Be Seen and Heard

ReadyTalk recently released an enhancement to it’s web based audio controls. Now for meetings of any size Chairpersons and Co-Presenters will have a visual queue for any audience member who is speaking. This feature brings more visibility into the audience of your web and audio, or audio only conferences.

With Active Speaker you can:

• See who’s audio line is making background noise and mute it
• Find out who’s hold music is playing for the whole call to hear
• Have more effective collaborative audio conferences
• Gain visibility into who’s asking questions during your conferences

Who is it for?

Active Speaker is especially useful for those collaborative meetings you may be having with your team members. Active Speaker, coupled with Name and Number matching through the phonebook, creates a very efficient collaborative meeting. Set up name and number matching by clicking the phonebook icon in your audio conference controls (pictured below). Once open add the names and numbers of the colleagues you frequently  meet with. The next time they dial-in to your ReadyTalk conference their name will automatically be entered into the audio participant list. Now when you start your meeting your colleagues names will automatically show up and you will be able to see who is speaking from the start of your call without having to set anything up. Now anytime someone speaks up on your collaborative call you will know exactly who is speaking making note-taking, follow-up, and roll call much easier.





Paul was formerly an Account Executive at ReadyTalk gaining valuable experience with competitors and the state of the web and audio conferencing industry. Currently in his role as Product Marketing Manager, he is in charge of the competitive landscape, on-demand audio products, and the web meeting interface. Paul loves the outdoors, his pup Huck, his wife Jess, and getting to the ski slopes as much as possible.

Post by John Andrews, director of government business development for ReadyTalk

The Small Business Administration (SBA) has used ReadyTalk’s easy to use conferencing solutions to help small businesses for years. And now, ReadyTalk’s Government Services Administration (GSA) contract is making it easier for other Federal, state and local organization to acquire and use ReadyTalk’s services.

At a time when governments are supporting new Telework mandates and trying to achieve sustainability goals, while cutting budgets, conferencing and collaboration solutions are cost-effective alternatives for managing and connecting people. Webcasts and webinars are indispensible tools for training and educating people who are geographically dispersed.

With more and more people being exposed to audio and web conferencing every day, it is key that the technology is it is easy to learn and easy to use. How many conference calls have you attended that started late, waiting while everyone was trying to get connected? And it has to be reliable. Ever been on a webcast where you couldn’t hear or understand the audio?

Nearly nine of 10 ReadyTalk customers surveyed stated they would recommend ReadyTalk services and the top reasons given were ease of use and reliability. Now ReadyTalk is trying to make it easier for Federal, state and local governments to acquire ReadyTalk’s services through our GSA schedule (GSA contract number GS-35F-0084X). A GSA contract streamlines the purchasing process and reduces government acquisition costs. A GSA contract also ensures the vendor’s business has met stringent requirements and that the pre-negotiated pricing is very competitive. It’s a good deal for the government.

While our service is easy to use so that new government employees can quickly utilize our service, our products are robust enough and comprehensive enough to meet the needs of rocket scientists. We just don’t think you should have to be a rocket scientist to buy our services.

Corporate Training: Now, More than Ever
By Melanie Turek, Industry Director, Frost & Sullivan

When I ask C-level executives about their biggest concerns when it comes to deploying new technology, one topic always tops the list: training. That’s a bit of a head scratcher, really. Training is, after all, something completely under a manager’s control. But in fact, with the increasingly virtual nature of the workplace, it’s harder than ever to make sure employees get the training they need—whether it’s related to technology itself, or broader business processes and corporate policies and regulations.

Organizations today are managing a growing number of remote workers, partners, suppliers and customers—all in the face of increased competition, pressure to keep costs down, and rapidly changing markets. These companies know they must continually train their employees and constituents, as quickly as possible, to ensure that they are up to speed on the latest company and product information; in-house technology; and business processes. But even as corporate training is becoming more important, it’s also more difficult, with trainers and their students spread out across vast geographic regions and time zones, and even across cultures.

Good corporate training must address several key issues:

Corporate training should be available to employees on-demand.

• On-demand, rather than scheduled, training. It’s no longer enough to plan a series of training sessions and expect employees to “show up” at the given time. With people working in different time zones, from various locations, and juggling multiple job roles, they can’t be expected to prioritize training ahead of business-critical projects or their own work schedules.
• Insightful, relevant content that engages attendees while ensuring their training needs are met. It’s critical to be able to cut through the multi-media clutter, while making sure that the information imparted is understood and retained. And as with all learning, corporate training greatly benefits from participant collaboration. Video, too, can add value to the experience and make it more interactive.
• Ongoing learning as needed. It’s important that corporate trainers be able to offer refresher courses and follow-up classes on an as-need basis, to ensure employees remain up to date on the latest information, and that they can refresh their memories on certain elements of a program or process days, weeks or even months after the initial training took place.
• Keeping costs and travel in check, while reaching more people more often. This is the age of innovation, in which employees must work with colleagues, partners and customers to develop content and ideas quickly and decisively. Training is critical to prepare all employees for this new way of working. But as more of those employees are located in remote locations and home-based offices, reaching them with training becomes more difficult and costly. Managers need solutions that can extend across the boundaries in the most cost-effective manner.

The good news is, web conferencing can help corporate trainers meet all these needs—easily, and cost effectively—and sometimes better than real-world events. For information on how companies are delivering effective online training through web conferencing, join Melanie for “Effective Online Training: Tips from the Experts,” a free webinar on Wednesday, February 23 at 2 p.m. EST.

Melanie is a renowned expert in unified communications, collaboration, social networking and content-management technologies in the enterprise. For 15 years, Ms. Turek has worked closely with hundreds of vendors and senior IT executives across a range of industries to track and capture the changes and growth in the fast-moving unified communications market. Melanie writes often on the business value and cultural challenges surrounding real-time communications, collaboration and Voice over IP, and she speaks frequently at leading customer and industry events.

Have you taken advantage of ReadyTalk’s Co-Presenter feature yet? If not you are missing out on one of the most effective ways to manage your webinars. Co-Presenters can be promoted from within the ReadyTalk meeting after joining as a participant. Once promoted to Co-Presenter they are given nearly the same privileges as the Chairperson. They can help manage the chat feature, mute and unmute participants, push polls, present slides, and share their desktop or applications.

How do I?

Simply invite your Co-Presenter to the conference as you would invite any participant. Once they join the conference as a participant, follow these instructions:

1. Find their name in the web participant list
2. Right click on their name
3. Click the “Promote to Co-Presenter” button

That’s it, they will get a notice on their screen that they are being promoted to a Co-Presenter and a moderator will load that looks very similar to yours as the chairperson.  If you accidentally promoted the wrong participant or you no longer need that participant as a Co-Presenter you can just follow the same steps except this time you will click “Demote to Participant”. Using this feature will give your conferences a professional look and feel with no added cost. Check out ReadyTalk’s Resource Center for more information on Co-Presenters and all kinds of other interesting features.

Next week marks the annual Salesforce.com user conference in San Francisco. As a long time CRM administrator, I always look forward to attending this event, in fact, this year will be my 7th trip to Dreamforce. In honor of that I’m listing the top 7 reasons why I love going to Dreamforce…

#7 The schwag – Not only have I accumulated some really nice Salesforce schwag over the years, but the partner expo is loaded with fun chotchkies. I’ve stuffed my suitcase with computer bags to water bottles, tee shirts, yoga mats, Crocs, movie tickets, Starbucks cards, USB drives, flashlights, key chains and more pens and highlighters than I’ll ever need. Yes, I still talk to vendors if I’m interested in their product offering (and there are hundreds of great partners at the expo), but good schwag makes any tradeshow more fun.

#6 Networking – Dreamforce is where I can really let my inner Salesforce geek shine. I have made some great contacts at Dreamforce and look forward to catching up with them every year at the conference. While affectionately teased as a “Salesforce guru” here at ReadyTalk , attending Dreamforce is my annual affirmation that there are over 15,000 Salesforce disciples out there just like me.

#5 The music – Salesforce knows how to throw a party. And, the opening night gala seems to get bigger and better ever year. It’s not easy to pull off a rock concert in a convention hall with a bunch of Salesforce admins and developers, but they’ve managed to do it with style. This year’s act is Stevie Wonder yes, the STEVIE WONDER. I’ll see you on the dance floor!

#4 The keynotes – I am always impressed by the caliber of the keynote speakers at Dreamforce. Over the years, I have been lucky enough to watch speeches from the venerable Colin Powell, Neil Young, Michael Dell and, the Jedi-Master himself—George Lucas. This year is no exception, we’ll be hearing from former president Bill Clinton.

#3 The food – Salesforce does its best to keep us all fat and happy. The conference lunches are far superior to your typical cafeteria meals; and drinks and snacks seem to be around every corner at the breakout sessions. Add to that the posh customer/partner dinners and receptions held each night throughout the conference, and the always-stellar San Francisco dining scene. My advice to newcomers is to pack forgiving clothing, stay at a hotel with a decent gym, and indulge!

#2 The breakout sessions – For me, the breakouts are the raison d’être for attending Dreamforce. I always walk away from these sessions with new tools and insights, and ways to improve our ever-evolving CRM arsenal. This is where you really get to see how other companies are leveraging cloud computing, learn best practices, checkout the product roadmap, and start to think outside the box. After several years in the same field, I love the fact that there is always something new to learn at Dreamforce.

#1 ReadyTalk at the expo! – That’s right! ReadyTalk is heading for the AppExchange. We’ve developed an application that integrates Salesforce Leads and Contacts with our Conference Center. Stop by our booth at the expo (#513) and see a demo of our awesome new app for managing our webinars right within your Salesforce instance. No downloads, no spreadsheets, just clicks. And, be sure to pick up some of our cool ReadyTalk schwag while you’re there!

ReadyTalk is also hosting the Cloud Connection Party with Astadia. Want to join us for the rockin’ party? Get an invite.

Susan is ReadyTalk’s CRM administrator. She loves dreaming about food, traveling the world and new ways to customize Salesforce.com. She lives in Boulder with her husband, Todd. They are excitedly awaiting the arrival of their baby boy in February.