At the bottom of the communication technological ladder is two tin cans and a string. At the top is a multi-point video conference webinar. Somewhere in the middle is chat – also called instant messaging. So how would stepping down several rungs help your video conference, even while using the best technology available? Well, by itself, using chat would be a downgrade. However, you can use it to enhance your video conference and make your meeting run that much better.

A good, basic meeting habit is recapping your agenda as you progress through the meeting. So after a speaker has finished his piece, or everyone has returned from a break, it's a good idea to briefly go over the main points of the rest of the meeting. Not only does this help to announce the next segment, it also keeps your audience orientated and better able to concentrate on the meeting.

During a video conference, especially if you are sharing PowerPoint or some other application, there are a lot of potential distractions. One way to keep your participants in the loop is to use the chat window. All you have to do is send a chat message that says where you are on the agenda. Then, if your participants ever get lost, they can easily see where the meeting is at.

Another good use of the chat window is for Q&A. Normally it's best to save all questions for the end of the meeting because they have the possibility of being answered by subsequent parts of the presentation. If they don't however, this can make for a long Q&A session at the end; possibly longer than time was budgeted for. One solution is to encourage your participants to use the chat window for questions and comments throughout the meeting. This unobtrusive impromptu Q&A will not disrupt the meeting, but the speaker will see the questions. Then, if he knows that he won't cover the answer later, he can easily work it into his presentation.

These are just two ideas for different uses for the chat window. What interesting solutions using chat have you come up with?