Friday, January 22nd, 2010
There was a time when you would not even think about running an automated conference call for 20 or more participants. If you were going to run a conference call of that size you would run the conference call with the assistance of an operator. And even today, an Operator Assisted call might be the right conference call solution depending on your application, but the conference call technology has gotten to where running a large automated conference call is manageable if you know a few tricks.
The main problem with running a large conference call is the noise the audience can introduce during the call. It is bad enough when there are just 4 or 5 participants and one of them introduces noise because they are on a cell phone, rustling papers on their desk, talking to people in their room, etc. Just imagine having 100 people on the call. The odds that someone is going to make noise during the conference call are pretty good. In fact, virtually certain. So, what can you do to hold an orderly conference call with a large audience? Here are a few tips to make for a successful large conference call.
- Turn Off any Tones - Most conference call service companies provide tones on the conference clal so you know when a participant joins the call. This is fine when you have 5 people on the conference call, but can be more than a distraction when there are 20 or more.
- Mute All - The conference calling service should provide a way to mute all participants as the Moderator of the conference call.
- Use an online interface if offered - Some conference call service companies offer an online conference call interface that allows you to see the callers and control the audio portion of the conference call. This can be very helpful, especially if you intend to open up to questions from the audience. That way you can see the callers and manage the call easier.
- Use Web Conferencing - In addition to enhancing your conference call with visual presentations, a web conference can allow you to manage a Q&A session better than just using an audio conference. With a Web Conference you are giving your participants a way to raise their hand for questions and a way for you to open up an individual line to allow them to ask their question.
- Practice - The best thing you can do to insure your success with a large conference call is to run a practice session to make sure you are familiiar with all of the conference call controls and how to use them.
If you follow these tips you can run a large conference call successfully without the need to use an expensive Operator Assisted Conference Call.
www.zipconferencing.com
Tags: Audience, Audio Portion, Call Interface, Cell Phone, Conference Call Service, Conference Calling Service, Desk, Distraction, Odds, Operator Assisted Call, Participant, Participants, People, Running, Technology, Visual Presentations, Web Conferencing
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Friday, October 16th, 2009
Being able to record a conference call has been around for a while. It is fairly simple to press a command on your phone and initiate a recording of a conference call and then allow people to dial into a system to listen to the recording or download a copy of the recording to share with others. A web conference, however, presents a different set of issues. The web conference is on one platform and the audio portion of your web conference may be on another platform. In fact, in the early days of web conferencing, the only way to record the web conference and the audio of that conference was to have a separate recording of the audio portion made using an adaptor that plugged into your PC and fed the audio portion back into the recording for the web conference. That was fun. Customers could not believe the gyrations they had to perform to record a web conference.
Today, recording a web conference is very simple and it provides a recording that is full audio and web and can easily be played back for participants. Zip Conferencing’s web conference service has a one click mechanism to start the recording of both the audio and web conference portion of the conference call. The recording of the web conference can be stored and viewed by you or your participants or you can download a copy of the web conference recording and distribute it as you see fit. Like many aspects of web conferencing, as the recording has been simplified there are not only more recordings of web conferences being done, but people are thinking of ways to use the service that we in the industry never thought of ourselves.
Why hold the same seminar over and over again for different audiences? If the subject matter for your web conference is not going to change you can just record the material once and then invite different people to observe the web conference to absorb the material. Maybe there is a web conference when the participants were especially intriguing. Record the meeting and you can share the insightful observations of one audience with another. If you cannot attend a meeting live, but you still need to present the material you can record the meeting ahead of time and then share with your audience later.
The ability to easily record a web conference with the audio portion of the call has opened up a world of possibilities.
Tags: Audiences, Audio Portion, Back Web, Call Recording, Conference Call, Conference Portion, Conference Service, Gyrations, Participants, Presents, Share With Others, Subject Matter, Web Audio, Web Conference, Web Conferences, Web Conferencing, Web Fun, Web Service
Posted in Web Conference | No Comments »
