Unconventional Wisdom

From monthly committee meetings to the annual corporate bash, three industry experts give tips to plan an event that will leave participants counting down the days until the next one

Mar 1, 2010  

Jeff Bradshaw, Online video expert
Jeff Bradshaw is adamant that the best meetings don’t have to happen in person. As the president and CEO of Zoom Web Video Integration in Calgary, Bradshaw connects people through Internet-based video. His business helps frequent fliers spend more time close to home, as a simple webcast set-up on one end can join hundreds of people anywhere in the world in a virtual speech or conference.

Do you have to be in the same place for a successful meeting?
Jeff Bradshaw: Absolutely not. With technology these days, there’s a number of options out there, from live webcasting to web conferencing tools, that allow people to really be anywhere in the world as long as they’ve got an Internet connection.

What options are available to someone who is staging a remote meeting?
JB: It depends on the amount of interactivity you want. For webcasts, that basically allows you to do one-to-many. You can set up a live video or a live audio webcast, have synchronized PowerPoint slides, downloadable documents, email feedback from your viewers, and you can send it out to one person or to 100,000 people. If somebody is holding a meeting in Edmonton, they could be broadcasting to 100,000 locations around the world one-way.

Web conferencing can go to large numbers of people, but it gets fairly costly. A web conference is more for a smaller group of people, [for example] if you have 10 to 15 people and you wanted to share documents and allow other people to work on a Word document or an Excel document.

You’ve already mentioned cost. What’s the cost?
JB: A live video webcast, you’re probably looking at starting anywhere from $3,000 to $4,000 and up. You could do an audio webcast for, likely, $1,500 and up. That would allow you to reach anywhere from 300 to 500 people. If you do a web conference, you could do it from as little as $300 or $500, but you’d only be able to reach maybe five or 10 people.

What kinds of technologies are involved? Do you own them, do you rent them or how does it work?
JB: Typically, it’s a fee-for-service. People will call us or go to an online conference provider, and it’s a pay-per-use basis. It’s either a one-time fee or you can set up long-term contracts.

How can you replicate the intangible benefits of a live meeting? What can you do to make it like you’re actually there as much as possible?
JB: If you’ve got a live meeting and, say, you’ve got 40 or 50 or 100 people in a room, typically what they do is they sit back and watch or listen and then they leave. They might ask the odd question. With a webcast, it’s really the same thing. They’re sitting back and watching a presentation and if they have questions they can email them in. They can watch it from their own desk. The other advantage to webcasting is that we archive most of our webcasts and put them on-demand. If somebody happens to miss the meeting or can’t get there right at 9 o’clock on Monday morning, they could watch it later that day, or later that week, and still be able to get the content from the meeting.

The downside, compared to a live meeting? I don’t really see it. Unless you have a meeting where you need human interaction and you want to shake somebody’s hand. Other than that, the technology is allowing you to be more efficient with your time.

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