You can oversee a merger from Colorado that’s between your company in New York and another in Tokyo.  You can speak to thousands of customers at the same time--in an orderly fashion--from the comfort of your own home.  You can go over spreadsheets with your accounting department that’s located in another state.  You have all of these powerful business tools at your disposal, but did you know you can use them with your family as well?

If you want to know the next big internet/social media/communications thing, just look at what the kids are using.  And as they embrace and extensively use tools like Twitter, Facebook, instant messaging, and video conferencing, so can you... with them!

And you don’t have to reserve this for when you’re on business trips.  Friend your kid on Facebook, follow them on Twitter to see what they’re up to, in to, and who they interact with.  Set up an instant messaging account and keep it on for those occasional “How’s your day?” opportunities.  

True, they pretty much all have cell phones these days and a call is more immediate, but it’s still just one-on-one.  Have family conference calls for even little things like dinner.  Instead of two, or three, or more individual phone calls, you can get the family talking together.  All the schedules can be worked out at one time, decisions will be made faster, and everyone will be on the same page.

With web conferencing, you can share a document and help with that tricky math homework hours before you get home from the office.  And with video conferencing, you can get a smile anytime.

How do you use conferencing outside of the business setting?  We’d love to hear about it!

Yes, I realize we bash on PowerPoint a lot on this blog, but if you’ve had to sit through some of the disaster-tations that we have... well, you’d understand.  PowerPoint can be incredibly effective when used properly.  Here’s one of the good ways to use PowerPoint: introducing a panel of speakers.

The PowerPoint Tips blog has thoughtfully detailed how to create your own PowerPoint Panel introduction slides, but there’s the overall gist.  From the main screen--or even just the pre-conference black slide--you advance to a slide with a big picture of the first speaker you are introducing.  When you start talking about the next speaker, their picture pops up next to the first one.

This is done using nothing more difficult than identical slides, each with one more picture than the last.  To the audience, speaker pictures are magically appearing on the screen.  And all you’re doing is advancing one slide at the right time.

Have you used this trick before?  Do you have any good PowerPoint tips?  Help us out by posting them in a comment!

When I get a good idea I have to write it down right then and there.  If I wait, or try to remember it later, the idea is gone--possibly forever.  On the other hand, simply recording my ideas isn’t enough.  If I don’t routinely go through my notebook, a good idea can lay in limbo until long after its “use by” date.

This is much the same in business as well.  Like it says on the99percent.com, a great idea that isn’t capitalized on speedily could quickly become a competitors great idea, or simply go stale and unusable.  But while speed in needed, building momentum slowly can’t be left out in the cold either.  Where’s the line?  

The good news is that we have tools available to move as fast as we’d like.  For example, if we get a good idea during a conference call, we can download the recording, snip out the idea part, and email it to our decision makers--or upload it and send them the link.  We can build momentum as normal on the rest of the meeting’s topics, but things are already moving forward on that one idea.

If the idea gets a stamp of approval we can’t take our foot off the gas pedal so how can we keep up the pace?  We can have a quick conference call to build a schedule and todo list, as well as out-dial and bring into the conference the various people who will be involved after we’ve sketched out their part.  Afterwards, we can email the minutes or simply send the recording of the call.

And then?  Well, we can hold a web conference and utilize the chat feature for side discussions and questions, the poll feature for consensus, and share pertinent documents, spreadsheets, graphs, images, etc.

The speed needed to get an idea from conception to final implementation is achievable with conferencing regardless of where your resources or key personnel are located.  It’s funny, but conferencing also provides the same tools for slow methodical momentum building as well.

Training a new employee can be a long and difficult process.  They have to be educated on the specifics of their new job.  If they already know what to do, you still have to show them how your company in particular does things.  It takes a lot of the new employee’s time to get up to speed, but also takes an existing employee’s time as well.  How can we make this process more efficient, smarter?

It seems like the learning process can be put into two categories; what new hires can learn on their own, and what they have to be taught.  Learning on their own is usually handled by handing them as stack of manuals, memos, and rules.  I think we can do this better.

What if we were to put all new hire materials on the website?  Let them start at an informational hub and work through all the protocols, rules, and SOP themselves.  Then when they’re ready, we can setup a web conference with a designated trainer.  The two--or more--of them can rapidly go over the material, handle any questions, and all with the documents there “between them”.

At some point though, the new employee will have to meet face-to-face with any number of people, and done one by one could take forever.  Addressing them as a group is a better solution for multiple hires, but each group meeting with a different trainer has it’s own time waste to consider.  Instead, let’s set up one video conference on a screen in one room with the new hires, and have a parade of trainers and managers address them from anywhere in the world.

And if we do it this way, we don’t even have to have the new hires in that room.  They can be at their desks or even at home when they join the video conference.  Using this method, we can save hours of training and work time lost to logistics, travel, and herding.

Have you used web or video conferencing in your training programs?  Tell us about it in a comment.

Knowledge is power, and today we’re going to get more powerful by learning about web conferencing mistakes.  These are fairly common, easily avoidable, and we can have better web conferences by knowing about them ahead of time.

Mistake #1  Arriving on Time - While it’s good to be punctual, “on time” for a web conference host is at least ten minutes beforehand.  This pre-conference time lets us get set up, check for problems, organize speakers and moderators, and be ready for “on time”.

Mistake #2  Leaving Other Programs On - A web conference allows us to share PowerPoint, documents, spreadsheets, and even our desktop, but we can also inadvertently share an email popup or instant message with all of our participants!  We should make sure all non-conference programs are turned off, and while we’re at it, we should double-check our background image to make sure it’s professional.

Mistake #3  Getting Sidetracked - To host a web conference, we have to be on a computer.  And on that computer--most likely--is all of the tools needed to create, correct, and finish the very things we’re having a web conference about.  Resist the temptation to stop the conference to update, change, or integrate.  Just make a note, and do it afterwards.

I hope this small review of mistakes to avoid wi ll help you in your future web conferences.  Help us out too, and tells us other mistakes you know of in a comment!

You may have a billion dollars in an account.  You may keep a ton of gold bullion in the vault.  You may even have 51% controlling interest on the Board.  But if you walk into your bank wearing a black ski mask, you’re not going to get the treatment you probably think you deserve.

We all know perceptions matter a great deal, and in a crisis situation, probably more so.  I read a tongue-in-cheek blog post listing crisis handling advice using real-world events.  Of course the point is to learn from other’s mistakes and do the OPPOSITE of each tip.

The main theme though is proper, clear, and honest communication will help avert a problem turning into a crisis--or a crisis becoming a disaster.  But while the bad examples in the blog post concern companies with larger than normal bankrolls--think BP--not all companies can get out to wherever and call a press conference.  And anyways, sometimes the scalpel is better than the sledgehammer.

We may not have millions for spin-control, but audio, web and video conferencing is the advantage for the rest of us.  As soon as a problem arises, we can have a conference call with everyone involved, from the CEO to the poor employee in the trenches.  We can get to what really happened, find out exactly what our customers think, know our resources, and discuss strategy with ideas from everyone at once.

And once we fully have the facts, we can have a video conference, getting our face in front of everyone affected.  We can use a web conference to illustrate and demonstrate exactly what has happened, and what we’re going to do about it.  We can let customers and everyone else air their grievances in the conference call and we can acknowledge their feelings and reassure them personally at the same time.

We can make all of this accessible to all--families, local businesses, the media--showing openness, acceptance of responsibility, and the will to do what’s right.  All of this can be done immediately through conferencing, no matter where any of our leadership, experts, employees, customers, or press are in the world.

Tuesday is coming and you dread it.  Why?  Because at 10am there will be a conference call... just like last week, the week before, and as far back as your dulled mind can remember.  Why does this meeting happen?  No one knows.  What is its result?  Absolutely nothing.  Should it be cancelled.?  That’s your year ly birthday wish.

In an article in the NyTimes.com, I found some tips on avoiding unnecessary meetings that I think you’ll enjoy.  The first thing we should do is...

Have an Objective - While this has been said before, it’s vital enough to repeat.  What is the purpose of the conference call?  What do we hope to accomplish and is a meeting the best way to do it?

Drop-ins Okay - Have you ever had to wait for thirty minutes until the meeting got to your part?  Did you really have to be there beforehand?  Sometimes it’s impossible to plan exactly when a speaker will be needed to speak, but if you plan correctly, it can be simple.  If people are to speak in the last ten minutes of a conference call, let them join the meeting at a later time.

Follow-Up - In the article, they encourage us to have someone take notes, including action items for the decisions made.  In a conference call, everything is recorded.  While this is easier, more efficient, and far more reliable, we still need to have someone be responsible to review the recording and follow-up.

Everyone in the Room - If we have a meeting to decide things but our report has to go to another meeting for them to approve our decisions, then we’ve just had an unnecessary meeting.  Get ALL of the involved parties into the same meeting.  Present, get feedback, answer questions, and make the decision all in one go.  This can be difficult to achieve with only face-to-face meetings, but with conference calls, it’s a simple thing to make it happen every time.

How do you avoid unnecessary meetings?  If you have any tips for us, leave a comment and tell us about them.

I want you to describe the room you’re in right now.  Go ahead, I’m listening.  Yes, out loud.

Okay, I can picture that.  Most rooms are easy to describe.  They usually have four walls, maybe a window, and furniture.  Colors and art might be a bit tricky, but not too bad.

Now describe to me your main product, service, or process.  

It takes a lot more words, a lot more thinking doesn’t it?  How many times did you want to say--or did say--”You’d just have to see it.”?  So what if you weren’t just talking to yourself in an empty room?  (Of course I couldn’t hear you.)  What if this was a conference call with ten important potential clients, a new crop of trainees, or all of your managers?  “You’d just have to see it,” would just not cut it.

So while conference calls are inexpensive, easy to use, and great to meet with hundreds of people at once, they do have that intangible limitation of being without visuals.  That’s the bad news.  The good news is that a video conference is readily available, and don’t forget that any conference call can be augmented by a web conference with just a few clicks of a mouse.

After those clicks, what happens is that all your participants can now see exactly what you’re talking about.  You can show them the pictures, the graphs, and the diagrams.  You can walk them through the website, or show them specifics of the new production line.  Your thousand words get saved by your picture.

Saved, and now those words can be put to much better uses.  You can clarify, answer questions, and elaborate.  And the best part is you won’t have to wonder if you properly described things.

Less is often more, and in PowerPoint, less is almost always more.  It’s more clear, it’s more simplified, and more conducive to getting our point across.  The king of “less” these days seems to be Takahashi Masayoshi, whose extremely zen style of PowerPoint slides caught the attention of Japan and the world.

We’ve talked about the concept of “less is more” before regarding PowerPoint, and we used Takahashi’s style as an example a few times too.  This time around, we’re going to focus on the part of the Takahashi Method that uses text as visuals.

It’s actually the catalyst of the Takahashi Method.  In the beginning, he had to give a short presentation, but didn’t have access to PowerPoint, photos, or even a graphics program.  So with text as his only option, he thought about how he could get his point across in a meaningful and memorable way.

What he did was take as few words as possible--and short words at that--and make them huge.  On each slide, one word filled the screen.  By doing this, the words stopped being text, and became visuals.  

If we were to do the same thing for our web conferences, each of our slides would be a title screen, a main point, a visual, a guide, and a message.  They would be read and understood instantly, and not take our participants attention away from us.  Our PowerPoint would be what it should be: an effective support to our presentation.

I really thought that I wasn’t old, but in my Junior year of college, I remember the first time I ever saw a student bring a laptop to class to take notes.  The teacher was hesitant to allow it but, “As long as you don’t play video games during the lecture, I guess it’s okay.”

Well check out this video of the modern college classroom, and one of the futures of learning:

How cool is that?  College students using Twitter to effectively outlearn the normal educational structure.  We can make similar strides in our audio, video and web conferences as well using short-message contribution systems.

Twitter is a great system for getting the thoughts, comments, and questions of a vast amount of people that wouldn’t normally be possible if gathered in the typical conference call Q&A style.  With a lot of participants for example, there just wouldn’t be enough time.  And what about shy people?  We might never hear from them verbally, but they’re typed contributions could be invaluable.

And it doesn’t have to be Twitter per se, there are private twitter-like programs out there.  Or, if you add a web conference to your conference call, you can use the chat feature.  There’s also instant messaging, and programs like Google wave, which allows emails, text, and IM to join a chat conversation.

The point is that by embracing and utilizing non-traditional communications mediums in our conference calls, we can look forward to much more effective collaborations.  And why not integrate Twitter and the like?  After all, it wasn’t too long ago that the simple conference call was itself a non-traditional communications medium.