web conference – webinars

Tom Cruz asked:




Webinar services are more and more important to know about and understand today. Virtual offices and online meetings are sharply on the rise, as businesses do what they have always done: look to technology to help them save on costs and increase the speed and effectiveness of communications to more people with greater speed.

Webinars are becoming a norm. Therefore, you as a business owner cannot afford to ignore the need for understanding the best webinar service providers.

The question is, what precisely should you look for in a webinar service? There are several factors to consider. But what if you are just beginning to get used to webinars? You could first explore the different service options.

You should look for synchronized website browsing. This option is useful for showing people around different websites that you want them to look at–such as maybe your company’s own website. But this is vital if you want to keep everyone literally on the same page at all times. If you are looking at something on the Internet that you find of great importance, you surely want to share that with others during a web presentation.

You want the audio portion of your webinar to be very clear. Some webinar host vendors include VoIP with the service, while at other times you’ll need to–or maybe you just will desire to–use the good ol’ land lines and have a teleconferencing function going on while you look at things on the screen. Either way, if your audio is not top of the line, you should look at a different vendor.

In a usual office, the whiteboard is of utmost importance. Good quality webinar hosting vendors also have a whiteboard feature. If you are considering a webinar hosting vendor that doesn’t offer this, you likely should not be using them. You also want to make sure that the whiteboard function is easily shared. It really does no good for you to be writing on a virtual whiteboard when others don’t even know that you’re doing it.

You should also be able to easily share, in real-time, your PowerPoint or OpenDocument presentation with everyone else who is participating. Part of the whole point of this technology is to be highly interactive and dynamic while even still at a physical distance apart. If you are considering a webinar services provider and you find that this part of their offer is shoddy, reject them. You need crystal clear presentation sharing capability to make it all worth your while.

Make sure you are able to do interface branding with your webinar services. You want your webinars to feature you and promote you. If you cannot customize them to the hilt, what good are they for that?

Also, you should choose a webinar service that allows you to have as many audience members as you want (within reason). Services that are too limited aren’t allowing you all the flexibility that you need.

And consider whether or not your webinar host provider offers supportive services like invitations to meetings sent from your company e-mail account. These little “extra” features add up to better presentations that make better and more lasting impressions on people.

Carolyn