Top Reasons Web Conferencing is HOT Now
If the high-tech consumer electronics industry were a high school prom, Web Conferencing would be a shoo-in for Prom King this year.
With the ability to hold virtual meetings and conduct every kind of possible business in an online virtual meeting (without ever leaving your office), Web Conferencing is proving to have seduction powers worthy of the greatest high school football hunk.
Consumers of all age groups, socio-economic background and business functions are turning to the latest trend in communication.
If you wanted to be “Hip” in the 60s wearing flowers and peace signs could get you into the in-crowd. “Hip” in the 21st century involves having a web-cam, a mobile phone, a laptop, and using them all together in virtual online get-togethers.
Travel Weariness
Believe it or not, there are people who loathe long drives, cramped plane seats, airport shakedowns and the out of control price of gasoline. With Web Conferencing, the hour of emancipation from travel woes and weariness has finally come. From CEO to Grandma, the low hassle, easy to arrive at meeting scheduled virtually via a web conferencing provider has consumers cheering.
Low Hassle
If you are the kind of person who enjoys lining up lunch caterers, arranging hotel and meeting space, travel itineraries for guest lecturers and keynote speakers, followed by frantic punting when the inevitable crisis hits, Web conferencing is not for you.
However, if you are an individual who values not only your time but your blood pressure safety margin, the immensely simplified conferences and meetings made possible by Web Conferencing technology are simply too good not to take advantage of.
Computer Savvy Society
Although it is true that some people still struggle to use email, today’s society is much more typified by blogging Grandmas, online-shopping housewives, telecommuting business men, and internet surfing teenagers.
Not only does every home strive to incorporate at least a television, having a computer as well has become a standardized accoutrement of middle-class society. In fact, households increasingly have not just one central computer, but a computer per member of the household.
Even a decade ago Web Conferencing simply would not have had the tech base, or the knowledge base, required for it to become an essential tool of homes and businesses. But in 2008, Web Conferencing has both, and it is quickly becoming the preferred medium of communication.
Easy to Use
Web Conferencing vendors are providing increasingly simplified user-interfaces to the technology. Many providers, such as WebEx, are structured so that virtual meetings can be launched quickly and easily from all Microsoft Applications-the kind that people are already using.
Providers often structure their products to interface seamlessly with programs and applications already running, and to incorporate material from every area of the consumers PC.
As the technology is growing by leaps and bounds, the tutorials are shrinking, and the how-to manuals getting slimmer. At this point in the technology, thirteen year olds can (and do) hop online to chat virtually with friends all over the world. After submitting their homework via podcast to their schools virtual web-site.
Recent Interface with Cell Phones
Gone are the days when having a car phone was cool, and the portable cell phones whipped out casually in Hollywood films were the size of the protagonist's head. No longer a Beverly Hills commodity, the cell phone has become the most ubiquitous techno-toy of our society.
Everyone wants the latest and greatest, and cell phones are becoming a status symbol similar to cars, although on a lower, more affordable level. Recently, the Web conferencing technology has made the interface with the cell phone industry, enhancing features, universality, and cost-effectiveness of Web conferencing services.
For example, Verizon Wireless boasts a comprehensive business suit of Web Conferencing services, and other phone cellular providers are following suit.
Most recently, Verizon has made all of their phones Web conferencing capable. When keeping up with the Jones’ now includes keeping up with their cell phones (as well as the car and the house) web conferencing has just gained an entire new market of potential users.
Multi-Tasking
Every one has had the experience of being stuck in long, boring, often pointless meetings. In fact, the level of your job satisfaction probably is directly related to how frequently you enjoy this experience.
Web conferencing owes much to its meteoric rise in popularity due to the self-preservation of business people reaching desperately to preserve sanity. Why struggle to stay awake during the quarterly review in a boardroom when you can schedule the meeting virtually via web conferencing, and actually get something productive done.
Why wade thru interminable reports or trainings with absolutely no relevance to your department, when you can completely finish replying to your email backload, finish budget analysis and catch a nap before the information in the meeting becomes relevant to your actual function.
The opportunity to multi-task and the staving off of stultifying boredom may be the single most effective driver in the web conferencing industry.
Sales Tool Du Jour
A salesman's dream is to be able to make a single presentation to hundreds of people at once yet maintain a personalized experience. Web conferencing provides just that.
When the numbers get crunched, salesmen find that a certain percentage of that 100 people will end up buying their product or service and then the web conferencing utility becomes indespensible.
Money Money MoneyOk, if it isn’t boredom driving the industry, it’s money. The extensive travel costs, meeting costs, conference set up and hotel costs and exorbitant traveling speaker fees have long been the source of gigantic collective wince in every businesses’ budgeting department.
With Web conferencing, all those costs fade pleasantly away into a single rate, usually so drastically below traditional meeting and conference output the accountants are actually smiling.
And it’s not just businesses who save, its also personal at-home users who may not be able to afford a plane ticket, but can manage the web conferencing fee to talk to their loved ones. Or better yet, use one of the growing number of free Web conferencing providers (who usually specialize in non-business applications).
Long Distance Relationships
Globalization of business and opportunities in education have increased the number of couples and families who live and work at distances that would previously have made any kind of a relationship impossible.
Via Web conferencing technology, people who have seasonal jobs, overseas jobs and/or deployment, or mandatory relocation, to name a few, are able to preserve familial ties with less stress.
Cyber-Café Coolness
Finally, there is just the coolness factor inherent in sitting in a cyber café and casually chatting with someone hundreds (or thousands) of miles away.
With Wi-Fi hotspots proliferating faster than celebrity babies, restaurants, hotels, bookstores, and cafes are all becoming venues for the techno-savvy to exhibit their coolness.