There are those who would argue that staging a webinar is not much different from conducting a live presentation in person. In many ways this is true, but the web conferencing format expands the audience and enhances the presentation. One example is through the use of videos in meetings.
Video Conferencing Explained
The term video conferencing refers to technology that allows communication via live video streams. It can involve two or more persons, but the basic idea is that all participants can see all others involved in the web conference. While it can be a standalone service, it is usually a component of today’s web conferencing software. While video conferencing is not absolutely vital to the success of a meeting, having a video component does greatly increase the overall presentation’s effectiveness.
The Benefits and Advantages
Few conferences can be considered successful without some sort of video component. Along with standard features as chat, annotation and whiteboard, presentations can be structured in such a way that participants can offer their own input in real time. This is one of the many benefits of conducting a seminar or meeting online and a growing number of organizations are catching on to this fact. These include:
Large and small companies: Regardless of the size of any business, there are great benefits to be had by either hosting or attending a webinar. Some companies may use them to provide training for employees. Smaller companies recognize the value of the web meeting for networking opportunities and self promotion. Many meeting software also have built in screen sharing functions, allowing for an easy way for teams to collaborate and work together regardless of their physical locations.
Schools and universities:
Use of video conferencing does not only apply to online schools. Online learning also schools the flexibility to offer self-paces or distance learning classes for students who are not able to attend classes on campus. Courses taught online can often be recorded for reference by students or professors later.
A simple search online using terms like ‘ web conferencing comparison will return an array of guides on picking a web conferencing solution. There are also many independent web conference service testers who offer an objective view and analysis of many of the major service provider available today. A quick read on these sites will give anyone a good start in their search for the right conferencing software.
I’ve always admired the work of Steven Covey and – if you are like many people time to read books is at a premium. So this short presentation is a welcome addition and can give you a very quick overview of the core themes of the book.
I’ve always read books and being in business means that I have a reason (as if I need one) to read books about business. I thought it might be worthwhile to create a list of my top business books; the ones that influenced me most.
Good to Great – Jim Collins. I’d never heard of Jim Collins until a few years ago. I attended a leadership conference where I watched a series of speakers from all over the world talk about leadership and one of these was Jim Colins. His book good to great is one of the seminal works that has shaped my subsequent business and personal activities. In the book he recounts the process of looking at hundreds of good and great companies all over the world and trying to identify what it was that enabled a company to make the transition from simply being good to being a great company. It sounds dry and academic but the insights that he, and his research team, draws out of the evidence, have to place this book in my top list.
Jeff Olsen – The Slight Edge. In this small book Jeff Olsen talks about the choices we make everyday without even thinking about them that over time lead to either success or failure.
Robert Kiyosaki’s book – Rich Dad Poor Dad in which he tells his own story about how he watched his real father get the best education in the world but end up poor as a teacher and his friend’s dad who helped Robert embark on an educational path that provided financial literacy and the knowledge to enable him to amass great wealth. The board game Cashflow 101 is well worth getting if you have children and teenagers – available via amazon.com
Start something today is all about bright simple ideas that can change your world and our world. Here is an outstanding example of what we can do. Please take the time to watch – it is fascinating.
One of the most poorly understood terms in use on the Internet today is the term avatar. Let me begin by explaining where the term came from originally. Apparently the term is derived from the Sanskrit word which is to do with Eastern religions which means ‘a representation of one’s self’ in other words a picture, an image or a representation of the person concerned. The modern derivation or application of the term avatar is almost exclusively connected with the use of computers, the Internet, Internet gaming and blogs in particular. Many services like MSN Messenger, Yahoo, AIM and Skype actually encourage you to have an image of yourself. They seem to work better if the image is of the person concerned. A picture of you has been shown to encourage confidence.
Probably the most common outworking of the avatar format is by using on of a number of free services that link a particular e-mail to a particular image and that image is stored on the Internet at one such service and probably the one most commonly used in the blogging community is a service called Gravatar (www.Gravatar.com) allows you to go and register an e-mail address and then upload a small picture related to the e-mail address. Then whenever you go and post a comment or write an entry on the blog then provided you use that e-mail address then that image that you’ve linked to the e-mail address will pop up in the post or comment. There are many examples of that all over the internet.
Now why is it important to use Gravatars when you’re working on the Internet? We all know the search engines love back links to your site and search engines like Google view them as very important. So let’s say that you have a chosen area and niche area looking for example high performance sailing. If you go and search on the Internet for blogs containing the phrase high performance sailing. Once you find a good site you post a helpful comment and in doing so are asked to provide your e mail and are given the option of providing a web address. Provided your comment is accepted by the owner of the blog then two things happened one is you get a back link to your site which is all cute importance of the just mentioned and secondly your image gets placed adjacent in the comments (if your image is good then people may well click on it. The more you place relevant comments on other peoples blogs the more likely your website is to gain that elusive goal – an elevated Google PR rank. There are no hard and fast rules regarding the number of back links that you need in order to step up from say a Google rank of 0 to 1 to 2, then 2 to 3 and so on but every back link that you have brings you closer to that elusive goal.
Wherever you see an invitation to post a comment on a blog where they require you to put an e mail address to validate the poster then there is a probability that the site is enabled to use Avatars/Gravatars. Each comment that you post acts as a valuable back link. It is for just this reason that spammers try to post comments by the hundred in blogs and on forums.
This weeks recommendation is in two parts:
go to www.gravatar.com and register – it is free. For each email address you want to use just have a small image – preferably different to upload.
then make a decision to visit one blog (search on Google for ones similar to your niche) and post a helpful comment. The box on “start something today” looks like this but you may only see a ‘Comments’ link on some sites.
It is essential that we keep our eyes and is open. The reason people and the businesses they run fall behind is that we as individuals are not paying attention to the changes taking place.
Some dramatic and well known examples of disruptive change are:
Who ever uses a cassette tape or a vinyl record today?
Where are the typewriters of yesterday?
Toyota and the Hybrid car
the electric light displaced the gas or oil lamp
With regard to the changes around us – are we looking for them but not seeing them, are we reading about them but not understanding them, are we noticing them but refusing to listen to the lessons they give? Sure, you can trundle out hundreds of excuses about being too busy, under resourced or restricted by the management but in reality these all just excuses.
If you take repeated action that is not pushing you in the right direction and you are not using this feedback to infer how you may need to change, then this is not intelligent behavior. It has been referred to colloquially as the definition of insanity; doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Not all feedback is good in the first instance. The faster you move through denial, to believing that all is rosy when it is actually not, and making some changes for the better. First you have to notice that all was not rosy.
The beauty of being a flip star is that you can always do the opposite of the what the world suggests – Google’s founders did this beautifully well – in truth they created an environment where change was seen as good. People say knowledge is power. Perhaps knowledge is not power. Maybe ignorance is David Grable, an author, speaks of the loss of ignorance with sadness:
“Unlike knowledge, which is infinitely reusable, ignorance is a one-shot deal; once it has been displaced by knowledge,
it can be hard to get back. After it’s gone, we are more apt to follow a well-worn path to find answers
than to exert our sense of what we didn’t know in order to present new options.
Knowledge can stand in the way of innovation. Solved problems tend to stay solved sometimes disastrously so.”
2000 years ago people “knew” the universe was created in the week. 1000 years ago humans “knew” the sun moved around earth. 500 years ago people “knew” the earth was flat. Imagine what you will know tomorrow? What knowledge or practices do you hold on to that are no longer empowering? What behavior that once drove your success do you and your team now need to unlearn?
Great leaders and managers must be prepared to make decisions about their business, and for that matter their lives. Often these decisions will be based as much on intuition and educated guesswork as on predictable data and knowledge. The flipstar makes the decision anyway. Why:
decisions lead to actions. When you finally make up your mind about something, it usually leads to action. There is no need at this point to say why this is a good thing.
Decisions creates momentum. The action that follows your decisions will give you the clarity that was preventing you from making a decision in the first place, and now you’re off on a positive upward spiral. Action leads to clarity, clarity leads to confidence, confidence leads to another decision and now the decision warrants action and so on.
Decisions create confidence. The decision gives you not just a sense of confidence but also those around you. If you get your team or, if you’re a CEO your whole company moving in the right direction of your stated trajectory, you had better instil some confidence.
Decisions create that confidence.
Let me give you a simple but profound question. When will Apple cease to be a computer company that has an interest in music downloads to being exclusively a music and media company?
For a few weeks now I’ve been thinking about about wisdom and what it really means.
Many of the simple lessons that we learn as young adults and children make up the bulk of the wisdom passed down through the years. For example why did our mothers and grandmothers tell us they need to eat parsnips only when the first frosts come? Another example being feed a cold and starve a fever! How do you cook a chicken?
I’m not talking about the brown things that monks wear when I talk of habits. I’m talking behaviour and thought patterns.
On one hand habits are like suitcases and bags that get in the way. On the other hand habits of behaviour that help us achieve what we desire.
Much has been written by many skilled authors over the years about habits. How to break them, how to improve them and I’m not about to try to compete with those writers. Just recognising that you have a habit is the first step and 90% of the solution.
In very simple terms habits are things that we picked up and employ every day without even thinking about it. As before they can be both positive and negative. The same dynamic is at work in our work. If you walk into any business and start looking around you’ll see good and bad habits. The good habits might be good customer service. For example following up with customers who have reported a problem with your product or service. A bad habit might be as simple as having a cluttered desk and being unable to find something when you need it. I just looked at my desk and realize that’s one of my bad habits.
So how do you decide whether a habit is good or bad? It’s really very simple. The question I would ask is “does my habit take me nearer my ultimate goal?” If the answer is yes all well and good I’ll decide to keep that habit. If upon examination my habit does not take me nearer my ultimate goal and then I have to conclude, based upon the creative process, that it’s a bad habit.
The more difficult ones to assess are those habits that are so small that I do not even recognize them as habits. So how do I assess them? It may be you need the advice and help of someone close to you who can dispassionately assess your activities and help you to see what is good and what is less good. You may find it helpful to diary your time and keep a record in 15 minute increments of when and how you spend your time.
In order to assess your habits in this way you need to have a very clear picture in your own mind of what you’re trying to create. If you tend to drift through the day without a clear idea of what your end goal is then I would suggest that you read Your life as Art by Robert Fritz. In this book he explains a very simple process, but once you understand what he is recommending, you’ll never look at your life goals in the same way again. Julia Frances put it so eloquently – “common sense in a poetic form”. It may not be the easiest book to read but it is one of the most profound in my experience. He also has a weekly newsletter which can be subscribed to at www.RobertFritz.com.
Walking, listening, hearing, reading, understanding: they are all part of the process of communication and if one goes awry then the whole process breaks down.
Although we’ve been bombarded with new methods of communication in the last few years (e mails, websites, twitter, facebook etc) the essence of communication is still a 2 way communication – an exchange.
Now looking at the process, it seems so simple but it contains many places where the flow of information can and does break down.
However, lets look at the crafting of the initial or outgoing message.
it has to be in the right language -
ever tried to talk with someone who doesn’t speak your language or for that matter different cultures. In Jamaica they speak a dialect very close to English but to the untrained ear it is gibberish – it is called Patwa (apologies to Jamaicans).
many elderly people think that twitter is what some birds do when sitting on a wire.
The message has to be clearly expressed
mumbled speech is almost impossible to understand
words without a logical sequence don’t often mean much
The message needs to be understandable by the person its intended for.
all to frequently I’ve said something that I think conveys what I mean but the person hearing it might infer or understand something way different from my intended meaning.
sadly this is often a feature of communication within relationships that are struggling
Our entire fabric of social interaction involves communication. Governments, families, friends, lovers, all depend upon some form of communication and the noise of aimless communication in the world right now is a symptom of the breakdown of the fabric of society itself. We need to become better communicators, better listeners and better at hearing.
I’d appreciate your views on the whole communication subject.
For a few weeks now I’ve been thinking about about wisdom and what it really means.
