Ten Things I Am Thankful For This Thanksgiving

1. Our Customers! They allow us to pursue our passion everyday – to help them find new ways to leverage communications technologies productively & profitably!

2. A smart, responsive and driven team… the best in the conferencing and collaboration business.

3. Innovative companies that are creating the next generation of webinar and collaboration tools and, by doing so, re-energizing the industry.

4. Patient technology partners that help deliver special services.

5. Our friends/teammates in Hawaii – World Class Conferencing – who deliver GREAT Calls.

6. New technologies that help me to re-connect with dear friends.

7. My tennis buddies at Colonial … great competitors and even better people!

8. For pictures that take you back to a special place – Mr. Stepnick’s 5th Grade Class to be exact!

9. Cincinnati’s football teams and the Minnesota Vikings for making this football season a BLAST!

10. My father who is still teaching me things even 3 years after he passed away.

Where Do We Go Now?

Nothing like stealing a Guns N' Roses lyric for a blog title.

The reason I love my job is because I get to talk to people about something that I find interesting.

Human interaction is fascinating. What we say, why we say it, context, delivery...With every gesture, word, and breath we are communicating something fundamental about ourselves.

And sure, the people who cut us checks are usually only doing so because it helps them be more productive and therefor more profitable. But we are still taking someone's message and attempting to deliver it in the most effective way possible.

So we'll throw your phone in front of a audio receiver, flash a presentation to your audience's computer screen, and maybe prompt them with a question or two to gauge what they heard and saw.

(Pandora Update: Sweet Child O' Mine just started playing. This blog is fate.)

Yesterday, I sat in on another company's event today and while I am always impressed with any technology that pushes people towards virtual interaction and by companies who see its value, I was underwhelmed by the actual virtual aspect of it. It took me 20 minutes to retrofit my browser to support it, the look and feel seemed a decade old, and there was no social media integration whatsoever.

And again, these people are ahead of the curve.

But that's just yesterday. Today, I want to know where do we go now?

We are quickly approaching an interactive revolution that goes well beyond muted speakerphones and stale PowerPoint presos and there are two reasons why.

Primarily, and realize I am making myself vulnerable to an endless line a ridicule from my boss for this, non-native computer users are beginning to pack for their condos in Del Boca Vista Phase 2. As a younger generation of decision makers who grew up with an Apple IIe in their home assume control of annual reports that will be read by stockholders on their Playstation 3 in between monster sets on Rock Band 2, failing to deliver far reaching technical integration won't be an option.

Also, as advanced communication technologies both hard and soft become more cheap or free (read: subsidized by retailers), the enormous world population that doesn't have a computer and internet access will soon be filling out their Facebook profiles and tweeting about what it's like to live in places where only CNN dares to go.

So, again, where do we go now? We go from Belfast to Berlin at 7.2Mbps. Design to delivery in less than a week. Thought to trend in one push of a button. We go to a place where the world is connected via streaming audio and video, they talk in 140 characters or less, and no gesture, word, or breath gets lost in translation.

The Greenwash

We are currently victims of a greenwash. What is a greenwash? It's when we are constantly bombarded by products and brands that claim to be "green" and "eco-friendly." I'm not about to say that companies trying to be more sustainable is a bad thing, it's not. What I will say is that we don't know what "green" and "eco-friendly" actually mean. There's no standard, there's no real definition. Is a company allowed to brand themselves as "green" because they recycle all their used paper? Can a bottled water company be called green because they use 30% less plastic in their bottles, despite the other 70%?

The problem is there's no way to set a standard anymore. We could have at the beginning, but now "green" is almost a brand unto itself. It's too large, too amorphous, for any single entity to get a grasp of and bring under control. As consumers, the responsibility falls on us to be skeptical of companies throwing around those terms with wreckless abandon. We have to remember that, in the end, a company actively branding itself as "green" is doing so to get a leg up on the competition because it's what consumers want to hear right now. We need to look into the practices of those companies before we decide they can ethically label themselves as "eco-friendly."

Maybe it's also important to remember that no kind of consumption and purchasing is eco-friendly. It can only be less harmful.

So what does this mean for your company? Well, if you want to have a green policy make sure it's one that actually helps. Something that goes above and beyond recycling your office paper. Encourage (even require?) your employees to take public transportation. Use only enough electricity to power what you need, leave lights off and use natural lighting. Make sure your products don't have a lasting impact on the environment (stainless-steel is a good example of this. It lasts forever in the home, but bio-degrades in a reasonable amount of time in nature). Three times a year, have your office go plant trees to make up for the ones that were cut down for your paper. Three times a year, clean up the trash from your company's city.

If you're going to slap the green title onto your brand, make sure you deserve it. Otherwise you're just manipulating people.

Bravo-Luna-Oscar-Golf

PART I
PART II
PART III

Have you ever been on a web conference where the material presented was so indispensable or interesting that you wanted to email the speaker and ask a couple of questions? So you sent a chat message asking for the speakers email address. The speaker saw your message and in the course of their closing comments they said, “Oh and if you want to reach me later and ask questions, my email address is “p” “smith” “at hotmail dot com”. There it is.

Your brain goes into gear and you propel yourself forward, (cause you were leaning back in your chair) to find a writing utensil and a scrap of paper. You can immediately find neither and you yelp. At this point a co-worker throws you a pen from across the way, you test it to make sure it writes on your hand and you begin to scribble…and you can’t remember exactly what the speaker said even though it was an easy one. “Smith” and “hotmail”, you’ve got that right for sure but the speaker’s first name initial is the problem. You don’t remember hearing it announced during the introduction. Did the speaker say B, D, E, G, P, or T? You are pretty sure it wasn’t Z.

You could either guess or you could send a note to 6 different email addresses and know you’ll get one right. The other 5 will probably forward your email address to an off-shore pharmaceutical corporation with a quick note saying you want to order two years worth of Viagra.

Variations on this scenario happen all the time in different telephony venues, not just web conferences. Getting letters correct has been a problem since we started communicating via radio and various militaries and international organizations have devised phonetic alphabets to make sure the message is received properly. Currently, many folks are using the NATO phonetic alphabet and speaker Smith could have saved you some spam mail if he had only said,”My email address is P as in papa, sierra, mike, India, tango, hotel at hotmail.com”. It would have been effortless, huh?

“Psmith” is an easy one. In my next blog, I’ll talk about what you should do if your email address isn’t so easy.

NATO Phonetics

PART I
PART II
PART III

Web Conferencing, ROI and the Real Challenge

We attended the Wainhouse Research Conferencing Service Providers Summit in Boston a few weeks ago as guests of our good friends at Compunetix. (The session was well done – kudos to Marc Beattie and his team).

One statistic that caught our attention is termed the attach rate (AR): the ratio between audio conferencing minutes and web conferencing minutes. The current rate is 6% or for every 100 minutes of audio conferencing usage there are 6 minutes of web conferencing. The expectation is that AR will grow to 20% over the next several years. We are seeing this growth in our own base.

As you would expect, customers and conferencing providers are responding by focusing on the technologies supporting the projected growth. As important as that is, we take a slightly different view. Given that the technology works, the challenge for clients is integrating good business practices into the web conferencing decision and delivery processes.

Profitable companies spend money on products and services only after ROI, productivity, and customer satisfaction indicators are defined. In the virtual meeting and conferencing space we see marketing and operations’ budgets quietly draining valuable cash and resources. The expense of the audio and web conferencing technologies improperly matched to the need; internal administrative costs and headaches; potential brand damage of a badly managed meeting; and the general misuse of an operating asset are spilling dollars into the cloud.

And of course, CEO’s are generally too far away to hear the sucking sound. The shame is that by applying strategic business practices improvements can be significant. In budgets larger than $40K per month we estimate that a 30–50% improvement is achievable. Gains come from the analysis and reworking of audio – both reservationless and operator assisted; the definition and consolidation of web conferencing and presentation tools; the tightening of administration processes; and the integration with Social Media initiatives.

As increased web conferencing usage puts pressure on resources, organizations will need to recognize that web conferencing has become central to customer communications, brand outreach and operational efficiencies.

The Marketing Director’s Webinar Problem

I had coffee this morning with a marketing director at a rapidly growing med-tech company. She has a webinar problem. Here is an excerpt of our conversation:

“We set it (webinar) up and get lots of people to attend, but the presentation is a disaster. There is constant beeping on the phone lines and no one wants to “own” the delivery because they always mess it up and are embarrassed. Then, the responsibility is passed along to somebody new and they don’t want to do it because they are scared of screwing up. And, with our doctors’ time being so precious, the importance of delivering a well-run presentation just adds to the pressure. Ugh.”
~ Anonymous Marketing Director

The Internet and associated web-based social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter and Linked-In, are making webinars commonplace. The technical and economic justifications are clear, but executing a professional webinar is still beyond the grasp of many marketing organizations.

Execution – the elusive Holy Grail for marketing directors –keeps them up at night. Her primary concern is focused on her team’s ability (or lack thereof) to present its value proposition in a clear, concise package. Information needs to be conveyed in a “clean technological wrapper” in order to deliver the desired impact and credibility in our tech-savvy culture.

Get Ready For The Google Wave (The Other One)

I like Google but they scare the daylights out of me.

They pretty much run my computer, my phone, and seemingly the future of technology as a whole. Want to find something on the internet? Google it. Buy it? Google Checkout. Run your business? Google Apps. Want to consolidate phone numbers? Google Voice. Go somewhere? Google Maps.

Arguably this type of command of my virtual life should be reason enough to be afraid but something happened the other day that is far more terrifying. Just take a peek at the stock prices of Garmin (GRMN) and TomTom (TOM2.NX) after October 28th, the same day Google announced Google Maps Navigation.

Now, I have nothing particularly profound to say about the nature of business or, even more, about how this is a wonderful example of a free market based economy and how it helps consumers or how this is some cautionary tale of a big company unfairly flexing its muscles that should be government regulated.

What I will say is that today's business, especially technology based ones, should be aware of where Google is going. And the short answer is everywhere. Businesses that are still hoping to thrive as this happens need to figure out where value is defined outside of the technology itself.

Either that or don't be surprised if the next Google Wave wipes you out.