Videoconferencing has taken the business world by storm. The uses for your business are obvious-the ability to hold meetings at anytime regardless of physical location. The ability to train employees through this technology as well as educate customers about your products/services. One may be excited to begin but proper planning is necessary to be successful.

Of course it is also important to make once everything is set up that you conduct everything properly. There are several points that must be kept in mind while conducting a video conference meeting. The most important is the quality of audio and video, especially if the videoconference has participants sitting across several remote sites.

Very often the conference organizers pay more attention to video than audio. This may prove counterproductive because a loss of audio can kill a videoconference. The participants can only watch images but are clueless as to what the key speaker is saying or what questions are being asked.

You must also pay attention to connectivity and transmission speeds. A slow speed will reduce the quality of both audio and video, and participants will find it difficult to understand what is happening. This is especially true of multi-point meetings.

It is equally important to have “chair control” meaning that the lead speaker should be allowed to run the meeting. Otherwise, the conference may be drowned in a cacophony of voices with all speakers trying to speak simultaneously. It is also important to let participants based at one location be able to see participants seated at other locations. This gives one the sense of belonging and involvement which in turn will make the videoconference more productive.

This information may seem common sense to you, but you’d be very surprised how many people really just neglect this and then wonder why there video conference is a total failure! This is why we speak so much about audio conferencing in early posts, because if you can’t handle a simple phone meeting then how in the world can you conduct a proper videoconference?

Just because it’s really “new” and “cool” doesn’t mean you need to incorporate the technology. Sure, some industries and companies lend themselves well to this technology but ask yourself again…are you capable? At least hire someone that is. Your companies image depends on this

In a future article I’ll cover more things you need to cover to conduct a proper videoconference