coach clients in new ways of doing things, or boost the productivity of distance workteams, there’s a lot for all of us in this conversation. I hope you enjoy it. If you like it, by all means, pick up a copy of Dirty Little Secrets. You can get one here.

As always, we like reading your comments and requests for future shows.

Coming up next… a fascinating conversation about providing telehealth care using live virtual meetings.

At the end of July, The Gartner Group updated its analysis and comparison of web conferencing applications/vendors.

Along with a thorough review of features, Gartner uses this bi-annual report to make strategic planning predictions about significant business usage patterns. This year’s predictions are Gartner’s best guess about the terrain between here and 2011.

I’m unable to reprint any direct quotes from the report or to republish the quadrant itself. However, AT&T has paid for reposting rights for the 2009 Gartner Magic Quandrant for Web Conferencing so that others can read it. If you’re unable to purchase your own copy from Gartner, you can read it here.

I was struck as I read through it with the variety of features available from the big names, on the one hand. And, on the other, at the narrow thinking about large-scale corporate deployment that just continues to ignore many of the realities of small business’ needs. Independent business people who are racing to keep the wolves from the door have a very different set of opportunities and constraints to work with than many of the bigger vendors are focused on.

And, as I keep saying, learning to operate all the bell and whistles in new web conferencing tools is just STEP ONE on the path to virtual meeting mastery. Adding virtual meetings efficiently into  business processes and learning to keep your full attention on the experience of those you’re meeting with are much more challenging tasks. As the tools become more widely available and accepted, your skill at thinking about and planning your virtual meetings is what’s going to help you stand out from the crowd. There’s never been a better time than now to start building those skills and I’d love to help you when you’re ready.

The 2009 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Conferencing is  a fascinating read. Take a look and let’s chat about what you think.

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!

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.

I’m one of the millions of Americans who has health insurance that doesn’t cover my care. I pay premiums every month. Big premiums. And HealthNet of Oregon denies my claims, classifying me as a “special case.” This has been going on since I moved to Oregon three years ago. What HealthNet is doing to me is nothing short of highway robbery and I resent the hell out it, not just for me but for the thousands of other Oregonians and Californians that HealthNet holds hostage because we’ve got “pre-existing conditions.” If we drop their coverage, we’ll be uninsurable. That means we pay the Mafia every month, or force our out-of-work neighbors and the gasping local hospitals to pay for our care.

At the President’s request, I thought I’d explain my predicament to my Oregon Congressman this morning on the chance that I might motivate Mr. Walden to support national healthcare reform. I drove up for a face-to-face meeting. Needless to say, he wasn’t in the office. And, his staff member – a person who told us she’s not actually part of his legislative staff – gave me and a handful of other folks a fully lukewarm welcome.

Then she spent most of our time together explaining to us in a decidedly patronizing voice why it wasn’t Greg Walden’s job to support legislation that he didn’t agree with. She listened to the needs and concerns I brought to share, but made no effort whatsoever to make even one written note although she said she’d tell the Congressman. So much for making a trip for a face-to-face meeting with my elected representative at 9:30am on a Wednesday morning.

My next best option is canceling my so-called “insurance” and forcing local tax rolls to absorb my care. Maybe my Republican Congressman would rather explain to Oregonians why they’ll have to pay new taxes – or cancel even more essential government services - instead of telling them what he’s doing to protect them from the cost of not giving people like me a way to participate in a national plan that enables us to remain responsible for ourselves.

I drove back to Ashland, shaking my head over the stone wall I ran into in my face-to-face meeting and, on the other hand, celebrating the excitement I’m feeling in recent online conversations around cost-saving telehealth, telemedicine, and digital doctoring initiatives.

It’s not part of my preventative care regimen to allow my blood to boil. So, after I return next week from a quick trip to the Bay Area, I’ll be following the path with a heart. For the next several weeks I’ll be focusing on the explosion of new medical applications for virtual meeting tools and other kinds of social media in the delivery of cost-effective healthcare and longterm care.

To wet your whistle, take a peek at this spiffy new site called Hello Health. Hello Health is a group of doctors setting up a simple way to serve their patients in web conferencing rooms while also trying to make it easy for other docs to work with them. What a concept! Based in NYC, they call themselves the “ground-up healthcare revolution.”

Welcome from Hello Health on Vimeo.

No gigantic bureaucracy. No death panels. No end of patient-doctor-relationship-scenarios. At Hello Health, all you have to do is “friend” another doc to give them access to your records.

Do you suppose this group’s got something to teach others about simple civility, collaboration, and creativity in meeting patient needs?

Do you suppose this could be generalized in some way to meet American’s political needs? Maybe they could show some of our Congressmen what it means to “friend” all their constituents. You think?

Man, I just met a new Twitter follower, virtually. He made a nice offer to try out his product. I signed up to do so…and BAMMMMM!@ There he was in my email with a personal webcam message.

That was okay…sort of. But the webcam message included telling me how I should use his product and that he would be tracking when I read his messages and used his system… That was a little creepy. Especially at 7:30am in the morning…

A stream of tweets followed to push me forward to do what he wanted me to do… When I replied, to see if we could start up a little dialogue on Twitter, I got ANOTHER webcam message! BAMMMMM!@ This one giving me more unsolicited direction. Including how I should use his product instead of Twitter to communicate… along with another dump of advice about how I should use his product to do business.

Another middle-aged white American business guy who doesn’t get relationship. Especially virtual relationship. Sigh…

If you want some coaching to ensure you’re not making this kind of first – and last – impression marketing to women, I can help.

Before people are willing to heed your advice,  buy your products, or use your services, they need to trust  you. And building trust online is a bit of a tricky process.

Over the course of 20+ years learning and working online, I’ve been studying what kinds of things enhance trust when we’re working with others at a distance – and what kinds of things tear trust apart. I’ve spoken all over North America and Europe on this and other topics related to achieving high performance when people are working on teams.

This year I decided to make a course  to  share with web-workers and other people looking to learn more about trust-building, in particular.  It’s a topic of vital importance to most of us as people are searching for new ways to contribute in this volatile economy, isn’t it?

So, I’ve just published a new 10-day e-course at Virtual Meeting Startup that teaches “21 Sure-Fire Ways To Build Trust Working With Others Online.” I’m offering it free, as part the Pre-Grand-Opening festivities for Virtual Meeting Startup.

If you’d like to spend 30 or 45 minutes a day over the next 10 days considering three tips a day and doing a little homework to integrate the tips to your online meeting and online relationship strategies, please pop over and sign up.

Instead of pushing advice, I’ve made this course interactive. As you go through the daily lessons, there will always be an invitation for you to take time to do a short exercise at the end.  Day by day, as you do the “Your Turn” exercises, you will be building yourself a custom action plan that can turn you into a much more effective leader/facilitator of online meetings.

Helping people build trust as they work across differences – and distances – is a lifelong passion for me! I’m truly interested receiving feedback from people who decide to take the course.  So if you sign up, please feel free to share your honest thoughts, feelings and questions about any of the lessons.  I’ll do my best to address them here in the blog, whenever possible!

Enjoy!

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!

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!