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Why Hold Web Meetings Instead Of Conference Calls?
The odds are high that you are quite familiar with conference calls. If you own your own business or if you work for a company that holds a lot of conference calls, then you know the drill; everyone calls a designated number from their home phones in their respective locations. The number they dial works just like a bridge to bring each side together. Once everyone has called in and joined the conference, then you can get on with your business meeting, seminar, etc. Many employers now use conferencing calls as a way to interview out of state employee applicants. Conference calls can become quite boring, as many people are just sitting in a room staring at their phones and listening to what everyone else has to say. Participants cannot do presentations or use visual aids, they can only talk and bounce ideas off one another. While this may be great for some companies, it leaves many wanting more. Luckily, the technology of recent years has brought us the web meeting.
Web meetings are often hailed as the latest and greatest of all the conferencing services. It may very well be the flashiest. When you hold a web meeting, there are two ways in which your participants will be able to join the conference; either by each downloading a small conferencing application to their computers and installing it, or by entering in a specific URL that takes them directly to your meeting place. Participants need only their own computer and access to the internet. Web cameras are also good, but are not absolutely required. You can even decide beforehand how much participation you are willing to allow from your audience. Many businesses choose to hold interactive meetings, with lots of question and answer sessions and polling questions; other businesses hold meetings that are more like seminars; where the presenter gives the information and the applicants either take notes or listen intently without being able to give feedback. Not only do they give the presenter quite a bit of leeway in the style of meeting they want to hold, but it also offers a lot of extra abilities that regular audio or video conferencing cannot, such as text chat, streaming or live video, web tours, whiteboard, polls and surveys, slide show presentations, VolP, Screen/application/desktop sharing, and meeting recording.
Once you have decided that a web conference may be good for your company, you must then decide where to hold your meeting. One only needs to do a quick search on the internet to bring up literally thousands of companies that host web meetings. Some of these companies will charge for their services, other offer free web conferencing. It should be noted that whether a company charges for its services or not cannot help you gauge whether or not the company is legitimate. There are lots of great sites out there that offer their services for free, and just as many bogus sites that require payment for their services. It may take you some extra time to sift through these companies to find the right one to host your web conference, but once you do, you will be glad you made the switch from regular video and audio conferencing.