This month I’ve written a lot about how web conferencing can help you market your company, save money and streamline your business operations. The truth is, web conferencing is an extremely versatile tool for many different aspects of online business, and, if used creatively, it can vastly improve your bottom line. This isn’t just true for marketing and employee meetings, it’s also true for business training, and providing tech support, two significant expenses that are often overlooked when businesses are looking to save money.

Employee Training
Training employees to prepare them for working in your industry can take a lot of time and money, especially if your business is technical or heavily regulated. Many businesses send employees off for weeks of training before they step in the front door. Those businesses are paying travel expenses, they are paying instructors to teach, and they are paying those employees to learn. What if you could pay once, for a series of presentations, and be done with it? With web conferencing, you can.

Hire your experts to create a series of training webinars that cover all of the aspects of your business operations. Record those webinars and link to the recordings from your website. Send new employees the URL and ask them to watch the webinars. When they are finished, host a live meeting with a seasoned employee to answer any questions and go over anything they don’t understand. This will streamline your training process, while providing company information in one place for easy reference. If your business handles sensitive or proprietary information that you can’t post publicly, you can still save money on travel expenses by hosting your training via the conferencing platform rather than in person. By having new employees connect with live video, you can teach them face-to-face, maintaining the in-class atmosphere that promotes attentiveness and focus.

Technical Support
If you have a business that provides technical support, you never have to make another house call with Voxwire Gold. With Voxwire, you can connect to your customer’s computer remotely and take control of their OS, while they watch. This means, you can go in and make changes, demonstrate a software product and show them exactly what you’re doing while you explain it, in real time. You will never again have to verbally walk someone through dialog boxes and login screens while they click on the wrong thing. Taking control means getting things done quickly, efficiently and to your customer’s satisfaction. It will lower your operation costs while making your customers happier. Happy customers bring more customers and help you build your business. Everybody wins.

Back in September of 2010, we posted an article about IPV6, the new IP address protocol that may cause some real problems for online businesses. Here we are in the beginning of 2011, and the last of the IPv4 addresses have been released, and businesses still don’t seem too concerned about updating their properties. This could spell real disaster come September.

“It just isn’t No. 1 on the radar scope — good or bad, it just isn’t,” said Alan Shark, executive director of the Public Technology Institute (PTI), a nonprofit that focuses on using IT to improve government services. Why is this? Well, there have been a few scares over the past few years, times when we thought IPv4 would run out, but then innovative solutions staved off the inevitable for a little longer. This time, it doesn’t look like we’ll be getting a reprieve, and people who are waiting for one should take a second look.

For those who don’t know, IP addresses are the numeric addresses assigned to every single solitary device that connects to the internet. That means personal computers, phones, iPads, routers, networked gaming consoles—everything. IPv4 addresses are compatible with other IPv4 addresses—they can communicate smoothly and without hiccups. However, IPv6 addresses are not necessarily so compatible. In order to make the two compatible, Internet providers need to upgrade their routing infrastructure, set up special software and configure their network to properly direct the new addresses. If your provider is doing this, you’re all set. If your provider isn’t doing this, you need to make sure they do, or find a new provider (just as an aside, TurnKey Internet is completely IPv6 compatible).

Some observers are making the comparison between the IPv6 scare and Y2K, the vastly out-of-proportion panic we all experienced before the turn of the millennium. “The computers will all go down at once,” they said. “It’ll be bedlam!” they cried. It wasn’t. Y2K was the technological community’s version of crying wolf, and its set us all up for trouble. It looks like a lot of federal agencies aren’t taking IPv6 seriously for this very reason, and their infrastructures may suffer the consequences.

Come September, you’ll be happy you investigated this back in February, as businesses race to update at the last minute or go down and lose customers, and glitches on government websites bring federal business to its knees. Hopefully there won’t be any real dangers to personal safety. Profits, on the other hand, are another story.

While most people tend to think of web conferencing as a tool for connecting with remote colleagues, there are astounding possibilities for using web conferencing for marketing new products to potential and existing customers. For many businesses, especially those selling goods and services online, one of the biggest barriers to sales is education. If you sell a software-as-a-service product, for example, and your clientele doesn’t really understand what your product is and how it can benefit them, they’re not buying. Overcome this barrier with an instructional interactive webinar!

Demonstrate Your Product
A product demo is easy with an online conferencing tool that allows you to stream video and screen share. Voxwire Gold Web Conferencing has these capabilities, enabling you to show your clients, in real time, how your product works and what it can do for them. Use images from your clients’ websites, incorporate audio and video and dazzle them with a full-blown sales presentation from the comfort of your office. While many people won’t make the time to travel for a product demo, they will sit through a short presentation online.

You can use Voxwire this way even if you’re selling big-ticket items like real estate. Upload images of houses for a virtual tour. Walk potential buyers through rooms without having to meet in person. This saves you time and money, and will help whittle down the potential buyers to the real serious customers.

You don’t have to do these webinars live either. Prepare a demo and record it. Then post a link on your site for new potential customers to learn about your product first-hand.

Interact with Clients
Sales videos are great, but only if customers actively watch. There is no way to guarantee they will with traditional video and, more than that, there is no way to guarantee that they’ll click on your link or follow up. With an interactive sales webinar, you can talk with customers while you show them your products. You can show your video in the window and talk over it, or pause to add detail. You can invite participants to enter text chat questions that you can address as you go, or even invite them to connect with video for a face-to-face conversation.

Host an Event
Everyday webinars are wonderful sales tools, but you can up the stakes by hosting your own online conference within the Voxwire interface. Invite up to 1,000 attendees to sit in on your presentation. Welcome all of them to contribute comments via text chat, or highlight specific attendees by awarding them moderator privileges mid-meeting. Large events like this attract a larger number of attendees than individual instructional webinars, and they create industry buzz in the process. Create a double-edged campaign with a regular weekly meeting and then a large, once every few months, webinar. Invite colleagues to present their own new products, and bring the marketplace to you.

Today was the day we were all set to launch our new online business product, Voxwire Gold. Of course this would be the day of Albany’s biggest snow storm in years. With the entire office stuck at home, we were struck by the irony of the situation. The product we were slated to release is a web conferencing platform, designed to help employees connect remotely from anywhere. So, what started as a product launch date turned out to be a trial by fire.

We all connected to Voxwire Gold from home to discuss our plans for the day. We even showed each other the piles of snow outside our windows and watched a new product video by our creative director. By the end of the meeting, everyone had his or her day laid out, and we were all on the same page. Without that Voxwire Gold meeting, my home work day would certainly have been less productive. Seeing my colleagues out their doing their jobs motivated me to get down to business and do mine.

Bring on the snow, Albany! No matter how buried we are, we’re going to get things done.

The product launch is happening as we speak, despite the storm. You can read the press release for more information, or visit our Voxwire Gold website.

With our recent release of Voxwire Gold, our fabulous and flashy new web conferencing platform, I’ve been talking a lot about the ways Voxwire Gold can be used for marketing, training, making businesses more efficient and profitable, and distance learning. In a nutshell, Voxwire Gold is an all-inclusive cloud-based service, which means you don’t need any hardware or software to run the system—it all takes place virtually. It doesn’t matter if you have a Mac or a PC, Firefox or Internet Explorer, Voxwire Gold will work. There are so many useful features in the new system that make meetings more dynamic, productive and entertaining. Plus, the interface is sleek and professional—it’s quality that will bolster the image of any company that uses it.

In addition to the obvious benefits of online meetings—reduced travel expenditures, green-friendly business operations—there are so many intangibles that I’m just starting to recognize. The more your employees use a service like Voxwire Gold, the more connected they feel to each other and to clients. The regular face-to-face time via Voxwire Gold can be even more productive than an in-person meeting. Since you don’t have the distractions of the physical space, you’re all focused sharply on the meeting itself.

The more I talk about Voxwire Gold the more I realize just how versatile this platform is, and how few businesses are thinking outside the box when it comes to communicating and collaborating with colleagues and clients. Finding innovative ways to engage is what keeps a business vibrant and helps it to thrive, no matter what the challenges. While web conferencing as a concept is not new, an interface like this absolutely is.

Communicate and Collaborate with Employees

Keeping in close touch with your employees can be difficult, especially when they are working remotely. Even for offices with no remote workers, employees may travel for business and be out of the office for extended periods of time. Talking on the phone just isn’t enough. You may need to go over a presentation, or discuss a profit chart, or you may just prefer to have a meeting face-to-face. With Voxwire, you can share documents including streaming video, collaborate on a whiteboard and talk face-to-face from anywhere in the world. The more you use it, the more it feels like second nature. Some of our clients are using Voxwire with people in the same office, to demonstrate a new piece of software, or go through a presentation. As it becomes integrated into your day-to-day activities, you will marvel that you ever managed to get work done without it.

Webinars and Online Events

Webinars are a powerful marketing tool. They allow you to make a full presentation, complete with slides, Powerpoint presentations and online video, to large numbers of clients or leads. Many web conferencing platforms allow for large-scale webinars, but if your participants are required to download software, many of them won’t attend. Technical difficulties present the number one roadblock for successful webinars. Voxwire Gold works on any browser for up to 1,000 participants. You can also use Voxwire to hold a product demo for an online conference. Invite participants by sending them a link in their email. That’s it!

Training and Support

One of the most powerful features in Voxwire Gold is the seamless screen-sharing tool. Via the Voxwire Gold interface, you can take control of another participant’s computer. This allows you to offer direct computer-to-computer technical support, and makes demonstrating software quick and easy. Show your clients where to click, right on their own screen! According to several new Voxwire Gold clients who are using the service just for tech support, it has already significantly sped up business, in just the first few days of use! Similarly, if you currently invest a lot of time and money into training your employees, integrating Voxwire Gold into your training program will streamline the process immensely. Show training videos while participants text questions to their instructor. Record your entire session and link to it on your website for employees to review later.

Distance Learning

The biggest roadblock for online schools has been the interface. No matter how good your classes are, if you have a sub-par platform, the students will suffer. Voxwire Gold provides multi-media support for seamless class presentations alongside face-to-face video interaction. Voxwire Gold also includes education-oriented features like hand raising and online scheduling for course management. Use Voxwire for online office hours for one-on-one meetings, conferences with parents (especially helpful for boarding schools and colleges where parents may be far afield) and school community-building events. Record lectures for later review, and compile an online database of past classes for students and teachers. Voxwire Gold works especially well for remote language classes, where class participation is a critical part of the learning process. It is very difficult to learn a language if you can’t listen, speak and be heard.

Whatever your business model, Voxwire Gold can help with efficiency, productivity and your bottom line. Give it a try for free with our 14-day trial (no credit card required) http://voxwire.com. We’d love to hear what you think of the new service. Please feel free to drop us a line: marketing@turnkeyinternet.net.