We all know that there are times when nothing beats a face-to-face meeting. Today's real world requirements, however, have caused many organizations to think about alternative approaches to meetings, including ways they can better leverage their existing resources, people and money. For many companies, this has led to evaluating and deploying technologies that can help them reduce the time and costs associated with "doing business." Among these cost saving solutions are the use of web conferencing and audio conferencing technologies designed for people who want to communicate in real-time, yet without the costs associated with many face-to-face meetings. Here's how our readers are using web and audio conferencing to add to their bottom line.

Product or Application Demonstration
Web conferencing is a great way to demonstrate a product or application to a prospect or customer wanting to gain a better understanding of how the product works. You can invite a prospect, customer or potential partner to join you in a web conference, then guide them through an interactive demonstration of your product or application, all online.

Virtual Trade Show
Conventional trade shows are expensive—it takes a lot of money to build a booth, create signage and graphics, ship the booth and materials from location to location, pay for exhibit space and staff the show, day after day, with some of your most expensive resources. And that doesn't include the cost of travel, car rentals, hotels and food. With web and audio conferencing, you can create a virtual trade show, including planned presentations and interactive sessions for anyone interested in learning more about your company's products and services—and you can do so at a fraction of the cost of in-person trade shows. An additional benefit is exposure. By not requiring people to travel to your event, you'll attract more interest and traffic to your online trade show than you might from a traditional show.

Interview Prospective Employees
You can use web and audio conferencing as one way to interview potential employees. Simply invite a prospective employee to a web conference. Upload his or her resume to your meeting console and invite other people who are part of the hiring process, but are located in other geographical locations, to participate in the interview and meet the candidate. With the Q&A session and wrap up that web conferencing offers, you can poll participants as to their evaluation, critique and comments about the candidate and determining next steps if this person is a prospective employee.

Corporate Training
Web conferencing is becoming a popular vehicle for delivering quality training. More and more companies are moving their training online, including Encounter customer and partner Microsoft Office Live Meeting. Using online training can significantly reduce your training costs and enable you to reach a broader audience more efficiently. And companies all over the world affirm that it is infinitely more convenient for someone to take a class right at his or her own desk. Reinforcing this point, software firm J. D. Edwards began using web conferencing in 1999 to train its sales team. Since then usage has increased six fold, to over 18,000 hours a year and counting. One training effort that would have sent a trainer on a four-week tour of 17 offices at a cost of $35,000 was turned into a day-and-a-half effort that cost only $5,000 using web conferencing.

Edit On The Go
Collaborate and edit on-the-fly with people at other geographic locations. Web and audio conferencing allows everyone to view the same document or web site simultaneously, so edits can be made quickly and efficiently. Web conferencing is an excellent way to share and review copy and designs to see how your creative team is presenting information. Plus, instant feedback allows for an accelerated approval process. You'll also save money on overnight delivery charges and the cost (and nuisance) of using the fax machine to communicate your edits.

Web Event Extraordinaire
Roll out the red carpet like the movie industry! Develop a special "by invitation only" web event or premiere for an important announcement, new product introduction or campaign. Make it newsworthy, then invite your press contacts (analysts, too) and any other influencers you want to include. Consider having a well known personality host the event and let your shareholders and Board members know about your event well in advance.

Business Travel Declines, Collaboration Climbs

A poll of over 900 professional workers found that 48% of them now travel less frequently than they did five years ago, according to a survey developed by Robert Half Management Resources, a provider of senior-level accounting and finance professionals.

Curtailed travel allowances account in part for the decrease in business travel. But collaboration technology also plays a part. “Many firms are capitalizing on less-costly communication channels, such as webcasts and video conferences, to facilitate project management and information sharing between remote parties,” says Paul McDonald, executive director of Robert Half Management Resources, in a press release on their web site.

Overall, there's been impressive growth in the use of collaboration technology across all types of business and for a variety of reasons, the cost of travel not the least. Competition plays the lead role in conferencing growth, as businesses look to collaboration technology to cut costs, make faster decisions and expand their market coverage. Since 2001, audio conferencing grew over 11%, video conferencing was up 24.5% and web conferencingusage jumped to over 60%.

Growth is expected to continue as greater awareness and availability of the technology increases.

Reader's Resource

We have several clients who use our conferencing services for online training and education. As more organizations and schools adopt eLearning or netcourses as a way to educate, it is increasingly important that teachers and facilitators know how to design, present and lead effective online courses.

If you teach online, you may find the following books helpful in improving your own techniques and strategies for online learning. The links are to Amazon.com.

"Facilitating Online Learning: Effective Strategies for Moderators" is Atwood Publishing's latest title and one of your greatest resources for distance education. It will help you build an online community and fuel online dialogue to create relationships between interactants. It will also provide you with a wide repertoire of strategies for sharpening your course's content and ways to fend off and avoid technological problems and roadblocks that you will invariably face during your class."

"Engaging the Online Learners includes an innovative framework—the Phases of Engagement—that helps instructors become more involved as knowledge generators and co-facilitators of a course. The book also provides specific ideas for tested activities (collected from experienced online instructors across the nation) that can go a long way to improving online learning."