WebEx Interactions: A Web Collaboration Blog by WebEx

Collaboration and Community around Shared Experience

Wikipedia, as an example of community collaboration, continues to provide interesting fodder for discussion, including Nicholas Carr's take on the speech Clay Shirky delivered at the Web 2.0 Expo.

Clay Shirky's speech discusses the interaction between the traditional consumption of information (in this case through TV) and the interest some consumers of information have in contributing back via the Web.

The "Wikipedia's take on Gilligan's Island" example in Nickolas Carr's post provides an interesting view on the new roll of media. My view of the subtext in Clay's speech is that if you want to immerse someone in information, you should give them a mechanism to respond. Only then do both parties win. This could be any interaction, sending an email, giving a presentation in a web meeting or teaming on a document.

The micro-communities that drive media creation on Wikipedia ultimately create a more interesting experience as our perception of information changes. Clay Shirky provides a great example:

You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change in Pluto's status?" And a little bit at a time they move the article--fighting offstage all the while--from, "Pluto is the ninth planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system."

When it comes to information, most of us consume more than we produce but in communities of interest -- be it work or a hobby -- people want to share their knowledge to create a more complete view. When selling a widget, work with the prospect to make sure using the widget will add some new value. When creating content, solicit feedback from peers and interested parties to ensure the information has relevancy and interest.

To get back to Clay Shirky's speech on media, there's a reason people with DVRs forward past the ads, the ads lack information and entertainment value.

Michael Caton, Collaboration Evangelist, WebEx

Marketing Webinar: Casting a Wider Web

On Wednesday May 14, WebEx and MarketingSherpa are teaming up to present Casting a Wider Web. This 2008 Marketing eSummit includes a series of webinars from experts at Marketo, Wainhouse Research, the American Marketing Association and Loomis Group on using the latest online marketing technology. In addition to these best practice and advice webinars, marketers from Cisco and the Philadelphia Stock Exchange will also talk about their real-world experience.

Two of the sessions focus on presenting research. In the first, Stephan Tornquist from MarketingSherpa and John Miller from Marketo will discuss trends for 2008. In the second, Andrew Nilssen and Alan D. Greenberg, both senior analysts and partners at Wainhouse Research as well as Nancy Costopulos, CMO of the American Marketing Association, will present survey results about the changing nature of online events.

The 2008 Marketing eSummit is a virtual event – in addition to the participating in the webinars, attendees have the ability to interact in real-time to discuss what they’ve seen and talk to presenters between sessions. The full program for the event is available here and registration for the event is here.

Marc Blakeney, Sr. Marketing Manager, Consulting Services & Event Center, WebEx

Keep Your Meetings Despite Travel Hiccups

The recent disruptions in air travel, with planes grounded for inspections and a couple low-cost carriers suspending operations, should remind travelers that having a fall back plan to keep appointments can be pretty easy. While meeting with prospects and customers face-to-face is important, web conferencing provides a way to still keep a meeting when getting on a plane just isn't going to happen. Given how hard it can be to get on some people's schedules, web conferencing also gives travelers a way to connect even if they can't get to their destinations.

March through May usually make for easy flying -- much of the country enjoys reasonably good weather after the winter snows and the coming summer vacation rush has yet to begin. With these current disruptions in mind, this might be the perfect opportunity to perfect web-based training and web-touch sales skills for those planning summer travel for training and sales initiatives. Since summer travel usual involves over-booked flights and thunderstorm-induced airport gridlock, honing web collaboration skills now could pay dividends in the near future.

Michael Caton, Collaboration Evangelist, WebEx

Enterprise Cross Platform Support: Mac OS X to Mozilla

Last week Forrester Research released a report detailing the increasingly cross-platform nature of enterprise PCs. The report indicates that the enterprise market share of Apple's Mac OS X is growing as is the share of Mozilla's Firefox browser. According to the report, in 2007 Mac OS X share grew 3x to 4.2% and Mozilla nearly doubled market share to 18%. 

As the adoption of Mac continues to grow among corporate users, Cisco WebEx has increased its support for the platform across its suite and just announced full support for Mac OS X Leopard and Safari 3 users across its entire collaboration suite. Several Mac-focused media outlets showed their excitement about the news. Check out MacWorld’s coverage.

We've seen Mac OS X use double recently, and while 4.2% could be described as modest share, the growth is strong. Sales of Apple PCs, particularly in the notebook segment, continue to be strong according to this MacWorld article citing NPD and IDC research.   

Mozilla's share in the enterprise increased despite not having an official MSI package to simplify large scale deployment. Forrester surveyed the desktop and browser environments of 50,000 users at 2,300 large to very large organizations on a monthly basis throughout 2007.

Colin Smith, Dir., Public Relations, WebEx

Kudos for MeetMeNow and coverage of WebEx Mac Support

PC Magazine posted a comprehensive review of MeetMeNow by Oliver Rist. The review touches on all the core MeetMeNow features, including presenting, document and desktop sharing, remote control, integrated audio and video conferencing. The review also discusses the reliability and security benefits of the MediaTone network. Oliver Rist covers small business technology for PC Magazine and looks at MeetMeNow from the perspective of a small business looking to collaborate across geographic boundaries.

This week also saw considerable coverage of our announcement of expanded Apple Mac support. Earlier this week we announced expanded support across WebEx applications for Apple's recently introduced Mac OS X Leopard operating system and Safari browser.

Expanding Mac OS X support for Meeting Center, WebOffice, Event Center and Training Center follows on to adding Mac OS X to WebEx PCNow in January. PCNow also supports Apple's iPhone.

Michael Caton, Collaboration Evangelist, WebEx

More Meeting Effectiveness Ideas

NPR's Day to Day has an interesting, short interview on managing effective meetings. The interview with Steven Rogelberg Ph. D., Professor and Director, Organizational Science, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, discusses some recent research he conducted on people's attitudes toward meetings. The revelation isn't that most people don't like meetings. Rather, the interview has some great nuggets for fostering a good meeting culture. These ideas apply equally to web meetings and in-person meetings.

First and foremost, organizations should involve HR in teaching people how to run effective meetings as well as provide feedback on the way an individual runs his or her meetings. Next, reign in the habit of inviting excessive numbers of attendees. Limiting attendance increases the effectiveness for participants. While it can be beneficial to invite a broad group, organizations should make it acceptable for team members to decline or sit out of meetings when appropriate.

On an individual level, structure the agenda to discuss critical strategic initiatives first and save general announcements for last.

This post has some additional pointers and links to resources on conducting an effective meeting.

Michael Caton, Collaboration Evangelist, WebEx

How to Conduct a Teleconference or Virtual Meeting

Esther Schindler at CIO.com wrote a nice article that gives pointers on how to run effective virtual meetings. As management consultant Steven M. Smith notes at the top of the article, many people in organizations don't know how to run effective in-person meetings. With so many organizations having geographically dispersed workforces, developing those skills and applying them to virtual meetings is critical to productivity. Pet peeves get deserved prominence throughout the article.

One of the first pet peeve examples, a meeting participant subjecting the entire team to hold music, ranks high up there in terms of being disruptive to productivity. Giving the meeting host the ability to mute the offending line really makes a difference. If one participant has dialed in from a phone with poor line quality or a cell phone, it can net the same result, the static or street noise can override other participants trying to weigh in.

Even for people that have good meeting skills, I recommend looking it over. The article is a quick read and positive reinforcement on the basics often lost to hectic workdays, e.g. including meeting agendas in invites, should pay dividends at least for the next month or two of meetings.

On the topic of editorial, I wanted to give my congratulations to Dan Farber and Larry Dignan at ZDNet. Dan Farber is taking over editorial operations for ZDNet's CNet's sister site, News.com. Larry Dignan is taking over for Dan as Editor in Chief of ZDNet. Having worked for Dan when he was Editor in Chief of PC Week (now eWEEK) I can say he is an excellent manager, editor, and writer. I also worked with Larry at PC Week and eWEEK, he too is a top notch manager, editor, and writer, best wishes to both.

Michael Caton, Collaboration Evangelist, WebEx

Schedule more effectively in 2008

One initiative organizations can use to start 2008 off right is to more be more efficient and effective when scheduling meetings. Anyone that regularly tries to schedule meetings with participants outside his or her organization knows, a good deal of time can be wasted in email or on the phone trying to find common free time. The more parties involved, the more difficult those negotiations become. Shared calendars can be a way to avoid this, especially for dispersed or multi-organizational teams.

Travel time, even over relatively short distances such as a typical suburban to metro commute, can really add to a person’s stress level. In a previous job, I used to get a lot of requests to meet in-person for briefings either in the city or for breakfast or lunch at a local restaurant. Given the stress of the daily workload, even though I loved meeting with people face-to-face, I did everything I could to minimize the impact of these on my day. After a while I realized even scheduling meetings around off-peak drive times or changing the time I went into the office, couldn't make up for lost time. If you run into resistance or scheduling impasses when planning in-person meetings, go the audio or web conferencing route, it will save time for either you or other team members. Meeting online also benefits the environment by reducing a team's carbon footprint.

Sharing calendars with every partner or customer doesn’t always make sense, so having a standard way to invite someone to a meeting via email can simplify the process and increase the likelihood that invite recipient adds a meeting to his or her calendar. iCal is the standard data format for sending and processing invites. Of course when a shared calendar integrates with a web conferencing application, that integration can save a couple steps for the meeting organizer and makes it easier to track meetings for internal billing purposes.

Michael Caton, Collaboration Evangelist, WebEx

The weather outside is frightful...and the commute isn't much better

The Boston area experienced the first major snow storm of the season today. The qualifier for major would be upward of foot of snow, winter advisories being issued, and evening events, such as classes, being canceled by early afternoon. Basically, the metro Boston area is expecting around a foot of snow to fall in 7 hours.

A further complication is that it began snowing just around noon, which is less than ideal since most people have already gotten to the office and settled in before it started snowing. Companies decided to start letting workers leave early, but after an inch or two of snow had already fallen, leading to gridlock. Schools let out early, so parents, now stuck in gridlock, couldn't get to their children's schools to pick the kids up. The gridlock also kept snow removal crews from being able to adequately plow and sand.

These kinds of storms should prompt companies to be proactive about telecommuting and telework. That is, more people telecommuting all day would have resulted in less gridlock and more work being done, since those workers would have been at their PCs instead of sitting in traffic all afternoon. The trip to pick up the kids at school is a lot easier and less stressful when the school is just a couple of miles away. My day consisted of a web conference this morning with folks in France, New York, Holland, Massachusetts and California, so being in an office park wasn't a prerequisite for working. Plus, I've been available through instant messaging all day.

We are expecting another mid-day storm this Saturday, only this will be a Nor'easter mixing rain, sleet, snow and high winds. A Saturday storm is more likely to disrupt holiday plans than work plans, but people even use web conferencing for social occasions, such as weddings and bed time stories.

Michael Caton, Collaboration Evangelist, WebEx

Market-driven Carbon Reduction Initiatives

Green Enterprise has video of one of the sessions from this week's 4th Annual Energy Tech Investor Forum. The panel session, Impact CO2, focuses on market-driven carbon reduction initiatives, so more about why than how.

While the panel discusses some of the basic issues large manufacturers and energy suppliers face, namely carbon trading, the discussion also focused on how to work in a world where the general public have tuned into the importance of making sustainability part of everyday life. A panelist brought up how BP now tracks green house gas emissions as part of the company's financial reporting.

More mundane concerns include attracting talent when more and more prospective employees seek out jobs that will at least have reduced impact on, if not actually help, the environment. A panelist cited architectural firms as an example, stating that most young architects want to work for firms engaged in green building.

Most of the content in the video could be described on the "think globally" level, but still worth looking at for companies that need to start thinking about their green initiatives. For the "act locally" ideas, WebEx works with Carbonfund.org on a couple initiatives: the carbon calculator that shows how using technology can reduce CO2 emissions as well as the Plant a Tree program to offset CO2 emissions.

Michael Caton, Collaboration Evangelist, WebEx