Web Meetings Versus Person-to-Person Meetings

We had an interesting conversation over lunch today with a friend who has worked in a variety of companies and industries over the last 15 years as a technical writer.  Although it was a tangent from our main discussion, we arrived on the topic of meetings — and whether they should be held in-person or could 95% of them be handled online.

Having recently worked at a large corporation on a contract gig, he offered some insight into how they were stuck in ways of always having person-to-person meetings. According to him, that was “the slowest business” he has worked at!

It was interesting to hear that forcing in-person meetings could actually slow the progress of everything, whether it was due to traffic, weather, scheduling or any other conflict that could force a meeting to be rescheduled. As our clients know, we only meet in person when necessary; with everything that we do online already, this comes naturally and without a second thought.  For most of our meetings, conversations and presentations, we hold them all online through web conferences.

At CI, we use GoTo Meeting for almost every meeting we have.  It provides all the features we need at a very reasonable cost.  With today’s internet connection speed, we rarely have lag and even with high-resolution montiors on our side, the client can view our screens (multiple screens at once if we need) without problems.  It also includes teleconferencing within the monthly service price.

We sometimes use Adobe ConnectNow as an alternative (since it’s free for both desktop sharing and teleconferencing) — mainly if we need to do something quick, or if we already have meetings running with GoTo Meeting.

With our main focus being on optimizing marketing campaigns, it’s valuable to see how optimizing business operations can increase efficiency as well.