Webinars are one of the miracles of 21st century technology and the Internet. Webinars allow you to conduct intensive meetings with full audiovisual and action features with anywhere from two to 1000 people anywhere in the world. All that is required is for you to be a client of an online meeting technology provider and for you and anyone who wishes to attend your meeting to have a fast Internet connection and either conference-call-enabled telephones or VoIP (voice-over Internet protocol).

With webinar meetings, you can share your desktop files and your computer’s applications with any and all participants, and you can even allow them to move objects around on your computer desktop–and you can do the same with them. (They cannot open or access any file or application that you don’t permit, so all is quite secure.). Everything is seen and heard in real-time, and anyone can record the meeting in full from any point. This includes PowerPoint presentations if you are using one.

Webinars also permit co-browsing, so that two or more people can do the same Internet look-up at the same time–again, in real time. This is perfect for walking people through a website for training or research purposes.

Webinar technology also allows for and features a virtual “white board”, just like the erasable white boards in the traditional conference room. Different participants can write on and erase things from the virtual white board that all see, as long as the meeting’s host (you) gives them individual access. If the nature of the meeting is such that you need to be in full control, you can make yourself the only one who can write on or erase things from the white board, although everybody will always be able to see it in, yes, real-time.

Polling and surveying just got much, much easier and more thorough with webinar technology. Participants can easily and quickly respond to poll or survey questions right from their own computer and their feedback is instantly recorded and, if you want, charted or graphed. This technology also facilitates more targeted audiences in the future, as one meeting’s results can be used to send out invitations on a more targeted basis the next time. This makes webinar technology a powerful sales and marketing tool.

As long as you enable it, your webinar is fully recorded and can be played back whenever you need or want, and of course you can fast forward, pause, and rewind. Anyone who participated can be given a copy of the recorded meeting, too. If the webinar was something like a special “teleseminar” in which you shared special expertise, you could even sell the recorded meetings as a product to anyone who participated or anyone whom they tell about your amazing teleseminar.

Before the webinar, you assemble the materials you’ll be presenting and/or sharing. These are situated on your computer’s desktop. Then you send out electronic invitations; whoever clicks to accept can attend the meeting and be given the URL to access it, and they don’t need the webinar technology. Once all is tested and (let’s assume) working properly, the guests start showing up; they enter a generated pass-code to gain access to your meeting. You can set up some kind of indicator to let you know a new guest has just arrived. Communications throghout the meeting may include teleconference, VoIP, IM, and webinar program chat. Also, web cameras can be used to allow everyone to gain real-time visual access to people who are currently speaking or writing, depending on settings. It’s all really that easy.

By Tom Cruz 
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