Innovation on Vancouver Island

As I’m building my professional network I go to many different business related meetings. One of my favorite ones is the Social Media Club, where we had another really interesting session yesterday.

The main agenda topic was a presentation by Rian Bowden from DailySplice.com. It was really interesting to hear what innovative products and technology is developed here in “little Victoria”. Thanks to Rian for this great overview about podcasting - how to participate as a “listener” or “viewer”, how to become a podcaster yourself, and last but not least, how DailySplice brings podcasting to communities and small businesses, like the fire and policed departments.

Other interesting collaboration products and technologies developed here in Victoria:

• Flock - the social media browser based on the Mozilla source code
• Projecho - an innovative online conference system

The 7% Rule

Did you know that only

7 %

of the impact of any communication is determined by content (your words)?

I just found this in an interesting Wikipedia article about communication.

According to this article, there are three major parts in human face to face communication which are body language, voice tonality, and words. According to the research:

• 55% of impact is determined by body language–postures, gestures, and eye contact,
• 38% by the tone of voice, and
• 7% by the content or the words used in the communication process.

Most online meetings rely on content only, so it’s not surprising that many people find teleconferences boring and not very valuable.

So what can we do to increase the impact of online meetings?

The simplest way doesn’t even require the use of any additional technology: In any conference call, you can increase the impact by making sure that you vary the tone of your voice. Try to put emotions into your voice. Work with multiple speakers, play a recorded interview of somebody else…

If you want to tap into the 55% bucket, you need to add visuals to your meeting. That can be either a web conference shoing slides, or a webcam showing presenters and/or participants. If used properly, the visuals can greatly increase communication. Here are a few things to consider:

• Don’t get too cheap on the choice of your webcam - there are huge differences in quality of the resulting pictures
• Make sure you have good light so that people can really get a good picture when using a webcam
• Upload bandwidth: Test if the bandwidth of your interent connection is fast enough to use a webcam, especially when you plan to use screen sharing, webcan and voice-over-ip (voip) all at the same time !
• Know your technology: Web and Video conferences have come a long way over the last years. Most systems are really easy to use and setup for participants. But presenters need to know more - and many meetings end up spending more time working out technology glitches, then on the meeting….

Webinar Step-By-Step Checklist

I recently gave a presentation about collaboration tools for a meetup group of entrepreneurs in Victoria.  After providing an overview about various file sharing and web conference tools, the focus of this presentation was on the process for web seminars (also called webinar).

In preparation for this session I wrote down all the different steps, which are required for a typical web seminar before, during and after the event. I was surprised about how big my list became… Please contact me to get a free copy of this webinar checklist.