I just found a blog called “Collaborative Thinking.” It is written by Mike Gotta, a principal analyst at Burton Group. Mike’s one-line summary of his content is “Perceptions on collaboration and social software.” It’s a perfect complement to my blog. I concentrate on public webinars, while Mike looks at collaborative web conference meetings, Unified Communications, social networking, and all the other ways that collaboration gets tied in to work and life.
Mike caught my eye with a post entitled “Web Conferencing: It’s About Adoption, Not Deployment.” He asks why web conferencing hasn’t taken off like email, Twitter, Facebook, or other collaborative technologies. People are chiming in with a variety of insights and opinions. It’s worth a look.
My comment was that a problem (among several other factors mentioned by Mike and others) is that the technology gets saddled with the sins of its users. If you attend a lousy web conference (terrible slides, bad presenter, poorly organized, ineffective demo, etc), you might say “Well that wasn’t worth my time. I don’t like web conferences.” It takes dedicated time and effort to create a good web conference (even a small one on one meeting), whereas you can create a terrible web conference at the drop of a hat. And many people do.
What can you do to help speed the growth of web conferencing? Make your meetings something that others enjoy and want to emulate.
