Are Webinars more Efficient than Physical Classrooms?

December 24th, 2017 by ali No comments »

Yes, they are. Read this article and discover why

How many times have you asked yourself whether webinars are more efficient than physical classrooms or not (apart from the usual considerations about time and money savings)? Now, there are at least six good reasons that support webinars against traditional classrooms:

  • Webinars make you an expert in your field. This medium spreads your words much faster and to a larger audience than traditional meetings. In other words, if you offer a couple of free webinars to a targeted audience, the participants will start to take you as an expert almost immediately. The fact that your webinars are free does not decrease their value, as the perception of worth of a webinar is connected with the information your participants receive, not with the cost of the possible ticket to get in.
  • Webinars are a great way to sell. It is sufficient to add a smart call to action at the end of the event to turn your webinar into a way to present and sell a product at one time. In a nutshell, webinars allow you perform the so-called soft selling, a less-stressing approach than the usual individual visit to a potential customer.
  • The engagement of your audience is higher. This is much due to the new possibilities offered by the technology. Solutions for video conferencing like R-HUB`s TurboMeeting (http://www.rhubcom.com) allow you to create engaging contents and memorable on-line events through the use of tools like screen sharing, document sharing, presentations, polling and telepresence. Moreover, during webinar participants feel more at ease and ask questions more naturally than in a real meeting, with consequent higher level of engagement.
  • Webinars makes it easier to generate new leads. Participants must register to your webinars, which implies that you can easily obtain their emails and names. According to the level of interest they show, it is then possible to perform activities of marketing, upselling or remarketing.
  • The return of investment on a webinar is easier. This is a mere consequence of the fact that webinars cost much less than in-person meetings. Therefore, your investment returns quicker.
  • Webinars make life easy for your participants. Participating to a webinars is easy, as guests do not need to travel and organize themselves accordingly. Consequently, expect to find a larger number of participants to a webinar than the traditional meetings in hotel halls. Webinars are also smoother to organize, as you do not need to take care of many annoying details mostly concerned with the logistics.

In conclusion, webinars are a more effective way to gather your audience than the usual meetings in a classroom or in the hall of a hotel. In addition, they allow you to exploit the many features of today’s video conferencing products, in order to offer your guests real engaging contents with high value.

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Top Recommended Best Practices for Web Conferencing Security

December 17th, 2017 by ali No comments »

What safeguards should we put in place to secure our data?

In a word where WikiLeaks has been able to break even the defenses of Pentagon, you can never be too careful, especially when working through a service of the type of web conferencing that is necessarily exposed to all the gaps and vulnerabilities of the web.

It must be also said that, unfortunately, there is no web conferencing tool that can be regarded as 100% safe; yet, it is also true that the adoption of some common sense practices can really decrease the risk of data leaks during a web conference at a very low, if not negligible, level.

So, what shall we do in order to have safe web conferences? In order of importance:

1.) Target your sensitive data.

The fewer the sensitive data you share, the better it is for you and your organization. But first, you must know what data are sensitive. Usually, the types of data that are deemed to be handled with special care are:

– Credit card numbers, passwords / credentials to access bank accounts and email accounts;

– Designs and plans of new products; industrial or commercial know-how of any kind;

– Revenues, and other relevant information for the tax man;

– Your customers’ information (like addresses and phone numbers);

– Information on someone’s state of health.

2.) Be aware of the legislation on privacy.

Especially in Europe, there is a huge set of legally binding dispositions on the storage, protection and preservation of sensitive data that impose specific measures on firms and users. Therefore, it is not a bad idea to ask a lawyer for help, as your organization could be required by the law to work out a specific code of conduct to handle with certain categories of data.

3.) Work out a code of conduct and build awareness among your team.

Human mistakes are often the real cause of dramatic data leaks, as it happened in the famous affair Panama leaks. Especially law firms, hospitals and manufactures should create awareness of the importance of keeping some types of data secret among their teams and work out a detailed policy of data security that includes all the practices that everyone has to observe when dealing with a specific category of data, especially while utilizing technologies like web conferencing, emailing and phones.

4.) Keep sensitive data secret as much as possible.

It is not necessary to disclose certain data to every member of your team. The more secret the data are, the more protected they are: organize then your data on a hierarchical structure on concentric circles where only few people can have access to the inner core that holds the most sensitive data.

5.) Technology matters.

The transfer of data through the web must be encrypted in order to avoid middle man attacks. However, this is not sufficient to sleep well at night; it is also important to set properly firewalls, computers and devices, as data can be stolen at either end of the transfer process.

If you are interested in the topic of safe data transmission and web conferencing, you are going to find other useful resources and interesting posts on R-HUB`s blog at http://www.rhubcom.com

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Virtual Conferences: Which technology is the cheaper between Cloud-based Solutions and On-Premise Server based Solutions?

December 16th, 2017 by ali No comments »

Despite the common opinion, on-premise server-based technologies for virtual conferencing can be less expensive than cloud-based technologies, on the condition to choose the right product

Moving to the cloud has been the mantra of the world of virtual conferences in the last few years. Among the reasons given, we found that the prices of cloud-based virtual conferencing services are supposedly lower than the old, poor technology of on-premise servers, and, last but not least, cloud solutions are more scalable.

Is this assumption true? Not at all. Despite the cloud revolution, the producers of on-premise server-based technologies for virtual conferences are safe and sound and still on the market with innovative products that are able to outperform the cloud right now, like, just to mention one, the latest release of R-HUB`s TurboMeeting (http://www.rhubcom.com) : in the domain of real collaboration, these servers have reached the shortest  frame delays possible today in live streaming ( 3- 10 seconds). This is evidence of the vitality of the technology of on-premise servers, despite the ones that keep on announcing that the bells tolls for them.

Going deeper, clouds are not as cheap as they are usually reported in the leaflets and the advertisements. According to some experts (Brianinca, https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1413438-how-is-cloud-promoted-as-being-cheaper-than-on-premise?page=1#entry-5451300  ), the cost of them is higher in the long run.

And, even though the price of each individual cloud service may seem low, the sum of the costs of all the cloud services that your organization has to buy could be very high in the end. If it is true that clouds are easily scalable, it is also true that it comes with risks of downtime and sudden high traffic peaks that can cost you an arm and a leg.

If you hope to save money on the IT team, you are going to be disappointed: the highly complex nature of cloud products often requires paying high fees to specialized technicians. Last, clouds have their hidden costs, should they be the need of specific hardware or redundant ISP connections.

On the side of on-premise servers, producers have been able to greatly improve their products, at the point that a solution like TurboMeeting has probably no hidden costs and can be managed in total transparency, so that mangers know what they have to exactly spend for their virtual conferences. This outstanding result has been achieved by eliminating the need of maintenance and a devoted IT team. In facts, R-HUB`s servers are self-installing and self-updating machines, and their maintenance is performed by R-HUB team remotely.

In other words, they are devices fully plug-and-play, and their stupidly- easy and intuitive graphic interface that is supported by clear, step-by-step directions on both video and paper makes staff training superfluous. TurboMeeting is so easy that users could even learn to use it just one minute before their conference.

In conclusion, the race between clouds and on-premise servers is still wide open, and we may expect other surprises from the on-premise server technology in the future.

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8 Best Practices to avoid the most common Video Conferencing Issues

December 12th, 2017 by ali No comments »

Video conferencing is a useful tool that really adds value to your daily activities; unfortunately, it can also turn into a real nightmare when some few best practices are not respected.

Today, it is difficult to meet someone that does not know video conferences or has no experience in communication through this popular medium. Unfortunately, it is also very common to meet users that complain about the so-many video-conferencing issues. Therefore, if you plan to host a video call, you’d better be aware of the main problems connected with the use of this technology and know the relative countermeasures and better practices to prevent/fix them:

Avoid background noise. Please avoid that your guests have to hear your dog’s barfs and your babies’ cries during your video conferences. Remember that background noises not only impede communication, but they also give a very poor impression of you on your virtual guests.

Mute yourself (and your guests) when necessary. Many times we have to perform secondary tasks while sitting in a video call, for example to answer the phone or sending some messages. Unluckily, these activities create some noise and distract participants; fortunately, every video conferencing tool has a specific function to mute yourself and your guests. You do use it.

Avoid spotty connections. Getting disconnected from a video conferencing is one of the worst experiences you can have. For this reason, it is important to check the quality of one’s own connection and ask participants to do the same.

Prevent any static and interferences. While it is true that technology has its limit, it is also true that simply muting one’s phone until the moment to speak comes along is generally enough to avoid this annoying problem.

Introduce yourself before speaking and ask every guest to do the same. Especially when there are many participants, it is easy to forget the names of some of them, even though the names are labelled under the icon of each individual participant. Therefore, asking everyone to in introduce oneself to each other is always a great idea, because your guests remember better the names of the others in this way.

Mute echo central. What is that? Nothing else than an unexplainable echo during a video call that can be very irritating. When it happens, you need to ask participants to redial in.

If you are interested in video conferencing best practices, you are going to find many useful posts and articles on R-Hub`s blog at http://www.rhubcom.com. It is also possible to experience a 30 days free trial of R-HUB TurboMeeting, a special suite of servers for video conferencing.

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Why People Hate Video Conferencing (and how to solve this problem)?

December 10th, 2017 by ali No comments »

Three main reasons why many users dislike video conferencing and there are three easy and quick tips to efficiently address the problem

Being widespread does not mean being loved, and video conferencing does not make exception.Although in the past almost everybody found the idea of communicating through screens cool, it seems that the enthusiasm is slowly going down today, now that the technology for video-conferencing has become real and within everybody’s reach.

What happened so badly? According to a survey conducted by the Blog High-five, there are at least three reasons behind many users’ aversion to this medium of communication:

1.) Appearance concerns

According to a survey of Zogby Analytics, over 59% of people in the US are very concerned with their appearance when staying in public, and a video conference is anything else than a virtual public space.  The most common hang-ups regard their hair-cut, facial expressions, double chins and bags under the eyes, being fat. Unfortunately, the cam can highlight these small defects.  To tell it in other words, you could be not very photogenic.

The solution? More education and training to utilize lights and cams properly. In facts, many problems can be effectively addressed simply by tuning up the lights in your room and setting the cam at the right tilt and height. Consider that a camcorder can also disguise physical defects and make you appear  better on cam than on the street.  It is much about how you utilize this device.

2.) Technical difficulties

Many users still have some concerns about their ability to utilize video-conferencing products. No matter how much money has been invested in UX design, functionality improvements and technological development in the last few years; the fear that something goes wrong is still strong among the majority of users. It must be said that 40% of meetings have technical issues, with frequent calls to the customer support and a lot of time being lost in frustrating attempts to fix several technical problems.  So, these concerns are well-founded.

The solution is simple: use reliable video conferencing solutions with highly ergonomic user interfaces, like, for example, the suite of video conferencing servers TurboMeeting of R-HUB (http://www.rhubcom.com).  Affordable, easy to maintain and very secure, R-HUB`s servers have an intuitive visual interface that has recently been improved. The guidelines and directions are easy to find and follow, so that it is possible to learn how to use the product in only a couple of minutes.

3.) It is impossible to see or hear, or being seen or heard

This issue is more common than the reader could expect. For some reasons, it frequently happens that it is not possible to see or hear during a video call. Abruptly, the signal disappears.

The issue can be caused by several reasons, like poor bandwidth, bad connections, noise in the background, lack of memory of your pc, and so on.

The solution is to check the system before your video conference starts and not before. Assure yourself to match the necessary requirements in terms of network, connections and power, such as they are stated in the technical documentation of the manufacturer, and that your equipment is running. Last, don’t forget to prevent background noise by switching off radio/TV, or asking your colleagues to keep away during your video call.

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