At oDesk, our in-house full-time employees work from home at least one day a week, and we’re regularly collaborating with a team of about 250 remote contractors who act as a crucial extension of our internal team. This has forced us to study how to make meetings work for all involved.

We’ve found there are three steps to a successful online meeting:

• Be sure you need a meeting to accomplish the desired result
• Establish topics and their time allocation, roles and processes (planning objectives, information sharing, problem solving, decision making, relationship building)
• Assess your meeting afterwards (results met, process adhered to, relationships strengthened)

We started by defining the roles involved in making a remote meeting work: the organizer, coordinator, presenter(s) and attendees. Each role has its responsibilities to the team, and by defining those roles, we’re able to ensure accountability for each meeting’s success and seek out ways to continually improve the remote meeting experience. Adopting these roles has allowed us to make sure members of a distributed team are as active, included, and productive during a meeting as those who are on-site.

Organizer: Setting the stage

Someone needs to make sure the meeting will accommodate all participants. The format of the meeting will largely depend on the needs of the group and the goals of the meeting. The meeting organizer works with the presenter to ensure that the right format is chosen and prepared ahead of time.

• Where will we hold the on-site meeting? Generally, this will be a conference room or office large enough to hold all the on-site attendees, with the technology necessary to accommodate remote attendees.
• What kind of access do remote attendees need? Is audio sufficient, or do they need video of the room? Do they need to be able to see slides or other materials?
• How will remote attendees “dial in”? This means choosing the platform of the meeting, which can include a bridge line, Skype, or a desktop sharing/presenting platform such as GoToMeeting.
• How will we communicate when and how to attend? Invitees need to know when, where and how to attend the meeting. If remote attendees need to have a login to register or to download and install a plugin, the organizer makes sure they are aware of this potential roadblock and are prepared in advance.
• Is everyone clear on the roles and their responsibilities? Make sure all attendees are aware of the presenters and meeting coordinator, and share the agenda and best practices with them.

Presenters: Adapting to the environment

Presenters must remember to take into account the remote participants. When you’re explaining concepts or an initiative to a distributed team, will there be visual aids? Do you intend to show something on a computer screen? Does it need to be seen live, as you manipulate it, or can you send a copy of the material, such as a PowerPoint presentation, to remote participants so they can follow along? Prior to the meeting, the presenter should work with the meeting organizer to make sure they—and the facility—are prepared technically to present via local projection and remote platforms.

During the meeting, presenters should:

• Log onto their presentation platform five minutes early to address any technical difficulties.
• Welcome everyone and ask remote attendees whether they can hear and see appropriately
• Make sure to verbalize throughout the meeting what attendees should be seeing (slide number, visual cues, etc.) to help flag sharing problems quickly.
• Ask whether the remote team has any questions. It can be hard for remote participants to interject or notify organizers of their desire to speak. Give them equal opportunity to contribute by offering them the floor at meeting/slide transitions.
• If a contributor is not near a microphone or speakerphone, repeat the statement or question yourself to ensure remote attendees can hear all conversations (since you’ll probably be best situated for microphone pickup).

Coordinators: Keeping everything on track

Identify a coordinator before the meeting. This person makes sure that the technical side runs smoothly and is prepared to respond to challenges as they arise. The meeting coordinator can also be the organizer, but should not be a presenter. If presentations are being made from more than one location, there should ideally be a coordinator in each place. Also, the coordinators should be members of the department presenting the meeting, to ensure that they’ll understand the material being presented, even if they’re distracted by the on-the-fly back-end management.

During the meeting, the coordinator:

• Facilitates an instant messaging group chat with remote team members, including updating the conversation regularly as problems are recognized and addressed. This IM session allows remote members to communicate technical difficulties or other distractions that need to be addressed without interrupting the meeting flow.
• Handles all troubleshooting requiring local action, such as adjusting microphones, encouraging speakers to talk louder, refreshing slide screens, etc.

Attendees: Ready to go

Attendees have a role to play in keeping the meeting running smoothly, as well. They’re responsible for:

• Logging onto the platform five minutes early to address any technical issues prior to the meeting.
• Communicating difficulties during the meeting to the coordinator via the chosen instant messaging channel.

A note on having a solid platform

Often a simple phone call and speakerphone is sufficient, but make sure any printed material, such as an agenda, is also shared with remote participants before the meeting. Depending on your presentation needs, more involved platform options include:

• Dial-in conference bridges or direct-dial phone calls
• Skype (video and voice chat)
• Shared documents (Google Docs)
• GoToMeeting/GoToWebinar
• WebEx

Whatever platform you choose, adapt your presentation to the platform’s strengths (don’t try to present a PowerPoint over a direct-dial phone call), and make sure that everyone is prepared. Check in with remote attendees afterward to make sure they had a positive experience, and work on ironing out wrinkles as they’re identified.

At oDesk, we’ve been refining our techniques for years, and we’re progressing toward meetings that are every bit as easy as having everyone under the same roof — sometimes even easier. More importantly, we’ve made sure that our remote workers are able to fully contribute to our success at least as well as if they were in our office. Which is the whole point of what we do, after all.

Gary Swart is CEO of oDesk. He has more than 17 years’ experience leading remote and local teams as an executive at Intellibank, IBM and Pure Software. 

Image courtesy of Flickr user Joe Shlabotnik

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• Report: High-Impact Collaboration in the Enterprise

The first crop of gadgets includes tools for web-based document sharing, lead tracking, issue reporting and monitoring, and note-taking, such as:

• An Evernote gadget that automatically displays notes containing the name or email address of a particular contact, and allows adding and editing.
• A Dropbox tool for finding files and sharing them by creating links that are entered into email messages. Drag-and-drop file sending is planned for the future.
• A JIRA bug tracker tool that allows programmers to update project status inline.
• A Google Translate tool that automatically translates entire conversations, both incoming and outgoing. Xobni says that the translations are good enough to be helpful for use in customer support.
• A WebEx tool to schedule meetings, and start them on the fly.

Other gadgets available today include:

• Productivity: GoldMail
• Collaboration: Huddle and Microsoft SharePoint
• Content: Facebook, Flickr, Hoover’s, Klout, LinkedIn, Twitter, Xing, YouTube, Yelp
• CRM: Salesforce CRM

Xobni was one of the first companies to bring “social CRM” services to the inbox, but has more recently seen significant competition from the likes of Rapportive, Gist and Liaise. By hooking into third-party services, the gadgets can offer offer additional capabilities not offered by Xobni’s competitors.

When I spoke with Xobni representatives recently, they said that the rationale for developing this platform was simple: research shows that in the enterprise, people spend 38 percent of their screen time in Outlook, so it makes sense to make Outlook as capable as possible.

Xobni says that its system relies on open APIs, and it is based on OpenSocial. Developers can create their own gadgets; they can be created with straightforward web development tools. The infrastructure can even be hosted on intranets to take advantage of corporate LDAP servers. Gadgets are not yet part of Xobni for Gmail beta, but they are on the way.

The new Xobni gadgets are available from the company’s website. Most of the Xobni Gadgets are free, but the JIRA and Saleforce gadgets are priced at $9.99 per user per year. Xobni handles billing and payment for developers.

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• Communications, Platforms, Privacy Ruled NewNet in Q4

Tungle.me users can now automatically embed WebEx information into meeting invitations when organizing a conference call. The location field in the email confirmation and calendar event will both have a direct link to the WebEx meeting. That should mean that participants won’t have to hunt down a dial-in number hidden in away in an email somewhere, and they’ll also have direct access to any required meeting or presentation documents.

Setting up your Tungle.me account to work with WebEx is straightforward:

1. Sign into Tungle.me
2. Click “Partner Add-Ons” in the left sidebar
3. Enter your WebEx credentials

As WebEx is the only item under the “Partner Add-Ons” menu currently, I’d hope that would mean that Tungle is also looking at integrating other apps with its service. Tungle.me already plays nicely with a large variety of calendaring apps, but being able to integrate it with a wide variety of web conferencing and online presentation providers would be very useful.

What meeting scheduling tools do you use?

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Enabling the Web Work Revolution

Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

In order to showcase their apps and services, many of these web conferencing companies offer free or affordable webinars on a variety of business topics to lure in new customers. Additionally, some companies hold free webinars to showcase their expertise. Either way, there are more and more free webinars offered every day. You can use them to gain knowledge from credible consultants, authors and other experts.

A caveat: When companies have something to sell, their webinars may tend to be skewed toward their products. Go for the webinars that include diverse topics and especially those where the experts are not from within the host company.

Here are some webinars on topics that can help you with your work.

1. Webinars on WebEx — free sessions hosted by experts using WebEx software. Upcoming webinars include a WebEx Q&A where you can ask a WebEx expert about holding large virtual events on December 8, 2009 and on December 15, “Reward & Recognition on a Limited Budget” led by Senior Consulting Partner Mark Paskowitz of The Ken Blanchard Companies.
2. New Marketing Labs — Coming up December 3 is “Measuring Success in Social Media” from the team at this reputable social media consulting firm led by Chris Brogan.
3. Radian6′s Twebinars — Sample topics include case studies of “engaged brands” like communications company Mullen and beverage company Molson Coors.
4. Sustainable Industries — This magazine holds free webinars about the issues of sustainability for anybody wanting to reduce their carbon footprint both (in both their personal and professional lives) as well as to learn about the latest trends in sustainability.
5. The IRS — Yes, even the IRS has gotten on the webinar bandwagon! Topics include tips on e-filing, tax updates (often based on specific states), and IRS Disaster Assistance.
6. Hubspot — While I do not endorse the Hubspot product, it does offer useful archived webinars like “5 Tips for Advanced B2B Business Blogging” and “How to Use Social Media to Manage Your Company Brand Online” There are also live webinars.
7. Awareness Networks — Watch archived videos of webinars with such industry leaders as Paul Gillin and Brian Solis.
8. Marketing Profs — For an annual membership fee, you can access archived webinars on topics ranging from “Monetizing the Long Tail of Search: Rethink Your Keyword Strategy” and “Love or Marketing? How Word-of-Mouth Will Save Your Brand.” Marketing Profs also holds live webinars including webinars on how to succeed with webinars.
9. Constant Contact — This email marketing company offers live webinars on email marketing, event marketing and online surveys. (Disclosure: I am a paying customer of Constant Contact).
10. Small Business Administration — The SBA has a series of small business training webinars covering finance and accounting, business planning and business startup, among other topics. You can also find webinars offered for free by local SBAs by state.

Virtual events company On24 takes webinars a huge leap further by sponsoring — and providing the platform for — virtual summits such as last month’s Social CRM Virtual Summit, essentially an all-day series of webinars and webcasting.

Webinars are a convenient way to learn best practices, hear case studies and hear from some of the world’s top experts in their field, all from the comfort of your office, your home or anywhere.

What webinars have you attended that you recommend?

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• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
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What do you do when an application you’ve adopted and incorporated into your work process suddenly goes under? Nancy recently wrote about why she doesn’t trust the cloud for her work, but when you run a virtual company or are part of a virtual team, it isn’t realistic to keep all of your work on a local computer. Even if you aren’t a virtual worker, there are still apps that die quick deaths every day — their demise can leave you out in the cold.

How do you protect yourself from the pains of losing the functionality of one of your favorite apps? Here are some of my thoughts about making a smoother transition even when there’s a technical bump in the road that you didn’t anticipate.

1. Hold your geeky horses. Did you just get an invite to an app in alpha or beta? Did you just read about the debut of a new app in your favorite news source? Stop, take a breath, and wait a little bit before adopting it as the tool you’ll use at the exclusion of other tried and true offerings. Sure, there are some new apps that come out that fill a big needs gap. However, there is a difference between being an early adopter and changing your processes to accommodate an app that may or may not make it through its first year of business.
2. Back up your options, not just your data. Yes, a cool app like Projecho comes along that offers affordable and super-easy video conferencing, but clearly it isn’t the only game in town. Before you go ditching your more costly option or before you jump on a new app bandwagon for any reason, have a contingency plan — a fallback app — that you can go to immediately if the new one fails. Of course you may save a bundle moving from a WebEx to a Projecho, but look at the unanticipated costs of having to switch back over, retrain staff, and change processes.
3. Inventory your options. Once you determine the backup apps for the ones you currently use, make a list or spreadsheet that clearly spells out the apps you use, your process, and your fallback plan in case an app goes under. This handy list can make for a smoother transition with less scrambling around for new solutions if you lose an app to the bad economy, bad business models or other app destroyers.
4. Get the e-newsletters. Lately, I’ve been opting not to get the e-newsletters from apps I sign up to use because of email overload. But frankly, if I hadn’t been on Projecho’s list, I may not have seen the news of its demise as promptly as I did and would have had to wait to see it in a news source — if I even saw it at all before arriving at the site one day to find the doors had closed. Even if you never read any of the e-newsletters in detail (and in some cases you should, because they are filled with useful tips on using the product), skim the headlines before trashing. I clearly could not miss “Projecho Discontinuation” in my inbox.
5. Buy the backup plan. Clearly not all web apps involve saving your data in the cloud. Projecho is a video conferencing tool, for example, so it is just there to use when you need it. But if you are uploading — or creating — assets purely online, either get in the habit of keeping your own backups (either on a local drive, or using a cloud backup service) or pay for a more premium account that includes additional online backups. You can never back up too much, and if your web app goes kaput, you’ll be glad you did the extra work or paid a few extra bucks.

Keep in mind that some of these tips can work for you whether you’re working with cloud apps or software on your computer (WordStar, anyone?).

How do you plan for the possible demise of your favorite and most-used web apps?

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• Communications, Platforms, Privacy Ruled NewNet in Q4
• Report: The Enterprise Videoconference Landscape, 2010 – 2015
• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era

Dimdim Webinar is very easy to use for attendees, as unlike other web conferencing products, you don’t need to sign up or install any software or plugins to join a conference. Hosts also don’t need to install any software, and they get access to an impressive array of features including screen-sharing, web site co-browsing, webcam video, text chat, audio and whiteboard tools. You can customize the look and feel of the webinar to match your corporate branding. Hosts can record webinars and get access to an analytics package for tracking who attended and how they interacted during the event. The app feels quite quick in use; joining an event is fast, and switching between presentations is snappy. 

A useful feature is the Webinar Widget, which you can embed on your site (or elsewhere, like your Facebook Page, for example), promoting the event and letting attendees register. The widget automatically changes over time — while the event is in progress, attendees can join through the widget. After the webinar has finished, you can configure the widget to promote a transcript and/or recording of the event.

Didim Webinar is competitively priced at $828 per year, or $75 per month, and is free to try for 30 days. After the 30-day trial, if you don’t wish to sign up to Webinar Edition, you can continue to use Dimdim Free, which is limited to 20 attendees but otherwise has full functionality.

Have you tried Dimdim? How do you think it compares with WebEx and GoToMeeeting?

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• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

The TimeBridge scheduler lets you set up a meeting or conference call by prompting you to pick some ideal date and time options, then sends them to the participants to vote on their best dates and times. It then provides you with a mechanism to accept a mutually agreeable time slot and confirm the meeting with everyone. Now, built right into the scheduler, is a button to “make it a Web conference” or “add a free conference call”.

The web-based conferencing system rivals WebEx and GoToMeeting. It is entirely Flash-based, so it requires zero download, and it seems to be pretty reliable and stable. Its capabilities include:

• share screen — for viewing someone else’s desktop. Perfect for demos.
• share documents — for viewing PDFs, Word documents, spreadsheets and more.
• white board — for collaborative composition. The white board feature also lays over documents for real-time, collaborative annotations.
• co-browse — for the ability to share a web browser view, where any party can click on active links.

Another useful feature is TimeBridge Groups, with which you can group together different configurations of people such as your design group, your executive team and client teams. This feature makes it easier to schedule meetings with pre-designated groupings of people.

So what does the new web conferencing feature cost? The company’s CEO and founder, Yori Nelken, says that TimeBridge can price their new conferencing service competitively because they have no customer acquisition costs. They already have an enormous customer base for their free scheduler, so upgrades are an easy sell. What might cost $50 per month from a competitor is being offered by TimeBridge for $8.95 per month. Of course, when I heard that price, my eyes lit up.

How Web Workers Can Use It

I face several challenge as I’m growing my social media marketing company with web workers in five different locations in the U.S. and a new addition in the UK, including:

• training new hires on the proprietary ways we execute social media marketing tactics
• having virtual meetings with the entire team that can include demos and brainstorming
  
• showing clients in other parts of the world the social media assets we’ve created for them
• demoing samples of our work to potential clients remotely

TimeBridge’s price is attractive for a lean, mean virtual company in startup mode. And it seems like it could provide an immediate functionality and efficiency that is lacking from many virtual teams. I think it is brilliant to build out a suite of “virtual meeting” tools for the new way we’re doing work.

So What’s Missing?

Something that I think would enhance the TimeBridge toolset is the service from TimeDriver that I’ve been using to allow other people to select available time slots on my schedule to set in-person meetings for my time at South by Southwest Interactive. I mentioned this to the folks at TimeBridge, and they acknowledged — somewhat dismissively — that this is something for the future.

If TimeBridge is being touted as a “personal scheduler” with virtual meeting space capabilities, I think the missing piece of the puzzle is just that — personal scheduling. Since part of my web work includes virtual demos and, occasionally, in-person meetups, being able to give people access to open time slots on my calendar and letting them select and book the meetings themselves would be a killer app.

What are you using to schedule meetings? What apps do you use for web conferencing and free conference calls? Are your solutions integrated, and does that matter?

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• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

Palbee homepage

In the fight for dominance in the video web conferencing realm, we have WebEx, the granddaddy who struggles to stay one step ahead of the young fighters such as GoToMeeting. But into the ring leaps Palbee, a scrappy upstart based out of Seoul, Korea who can throw a quick and unexpected left hook that could knock the socks off the competition.

Palbee is leaner than the big guys. And it is cheaper. Much cheaper. While still in beta, it is completely free. Sure, it doesn’t have all of the bells and whistles of the heavy hitters, however, what it lacks in bulk, it makes up for in simplicity. Palbee sought out to be easier to use, and it succeeds.

Set up a free account, log into Palbee, type the title of your meeting, hit start. Voila. You can get a little more complex – but not much more – by opting to record the meeting (click a button), invite other users to your meeting (click a button, type in their Palbee names), and schedule your meeting for another date and time (click a button, enter date and time).

Other quick specs:

• You can have up to 10 people in each meeting.
• There is a limit on meeting time – 1 hour.
• Palbee currently supports JPEGs, GIFs and PowerPoint files.
• Cross platform – runs with a Web browser and Flash.

Palbee Meeting

Now Hear This

Palbee delivers the one two punch with these features:

1. Their whiteboard feature - Every participant can gain access to markup tools including drawing and text functions to make notes on the image or PowerPoint file as it appears on everyone’s desktop. Currently, you have to take a screenshot to save those notations, but brainstorming and collaboration is easy to do.

2. Their conference room embed feature – While I’m not quite sure of the work application here, I was intrigued by the ability to lift some embed code of a Palbee meeting space and paste it into your Web site, blog or even MySpace page. This means that people can click on the Palbee widget and enter the same meeting room. Yes, this also means that if you paste the widget on multiple sites, those become multiple points of entry into the same conference room. So your visitors can engage not only in a live video web conference call or chat with you but also with one another at any time. Freaky!

In the Works

Some of the handy features that will be in a future version of Palbee include:

1. A premium level of services.
2. The ability to save the whiteboard edits.
3. Inviting conferencing guests who are not already registered users of Palbee (registration is free).

Palbee Widget

The company says that Palbee was not initially designed to fit a market need – it was created to fit an internal company need and then they realized it could serve a much wider market.

When I did the demo with the company as part of researching this post, the camera feature did not work for me. The software was not recognizing my Webcam built into my MacBook. There was also the expected delay – I was in Alaska and they were in Seoul, Korea!

If you like Beta products and don’t mind working out the kinks along with the company, Palbee is a handy little tool to meet your next basic Web conferencing needs.

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