Posts Tagged ‘Amp’

Have you tried a Web Conference yet?

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011

I still talk to people all the time that have not hosted a conference call before so it does not come as a shock to know that most people have not tried a web conference yet. Let’s face it, you have to learn a new thing on your PC and who has the time for that? Besides a web conference is hard to do and everyone joining the call has to learn something new too, right? Well I am hear to tell you that I don’t like having to learn new things either but today’s web conference is so easy to use there really isn’t anything to learn. You can literally sign in to the Zip Conferencing web conference for the first time and be up on a web conference with your participants in just a couple of minutes. And as easy as it is for the host of the web conference it is even easier for the participants. There is no software to install and all they have to do is click on a link you send them and they are on the web conference. In case you did not know here are some of the things you can do on a web conference.

  • Share Your Desktop – By far the most popular thing that people do on a web conference is share their desktop or an application with their participants.  Basically what you are doing is allowing your participants to see whatever you have on your PC.  If you want to show your participants a web site your are browsing or a application on your computer you can on a web conference.  That way you and your participants are literally on the same page when you are talking on a conference call.
  • Collaborate on a Document – Not only can you share an application during a web conference but you can also allow your participants to provide input on a document or spreadsheet by giving them control of an application.  If a participant has an idea for updating a formula in Excel, for instance, you can give them control and let them put the new formula in on the spreadsheet on your PC.
  • Do a Q&A session – If you are conducting a seminar or training session the hardest thing is keeping your audience engaged.  With a web conference you can conduct a Q&A session and poll your audience.  You can then share the results with your audience.  Interaction like this will keep your audience on their toes and involved in your discussion.

And the best thing is you can try a web conference for free with a FREE demo from Zip Conferencing.  That’s right, the first 30 days are free!  So what are you waiting for?  Try a web conference today!

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The Right Web Conferencing Solution for You

Monday, June 6th, 2011

Web Conferencing has come a long way since its invention in the mid 1990′s and today there are a lot of different solutions available.  So what is the right web conferencing solution for you?  First you need to familiarize yourself with the different features and options available and then look for the right solution.  Here are a few of the most popular options available with a web conferencing solution.

  • Application Sharing – Most web conferencing solutions offer some type of application sharing.  Application sharing is where you have the ability to show what is on your computer to the participants in your web conference.  Usually you can choose the application you want to share or just show everyone your entire desktop.  Just be careful if you choose your entire desktop all participants will see everything you have open on your computer as you move around. 
  • Whiteboarding – This is another popular feature for any web conferencing solution.  This feature mimics having a white board in your meeting.  You have the ability to draw on the white board and so do your participants.  So if you want a live interactive white board session you want to look for this feature.
  • Video Sharing – Some, but not all web conferencing solutions allow you to share your desktop video with your participants.  And some web conferencing solutions enable your participants to share their video with you and other participants as well.  Zip Conferencing has full video sharing with the host and participants.
  • Q&A and Polling – If you intend to use the web conferencing solution for any training application you may want to make sure it has some form of Q&A and Polling built into it.  These features allow you to ask the participants questions and then provide the results real time to the audience.  This interactivity helps keep your audience engaged throughout your presentation.
  • Chat – A chat function in the web conferencing solution allows you to communicate with people separately from the audio portion of the meeting.  That way you can have a private discussion with a participant during the web conference.

The best way to determine which web conferencing solution is right for you is to try them out.  Most of the services available offer some type of a free trial so there is no risk in trying out the service.  Zip Conferencing is extremely easy to use and offers a 30 day free trial to all users.

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Low Cost Conference Calls Provide Powerful Business Tool to All

Thursday, December 9th, 2010

It wasn’t too long ago that I was with a conference call services provider and we were offering low cost conference calls for 50 cents per minute. And at that rate we were saving customers of AT&T over 40%! Well, even at that rate conference calls were easily justified to large businesses because of the savings they recognized in travel and the increased productivity. But now, with toll free conference calls priced less than 10 cents per minute, this powerful business tool is available to businesses of all sizes.

There was a time when the majority of my customers had over 50 employees. But low cost conference calls has really changed that dynamic. Now there is a much wider mix of companies utlizing low cost conference calls. I have many 1 – 3 employee companies who have realized that conference calls can help them be more productive and provide a very important communication link to their customers. Small home construction companies are using conference calls to keep their customers up to speed on their home building developments and coordinating with building supply vendors to make selections for their home. Small Accounting firms and CPAs are using low cost conference calls to keep their customers informed and to have meetings with investment firms and attorneys with their customers. Small law firms are using low cost conference calls to hold conference calls with opposing council and their customers.

And not only have low cost conference calls now opened up the advantages of conference calling to businesses of all sizes but the service itself is richer than ever. Zip Conferencing allows its customers to customize their conference calls in such a way that they have full control over all of the facets of the conference call. With Zip Conferencing you can decide whether participants are announced into the conference call with a tone, their name or not at all. Customers can have their participants listen to music or provide them the ability to speak without the moderator present and engage a number of security measures to insure their privacy on the conference calls. And much more. So now companies of all sizes have the same high quality, feature rich conference call services available to them as large companies. And with small companies the ability to save money on travel and be more productive are no less important than to large companies.

Low cost conference calls have truly leveled the playing field for companies of all sizes in many ways.

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Interactive Web Conferencing

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

As web conferencing has become more popular chances are that you have attended an online seminar where the presentation has been done via web conferencing.  Usually you are simply sitting in the audience on a conference call listening while watching the presentation on the web conference with little or no interaction with the speaker.  Although this is the most used method of web conferencing, the people who first came up with the idea had much bigger plans for web conferencing.

When web conferencing was first invented a lot of effort was made to make the service a collaborative tool where people could work on a document together from great distance.  This ability to collaborate was seen as the the killer application.  The adoption of web conferencing services is more and more widespread but interactive web conferencing is still lagging in its use overall.  Here are some of the features that allow for interactive web conferencing.

  • Application Sharing – Application sharing provides users the ability to share their desktop with the other participants on the web conference and permits any participant to control another computer.  This means that participants can actually control a document or spreadsheet and input or edit data on it.  Much like you would pass around a piece of paper in an in person meeting for people to mark up, you can actually change the document on the fly while on the web conference.
  • Whiteboarding- This application permits participants to mark up a virtual whiteboard seen by all participants while on an interactive web conference.  Much like someone would go up to a whiteboard to discuss things while in a conference room, participants can easily do the same on the web conference.
  • Polling/Q&A – Even a presentation can be an interactive web conference through the use of polling and Q&A features.  By engaging the audience you will have a more stimulating meeting and have better retention of the material.  Polling permits you to survey your audience during an interactive web conference and the Q&A feature allows you to conduct an orderly Q&A session for the presentation.

It seems that maybe people don’t work in a collaborative manner and allowing someone to control your PC is a little scary to some people as well.  But even if you are only doing a presentation using a web conferencing service you can make it an interactive web conference by adding polling and Q&A to your web conference.  You will find that the more you can make it an interactive web conference the more your participants will stay engaged with your presentation.

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Conference Call Service or the Phone System?

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

When I tell people what I do for a living they are surprised that there is an industry that exists to provide conference call services to businesses.  Many people think that the phone company is who provides the service.  Which has always been true.  But private companies have been providing a higher level of service for lower costs since the divestiture of AT&T in the early 1990s.  The other thing that people want to know is why people don’t just use their phone system which usually has the capacity to run a conference call.  Well, there are a number of reasons to use a conference call service instead of a phone system conference button to hold a conference call.

  • Phone systems have capacity issues – Most phone systems can only handle a limited number of participants on a conference call.  And you are also limited by the overall number of phone lines on the system.  If the people in the office are using a number of lines to make calls you may be limited with the number of people you can get on a conference call.
  • Phone systems require you to connect the participants – In order to connect people to a conference call using your phone system you will need to dial out to the participants through the phone system.  You have to get the people on the phone and sometimes they may be on the phone or out of their office and you can reach them by dialing out to them.
  • Call quality on a phone system degrades as you add participants – Phone systems are not made to hold conference calls and as you add participants the voice quality in the conference call degrades.  The more people you add the worse the overall quality of the conference call. 
  • Most people have difficulty operating the conference call function on a phone system – Since there is no standard on how the phone systems assemble a conference call you will need to learn how to assemble a conference call using the phone system.  Most people do not use this function often enough to be proficient at it and are not able to smoothly carry out the procedure.

The bottom line is a phone system does not provide a high quality conference call experience compared to a conference call service.  A good conference call service company provides a service that is easy to use and gives you an experience that is equal in quality to meeting in person.  And at the rates that conference call services are currently available it is no wonder that most people opt to do a conference call using a conference call service instead of a phone system.

www.zipconferencing.com

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Conference Calling goes Mainstream

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

I have had the fortune to be involved in a few industries as they have gone from the early adoption phase to the accepted norm stage.  I was in the telecommunications industry shortly after the divestiture of AT&T.  I was in the paging industry as it grew wildly and then died just as quickly with the adoption of the cell phone.  And then I joined the conference call industry and over the past 14+ years I have seen the conference call service industry go from a niche application mostly used by the legal industry to a widely used business tool.  Conference calling has truly reached the level of mainstream acceptance.

I am not sure how an expert would judge whether conference calling has reached mainstream acceptance, but I am sure the growth of the industry is certainly one of the factors.  And no one can deny that the conference calling industry has been fortunate to realize exponential growth over the past 14 years.  One of the biggest factors for the growth in the conference calling industry is the change to a reservationless system where you don’t need an operator or schedule a conference call with anyone.  The ease of use of conference call technology has also contributed to the growth.

When I started in the conference calling industry we received many calls from people at businesses who were trying to understand how to get multiple parties on the conference call and they really were not familiar with the technology.  Now we receive calls from people who have inevitably been on a conference call but maybe they have never hosted a conference call before, but now plan to use the service.  The method of conference calling has become somewhat standardized and everyone seems to know what the experience will be like on a conference call.  So, now we spend a lot more time telling customers about the benefits of our service over others and educating them on the small differences between conference call service companies instead of educating them on how a conference call works. 

But probably one of the biggest indicators I have seen in the past few years that conference calling has hit the mainstream is the use of conference calls for personal use.  Because so many people have been exposed at work to conference calls, they are now finding applications in their personal lives to use conference calling.  The wide availability and lower costs of conference calling have really helped this new area of applications.  We have had people use conference calling for wedding and event planning like family reunions where the participants are not able to meet physically.  Recently we even had a family use a conference call so that the missing family members could attend a grave side service because they all could not attend the service in person.  I think that the conference call industry will continue to grow with the advent of new applications as more and more people think up new ways that they can use conference calling to their benefit.

www.zipconferencing.com

 that is widely used

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Web Conferencing Features Make Remote Meetings Easy

Friday, July 24th, 2009

When Web Conferencing was first introduced it included a number of features that still exist in the web conference service business today.  But over time, conference call service providers and web conferencing companies have enhanced web conferencing to allow anyone to quickly and easily conduct a web conference without the need for a lot of training or experience.

The features that have always existed with web conferencing include:

  • Whiteboarding
  • Share Powerpoint presentations
  • Share Applications

The ability to whiteboard on a web conference allows participants on the conference call to participate on a virtual whiteboard by using their mouse and tools to annotate and collaborate with other participants.  The ability to share a Powerpoint presentation gives you the ability to broadcast your Powerpoint to the entire audience and the ability to share applications allows you to share virutally anything that is on your desktop with the other participants.

Over time additional functionality has been added to web conferencing including:

  • A Chat feature
  • Video conferencing
  • A Recording function
  • Q&A
  • Polling
  • Participant Registration Info
  • Exit Surveys

A chat feature was added to allow participants to chat with each other or the Moderator on a web conference.  The ability to share a video of yourself as the Moderator on the web conference gives the participants a face with the name on the conference call.  A recording function has existed for a while, but only recently has the full integration of voice and visual presentation recorded without the need for extra equipment become available.   A Q&A and Polling element on a web conference has also been available for a while but the tools provided to build the questions and tally the results have become much easier to implement and use.  And one fo the favorite tools of the Sales and Marketing users is the ability to create a registration process to capture participant informaiton on the front end of the web conference and a exit survey process to give the participants the ability to provide feedback after the web conference has been completed.

Even though the features available on a web conference have grown and enhanced, the inuitiveness of the interface has also improved to where anyone can conduct a web conference and look like a pro in a very short time.  Zip Conferencing like some other conference call service providers gives a 30 day free trial of the service to allow users to become familiar with the web confernecing service at no cost before they do a live presentation.

www.zipconferencing.com

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Web Conferencing – The New Meet and Greet

Friday, July 10th, 2009

Holding a free seminar on a subject of interest to your prospects in a hotel or other public space and inviting potential customers has always been a good method to attract these prospects to a place where you can meet them and begin to build a relationship.  This strategy for sales has been around for a long time and can be pretty effective if you have a good speaker and a topic they will make the time for to attend.  There are, however, several obstacles to overcome in making this an effective sales tool.

  • The prospects need to make a large time and effort commitment
  • The speaker and subject matter needs to be very compelling
  • The cost of the space and refreshments
  • Personnel on your part to coordinate and man the event

Today, using a Web Conference, there is a new way to meet and greet your potential customers with what has been called the “webinar”.  A webinar is simply a seminar you hold on the web using web conferencing services.  There are a host of advantages to holding a virtual seminar instead of an in-person event.

  • Prospects are more likely to attend since the commitment is much less on their part
  • The cost to you and your prospects is much less
  • No refreshments or hall rental necessary
  • You can gather information on your customers when they register

And, even though your meeting is virtual, you will not give much up in the way of tools to make your seminar an effective way to introduce your prospects to your good or services.  With Zip Conferencing’s web conference service you can craft an invitation and require your guests to provide information in the process about themselves to assist in your marketing efforts.  Once they join the web conference you can better engage your audience through the use of multiple presenters, Polling questions, audience interaction and a Q&A session at the end of your presentation.  When your guests leave the web conference you can also provide a thank you email and survey if you like so that the audience can provide feedback.

Zip Conferencing’s Web conferencing is so easy to use anyone can do it and it cost nothing to test drive your own webinar and see if this service can help you get to your prospects quicker, easier and less expensively.  You can start a FREE TRIAL of web conferencing by going to https://www.zipconferencing.com/web-conference-demo.php

www.zipconferencing.com

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Conference Call Applications – Training/HR

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

Training sessions and and communication of HR policies are essential to any business.  New employees especially are in need of training and HR policy education and you can deliver effective training and communication from a distance with conference call services and web conference services.

Training Programs

Combining Audio and Web Conferencing services provides an effective way to deliver Training and Communication from a distance without the need to incur travel costs or spend the time necessary to go to remote locations. The features included in our conference calls and web conferences make your presentations powerful and yet easy to use.

  • Increase productivity – deliver more training in less time without the need to travel
  • Reduce Costs – eliminate travel costs 
  • Deliver Training and Communication more frequently –  conduct more training sessions more frequently and reach a wider audience

 

 

Conference Call Services to Help You Deliver Effective Training

  • Audio Conference Calls – A conference call allows you to deliver a consistent message to a large audience.  Host controls allow you to be in charge of the meeting and deliver your training in an effective way without audience interruption.  
  • Web Conferencing - Web Conferencing allows you to deliver your message in pictures as well as words improving audience interaction and retention of the information.  Our easy to use Web Conferencing tool enables anyone to be an effective presenter in minutes. 

 

 

Key Features

  • Host Audio Controls
    Control your audio conference using Host Controls through your telephone that allow you to mute all participants, take a roll call, conduct sub-conferences and more.
  • Distribute Information
    Allow participants to download files of your presentation at the end of your presentation.
  • Audience Participation
    Engage your participants throughout the presentation with the use of Q&A and Polling questions to keep them engaged in your presentation.
  • Branded Interface
    You can brand your online interface and the Web Conferencing tool itself with your logo to personalize your interface and put onn a more professional appearance to your online meetings.
  • Multimedia Content
    Your presentationscan include visual elements to egage your audience.
  • Polls and Surveys
    Conduct Q&A, Polling and surveys using Web Conferencing’s tools.
  • Invite Participants 
    You can invite your participants through the web conferencing interface or simply invite your participants to your online conferencing Hub where they can join web conferences.
  • Record and Playback
    You can record the audio and visual portion of your conference call and allow participants to view or listen to your presentation after the completion of the conference call.

 www.zipconferencing.com

 

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