In the best of times, it can be hard to get everyone together in one room to work. Colleagues work on different floors, buildings, towns, or countries. Time spent going to work conferences are potentially dead time. Staying at the accommodation can be costly. Jet lag can affect your productivity if you have traveled abroad. Add the global pandemic into the mix, and the need for online communication is dramatically heightened. The incredible thing is that web conferencing now allows you to do everything a normal meeting can do, and more! Before we take a deep dive into this, let’s first look at the definitions.
You may have heard of live webinars, live seminars, or webcasts. Others have heard of video or web conferencing. They are all basically the same thing. People are invited to attend an online event and need to register by providing their email address. They then log in at the time and observe the proceedings, and can contribute if given access to do so.
Several different products can be considered for this. When searching for online meeting software, it was helpful to see that some sites listed and have compared the different products all on one page. Some provided reviews and direct links to the sites if you wanted to take things further.
How Is It Like A Real Meeting?
A physical meeting will be led by someone who ensures it keeps to the time and is not railroaded by anyone. There may be several speakers and presentations. There is face to face communication throughout. There may be handouts, and questions and answers at the end if there is time. Web conferences offer you all this. The moderator is the officiator of the meeting who enables different people to have a slot for their talk or product demonstration. Access can be given for everyone to see a presentation or someone’s computer screen showing a particular website. If the whole thing is opened up for questions, different people can be given access to speak.
How Is It Better?
People often miss meetings due to double bookings or sickness. Unless a live event has been recorded, you may miss out or just have access to a few old handouts. Web conferences can be recorded, however, and posted on business websites, social media, or blogs. If the recording is too long it can be cut into relevant segments and posted where it is most useful. A ten-minute product demonstration may never grow old in your website. People at the web conference may have helped you by asking good questions. Most product websites include an FAQ section where you could post these.
As we have said, you won’t have to waste valuable business time and money traveling. You won’t have to pay to stay somewhere for a night or several days. You won’t experience jet lag. You can access the event from anywhere using a tablet, computer, laptop, or mobile phone. Almost everyone owns one of these. The speaker/s at the event can talk from wherever they are – at work, home, or a hotel if they are on a business trip.
If your business is harnessed to the very latest technology, you will be helped considerably. Web conferencing can communicate great information that can be recorded for future use on different platforms. Customers can be gained and employees trained. It’s another string to your bow – so why not use it?
