Stop hosting your meetings with blindfolds!

I am a work-at-home employee here at InterCall and telecommute every day. I attend several virtual meetings throughout the week and nothing is more frustrating than being invited to an audio-only meeting.

It’s a hassle even before the meeting starts because I need to manually punch in the dial-in number and conference code into my telephone keypad to join the meeting. And then once I have joined the call, the meeting host is incessantly asking, ‘Who just joined?’ every time they hear the entry chime. And it doesn’t end there: When I am unfamiliar with the other participants’ voices, I never know who is speaking; I’m always digging out my wallet card from the bottom of my desk drawer to help me remember the keypad command to mute my line; and I find myself multi-tasking and not paying attention because I have nothing to visualize when the meeting host is presenting.

Fortunately, InterCall has two great solutions to help with the limitations of audio-only meetings. With the new and improved Unified Meeting 5, InterCall’s web meeting tool, and the upcoming release of the second version of MobileMeet™, InterCall’s mobile app for Apple and Android devices, you can easily join and start your meetings with a click of a link or tap of a button.

By adding Unified Meeting or MobileMeet to your audio meetings, you have greater control of your meeting and you are engaging your participants. You can see who has joined the meeting by looking at the participant list and also know who is speaking with Active Talker. And to make it a little extra interactive, you can upload a picture of yourself to put a face with a name. Participants can mute their own lines or you can mute their lines right from either interface. And don’t forget, Unified Meeting allows you to show your participants what you are speaking about when you use application sharing. Help shed a little light on your meeting and keep the attention of your participants to have productive and successful meetings.

Stop hosting your meetings with blindfolds! Check out this video we put together showing you what a meeting would look like if you had to wear blindfolds and illustrates the frustrations with audio-only meetings. Does it sound familiar?

Christina Todisco is a marketing manager at InterCall and has been in the conferencing industry since 2002. Christina currently provides product marketing support for InterCall’s audio services, reporting and invoice solutions and InterCall Online. When not working, Christina enjoys spending time with her husband, daughter, family and friends.

Introducing InterChange

Where can small businesses network, receive exclusive offers and view original content?

InterChange - The Intersection of Commerce and Collaboration

InterChange is a virtual community designed to help your small business flourish. It's FREE to join and accessible 24/7.

Within InterChange, you can:

• Engage with prospective customers, potential investors and highly influential decision makers in the Networking Café and community storefronts.
• Attend exclusive webcasts, monthly small business webinars and specially sponsored programs in the Event Center.
• Explore special offers and exclusive discounts in Enterprise Exchange and West Central showrooms.
• Discover collateral, white papers, research studies and presentations that benefit your company in the Resource Library and community storefronts.

This week we will feature a variety of webcasts in the events center including:

Tuesday, September 25

• Get to the Point (And Get People to See Things Your Way) with Terri Langhans at 1:00 PM Eastern

Wednesday, September 26

• Perseverance, Success and You! with Brian Patrick Jensen at 2:00 PM Eastern

Thursday, September 27

• Sins and CEOs: Lessons from Leaders and Losers That Will Change Your Career with Richard A. Moran at 3:00 PM Eastern

Friday, September 28

• Growing Your Business with Mark LeBlanc at 12:00 PM Eastern

Plus, you’ll be able to interact with InterCall staff in the West pavilion.

Sign up today!

Tonya Hottmann is the director of marketing at InterCall, responsible for small business marketing. Before joining InterCall, Tonya ran a boutique marketing consulting firm for 10 years. An avid baseball fan, she enjoys reading, traveling, exercising and spending summer days at the beach.

10 Tips to Successful Webcasts

Do you feel that your webcasts or web events go unnoticed or are not producing the results you WANT? Learn the best tips from industry leaders and experts. Join us for a webcast that will teach you how to increase attendance, audience engagement and knowledge transfer via web events.

In this interactive webcast you will learn:

1. How to market to your audience and make them WANT to attend your events
2. Best ways to engage and CONNECT your audience during the event
3. Understand and apply BEST PRACTICES to gauge audience interest and target the right market
4. How to properly follow up and use data to create “hot leads”

Webinar Details

• Date: Tuesday, June 26
• Time: 11 AM PST
• Register here

Hope to see you there!

Eric Vidal is a Director of Product Marketing at InterCall and is considered a leading voice and expert in virtual business, which expands from marketing to collaboration to learning. He has more than 15 years experience in developing, implementing and optimizing strategies in these areas for numerous organizations and Global 2000 companies. As the director of product marketing for InterCall’s event services, Eric manages the strategy and initiatives for the virtual technologies that include virtual environments, streaming, event management services and operator assisted services. Previously from WebEx, Eric managed the virtual classroom product, as well as brand advertising and new media. Over the last several years, Eric has held management positions at Cisco, WebEx, IBM, BBDO Worldwide and Macromedia.

Infection Detection

On Monday, I walked into my office trying to pump myself up for another week of work, silently telling myself I’d accomplish everything on my to-do list and not get distracted by firedrills. My good intentions were quickly shattered as my computer booted up and I found my screen covered in warning messages about the 15 viruses that were detected. I quickly called tech support only to find that the virus was even preventing my virus detection software from working. For a non-technical person, this sounded pretty bad.

It turned out the only remedy was a complete rebuild. Working from home with no resident tech support personnel means shipping my laptop off to the main office. A slight state of depression set in; I’m a creature of habit and don’t like to have my routine interrupted.

It is now Thursday. I have survived the week and my laptop is on its way back. Living without my work computer was a bit of a challenge, but having my comfort zone disrupted wasn’t all bad. I decided to stray from the norm and experimented with different ways to join audio conferences and online meetings.

The best option was by far joining an online meeting with InterCall Unified Meeting using my iPad. It really was just like the real thing – no apps to download, no ‘light’ versions. It worked exactly like it does on my laptop and almost better because I could easily zoom in on areas of the slide I was viewing. I highly recommend it.

And, if you are a multitasker, I’ve heard using an iPad and speakerphone for meetings that require you to only be a silent participant work really well if you want to combine work and a treadmill. Word of caution, though: Keep the iPad in the display in front of you, not the table next to you.

How about you? Are you a fan of multitasking? Have you tried joining web meetings using your iPad or tablet?

Jill Huselton is a senior marketing manager at InterCall. She's been in the conferencing industry for nearly 15 years, working in operations, account management and marketing, mainly based in Colorado. Before leaving the Mile-High City, she hiked a 14er, one of her top accomplishments. Now she's traded the mountains for the beach and works from a home office in North Carolina.

Pull Your Chairs (or Phone Lines) Together

Last month I wrote about one of the great features of our reservationless conferencing service, Record & Playback. Another handy feature is Sub-conference. Have you ever tried it or been on a conference where the leader used it? If you are simulating small-group collaboration remotely, this is a feature you definitely need take advantage of. It’s ideal for breakout sessions, small group work, sidebar discussions and training seminars.

I’ve participated in several internal training sessions where this feature has been used, and it really is just like being in a classroom and pulling your chairs together with a few other people to work on a project. All the trainer had to do was tell us what our sub-conference numbers were and the phone commands to move our lines into the sub-conference. Within a few seconds, I was in a separate ‘room’ with my co-workers and we were able to complete our project. Our trainers were using a web conference, so when it was time for us to go back to the main conference, they just chatted a message to all the participants. Again, within a few seconds, we were all back together in the main ‘room’.

Think you might use this feature to make your conference calls more productive? Here are the instructions so you can give it a try.

Starting a sub-conference:

1. Assign your participants to a sub-conference number between 1 and 15 (your conference call can be broken out into as many as 15 sub-conferences).
2. Press *9 to be removed from the main conference.
3. Press 1 to start a sub-conference.

Joining a sub-conference:

1. Press *9 to be removed from the main conference.
2. When prompted, enter the sub-conference number that was assigned to you.
3. Press # to join your sub-conference.

Rejoining the main conference:
Press *9 to be placed back into the main conference.

Switching to a difference sub-conference:

1. Press *9 to be placed back into the main conference.
2. Press *9 again to be removed from the main conference.
3. When prompted, enter the sub-conference number.
4. Press # to join your sub-conference.

Returning a specific sub-conference group to the main conference:

1. Press *9 to be placed back into the main conference.
2. Press *9 again.
3. Press 3 to request a specific sub-conference group to return to the main conference.

Returning everyone to the main conference:

1. Press *9 to be placed back into the main conference.
2. Press *9 again.
3. Press 2 to return all participants to the main conference.

See how this works in your next team meeting or training sessions. It’s a good way to make your remote meetings more interactive and engaging so your participants will get more out of it. After you've used it, come back and let me know what you think!

Christina Todisco is a marketing manager at InterCall and has been in the conferencing industry since 2002. Christina currently provides product marketing support for InterCall’s audio services, reporting and invoice solutions and InterCall Online. When not working, Christina enjoys spending time with her husband, daughter, family and friends.

10 Tips for More Effective Meetings

As Anusha mentioned in one of her previous blog posts, we’re fortunate at InterCall to have an excellent training department that offers courses on a variety of topics—from managing your inbox to becoming a better manager.

Since I work from home and InterCall’s employees are located all over the world, meetings are held online instead of in a conference room. While online meetings are the next best thing to being face-to-face, talking to your computer screen creates a different meeting dynamic than when you are staring at someone from across the table. So, I figured I could probably learn a few things if I attend the Facilitating Effective Team Meetings class.

According to a recent Microsoft survey of 38,000 workers in 200 countries, 5.6 hours each week are spent in meetings and 69% feel meetings aren't productive. I’m sure you’ve been to a meeting that you felt was a total waste of time because the host wasn’t prepared, there was no clear agenda or no one could stop talking about the topic that was supposed to be ‘taken offline’.

Here are some helpful tips I learned that you can use to make your meetings more productive.

1. Know why you’re having the meeting and your expected outcomes – Don’t have a meeting for the sake of having a meeting. Have a purpose and know what you want to accomplish.
2. Build an agenda with time allocations – Identify the areas you want to focus on and how much time you’ll spend on each topic. Send this out prior to the meeting to all the participants so your meeting stays on track.
3. Establish ground rules – Let people know what you expect from them (stick to the time allocations, full participation, etc.) and review the agenda.
4. Designate a note taker and timekeeper – Stay focused on leading the meeting and appoint others to take notes and watch the time. It’s too challenging to try to do it all yourself and your participants will appreciate having your complete attention on the agenda. If you’re using a conference call service, record your meeting so you can go back to it if there are questions.
5. Lead the meeting – Take charge and keep everyone focused. That means shutting down sidebar conversations and asking people to give their opinions.
6. Encourage full participation – Do this by asking directly for feedback, create break-out groups or sub-conferences if you’re all on the phone. If you have on-site and remote participants, make sure to include the remote participants in the discussion.
7. Stay focused – Don’t be afraid to ask people who go off on tangents to save it for another meeting. Your participants will be happy that you’re keeping everyone on task.
8. Summarize to verify agreements and action items – Recap the meeting to make sure everyone knows what was agreed to and who’s responsible for what.
9. Follow-up on assignments and agreements – Send notes so people are reminded of who needs to do what, by when and don’t forget those who missed the meeting. If you recorded the conference, include the playback link for reference.
10. Evaluate your meetings – Ask for feedback from participants and see what you can do differently next time.

I will admit that I haven’t put all of these into practice, but I have started emailing an agenda prior to the meeting and screen sharing it during my web conference. It has actually made a big difference and made my meetings more productive. I’ve also stated sending out notes after the meeting, which really helps keep me organized.

How about you? Do you use any of these suggestions in your meetings? Any other tips you would share?

Jill Huselton is a senior marketing manager at InterCall. She's been in the conferencing industry for nearly 15 years, working in operations, account management and marketing, mainly based in Colorado. Before leaving the Mile-High City, she hiked a 14er, one of her top accomplishments. Now she's traded the mountains for the beach and works from a home office in North Carolina.

Improve Productivity with Record & Playback

How often do you host a conference call and at least one person who needs to be there can’t make it. Or, maybe you have meetings that you need to be able to go back and listen to again. This happens to many of us, which is why one of the most popular features of our reservationless conferencing service is Record & Playback. Right from your phone conference, a simply command lets you archive a conference call. You can even start and stop the recording throughout the meeting if you want to create segment or only record certain portions.

Not only is the feature easy to use, but accessing the recording later is just as simple. You can listen over the Internet or by dialing a toll-free number. You may also purchase a CD, downloadable link or a transcription of your recording.

For those of you who haven’t figured out how to be in two places at once or who don’t have superpowers that allow you to recall everything you’ve ever heard, Record & Playback could be just what you needed. Below you’ll find instructions to use for your next audio conference call.

Starting a Recording

1. Once your conference begins, press *2 on your telephone keypad to start a recording.
2. When prompted, press 1 to confirm that you would like the recording to begin.
3. our conference is being recorded once you hear, 'The conference is now being recorded.

Pausing/Resuming a Recording

1. Press *2 to pause your recording.
2. When prompted, press 2 to confirm you would like the recording to pause. You will hear a beep once the pause in the recording begins.
3. To resume your recording, press *2.
4. When prompted, press 2 to confirm you would like to resume the recording. You will hear a beep once the recording has resumed.

Ending a Recording

1. Press *2 to end your recording.
2. When prompted, press 1 to confirm that you would like the recording to end.
3. Your recording will end once you hear, 'This conference is no longer being recorded.

Playback a Recording
Detailed playback instructions will be automatically emailed to you within one hour after the end of your conference. You can choose to playback your recording over the Internet or by telephone. Your recorded conference is available for playback for a period of 30 days.

Playback Keypad Commands

3 Fast forward 30 seconds
7 Rewind 30 seconds
# Pause 30 seconds (or until any key is pressed)
* Exit recording

Think this might be helpful for your meetings? Have you used this feature before? How do you increase productivity by making information more accessible?

Christina Todisco is a marketing manager at InterCall and has been in the conferencing industry since 2002. Christina currently provides product marketing support for InterCall’s audio services, reporting and invoice solutions and InterCall Online. When not working, Christina enjoys spending time with her husband, daughter, family and friends.

Too Much to Remember?

It seems like everywhere I go or new service I sign up for, I get another password or PIN number to remember.

These days, our brains are crammed with password and number combinations for every part of our lives, from corporate network logins, social networking sites and email accounts to bank accounts and credit card PINs.

If you are like me, then you often feel as though you can’t possibly remember everything you are supposed to. Studies have been conducted to examine our collective ‘external memory’, which is the Internet. With a few keystrokes on your computer or smartphone, you can get a phone number, address or birthday. Having a GPS means you don’t have to remember how to get somewhere. Even the art of memorizing poems, like my grandmother did, is going by the wayside.

As the need for online security grows, so will our logins and the challenge of keeping them all straight. Even if you store information in a safe place, it’s usually so safe that you can’t remember where it is when you need it. We almost have no choice but to embrace the tools available on the Internet and use them to help you. There are loads of password management software you can use to store it all, like RoboForm and LastPass.

When it comes to audio conference calls, how many of us can actually remember a phone number without having it stored in our phones, let alone our conference code and leader PIN? Ever found you need to join a conference call, and out of the office, without a laptop, you are stumbling around for a pen and a bit of paper to scribble the details down?

InterCall’s free Mobile Assistant works just like the password management software. You can access your reservationless conference call with a single click of a button or tap of the screen—all from your smartphone. There’s no need to remember long numbers and codes anymore, freeing up your brain capacity for other important things, like remembering to get your phone, bring your GPS or buy that birthday card.

Sandra Di Giacomo is the Asia Pacific marketing manager at InterCall. Originally starting out as an account manager in InterCall’s Sydney office, she also lived in Tokyo for two years before making her way to Singapore where she is now based. When not working, she enjoys travelling, photography and cooking.

Tips for Managing a Virtual Workforce

As the economy and our marketplace become more global, having a distributed workforce is a normal part of business. Not only are offices spread around the world, but a growing number of people work either full- or part-time from their homes. If you are managing remote employees, a whole new set of challenges develop in these situations; you may rarely see, never have met or not even speak the same language as the people who you are supposed to coach and hold accountable for getting a job done.

Right now, approximately 34 million workers in the United States work from home or a remote location at least one day a week. That number is expected to almost double to 63 million by 2016, which represents a staggering 43% of the U.S. workforce. On a larger scale, according to IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Worker Population 2009–2013 Forecast, more than one third of the global workforce will be mobile by 2013.

There are many reasons to have a remote workforce, such as saving office/real estate costs, meeting customer requirements, offering a better work/life balance and having access to a larger talent pool. No matter what’s behind your decision, if you’re managing employees who aren’t in your office, you have to engage in a different management style if you want to make everyone successful.

The days of popping your head into someone’s office to check in or get a status update are long gone for many people. I experience this firsthand; for my marketing team at InterCall, half of them work from a home office. Below are some tips I've found from the Society of Human Resource Management and the National Federation of Independent Businesses that you can use to keep productivity and morale up for your virtual workforce. You can also get more information from our February webinar, Managing Blind: Redefining Management in a Global Virtual World. I've applied many of these in my own situation and found them to be quite helpful, particularly the unified communications tools.

• Take the time to train virtual employees and managers on the company’s mission, in addition to telecommuting policies and expectations, such as:
  • Values and goals
  • Expected business hours
  • Not substituting working from home for childcare
• Make sure workers have appropriate and reliable equipment that is required to do their jobs
• Set up remote communication tools, like audio conference calls, web conferencing or video conferencing solutions, mobile apps and instant messaging, so remote employees can easily be reached and reach other employees, as well as collaborate on team discussions and projects
• Schedule regular meetings with all team members to get updates on projects and hold workers accountable for their deadlines
• Don’t micromanage; if your expectations are being met, then trust your employees to do their jobs
• Take time to understand the culture where your remote employees are located, particularly if they are located in another country
• Make sure to spread the workload among all employees so that those in the office don't feel like they are unfairly taking on a larger burden of the responsibilities compared to those working remotely
• Create spaces in your office so remote workers can periodically come to ‘plug in’ or provide them with a location where they can collaborate with other remote co-workers/professionals

Remember, it takes self-disciplined and motivated people to work outside of an office, and those people usually work harder and longer hours. To avoid burn out and feelings of isolation, find ways to make them feel included. Using web conferencing with web cams or video conferencing solutions gives your team that face-to-face feeling they’d have sitting around a conference table together. And if you can get it in your budget, bringing everyone together in the office or another off-site location can go a long way to fostering team spirit.

What have you done in your company or work environment to put these practices to use? Do you have other tips to share?

Cambria Vaccaro is the Senior Director, Marketing Communications and our “Industry News” blogger.  Cambria has been in the conferencing industry for nearly fifteen years, and has seen it evolve from a traditional video bridging service to include cool web features and remote communication services.  She is an avid runner, cook and mother of two gorgeous girls.

If you’re like me, you spend a lot of time in meetings every day. Have you ever stopped to think about how much time is lost due to meeting management mishaps? We’ve all experienced them—background noise from the participant who forgot to mute their line, the barking dog, the loud downtown traffic, the clamor at the airport. It never fails that once the audio conference call gets started, there are the interruptions to ask who just joined as you hear the entry tone or to ask if a specific participant is on the call to answer a question. Something like “Is Dan on to answer that one?” probably sounds familiar. All this lost time adds up pretty quickly.

So how can you host better meetings? Watch this short video to find out!

With online tools that integrate audio and web conferences, you and your participants can meet in an interactive environment, at any time, from anywhere. Using web conferencing services, you can:

• Visualize and manage your audio calls from your computer with simple point and click commands so you can mute that participant with the barking dog, see who has joined the meeting and know who to call on for answers.
• Take your meetings to the next level of interactivity by sharing and showing materials from your computer. You and your participants can easily and seamlessly collaborate online with documents, share PowerPoint slides or conduct a web tour at a moment’s notice.
• Add desktop video to your meeting to give it more impact. With a webcam and a high-speed connection, you and your presenters can broadcast live images to meeting participants. All it takes is a click of your mouse.

Have you tried using the web to enhance your audio conference calls yet? Noticed any improvements in your meetings?

Sarah Murphy is a marketing manager at InterCall. With over ten years of experience in the conferencing industry, Sarah has worked with customers and products that cover all segments of conferencing, including traditional operator attended services, video and online meeting solutions.

Hello, Who Just Joined?

If you’re like me, you spend a lot of time in meetings every day. Have you ever stopped to think about how much time is lost due to meeting management mishaps? We’ve all experienced them—background noise from the participant who forgot to mute their line, the barking dog, the loud downtown traffic, the clamor at the airport. It never fails that once the audio conference call gets started, there are the interruptions to ask who just joined as you hear the entry tone or to ask if a specific participant is on the call to answer a question. Something like “Is Dan on to answer that one?” probably sounds familiar. All this lost time adds up pretty quickly.

So how can you host better meetings? Watch this short video to find out!

With online tools that integrate audio and web conferences, you and your participants can meet in an interactive environment, at any time, from anywhere. Using web conferencing services, you can:

• Visualize and manage your audio calls from your computer with simple point and click commands so you can mute that participant with the barking dog, see who has joined the meeting and know who to call on for answers.
• Take your meetings to the next level of interactivity by sharing and showing materials from your computer. You and your participants can easily and seamlessly collaborate online with documents, share PowerPoint slides or conduct a web tour at a moment’s notice.
• Add desktop video to your meeting to give it more impact. With a webcam and a high-speed connection, you and your presenters can broadcast live images to meeting participants. All it takes is a click of your mouse.

Have you tried using the web to enhance your audio conference calls yet? Noticed any improvements in your meetings?

Sarah Murphy is a marketing manager at InterCall. With over ten years of experience in the conferencing industry, Sarah has worked with customers and products that cover all segments of conferencing, including traditional operator attended services, video and online meeting solutions.