Web Conferencing: Stealing Email's Secret Formula (part 2/3)
For anyone who missed part 1 of this blog post, check it out here .
Before I get into how web conferencing can leverage email’s success, let’s review my reasons for not embracing email in the early 90s. These are typically reasons I hear from people who have not yet converted to web conferencing today.
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It’s a new technology with which I’m not familiar
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I’m more comfortable with in-person meetings
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It’s too complicated to use
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I don’t understand how to get signed up for it
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I don’t think it will improve my daily life
Now, these are just one Product Manager’s observations, by no means a fool-proof formula, but I think that if web conferencing providers can address these simple concerns, wide-spread adoption is inevitable.
I don’t understand the technology.
Thankfully, the World Wide Web is very well rooted now (my mother uses it), which is one hurdle web conferencing doesn’t have to overcome. Not so in the early days of email, which was one of the main reasons why I didn’t hop on the bandwagon right away. The Internet was a big scary world, where only the tech-savvy and nerds dared tread (according to me anyway).
Setting aside having an understanding of how the technology actually functions (which isn’t important to most users,) the user must have a fundamental understanding of what the tool does. Simply putting forward a list of features and benefits won’t do either. Providers must clearly identify a value proposition for their web conferencing solution for a variety of personas. The value for an IT manager who needs to have collaboration between her globally dispersed teams is different from the value for a Marketing Director who needs a forum to conduct focus group sessions. This is akin to how the value of Hotmail for individual consumers is different from the value of Microsoft Exchange for enterprises.
Helping the user understand what the tool can do for them will go a long way to gaining acceptance and ultimately, adoption.
I’m more comfortable with in-person meetings.
There will always be a need for in-person meetings, and a subset of the population who will refuse to change how they do things today. There’s not much we can do about that, other than create alternatives that are viable and user-friendly to facilitate the switch.
If I had to follow a 10-step process to send an email, and there were built-in restrictions on the type of words I could use when communicating in this way, for sure I’d still be writing letters. Luckily, that’s not how email works and it’s in fact a much easier way to say the same things I would using a pen and paper.
Similarly, I couldn’t consider web conferencing a viable alternative to in-person meetings if the set up process were cumbersome, and if the collaboration available during the meeting were limited. In many cases, setting up a web conference is as simple as following standard invitation processes through email plug-ins or even through instant messaging applications. There’s nothing different or out of the ordinary the meeting organizer needs to do, except that at meeting time, she can connect to her meeting virtually, from home, an airport, an internet café, rather than get up and go to a boardroom.
And that leads into another ingredient to success: ease of use, which I’ll cover next in my next blog entry.
Irene is the Web Collaboration Product Manager at ACT (irene.psimenatos@canada.acttel.com)