We have put together a quick comparison of web conferencing services ReadyConference, Netspoke, Microsoft Live Meeting, WebEx and Adobe Connect (formerly Macromedia Breeze).
Web conferencing services compared
ReadyConference Plus Web, Netspoke, Microsoft Live Meeting, WebEx Meeting, Adobe Connect
For audio conferencing solutions that compliment these web conferencing and collaboration solutions contact us today.
With all the web conferencing services available on the market today it can get confusing as to which one to use and why. If the web conference your hosting is not that important to you most will suite your needs, but it’s important and you have customers, partners, prospects or others that are critical to your business and it absolutely positively needs to happen no matter what you better make the right decision as to who you choose as a web conferencing service provider. Have you ever wondered what the difference is between all the conferencing services out there. We hope to help clarify it for you a little so you can make the right decision. We have put together a simple grid as a starting point and you will continue to see this as a regular topic. Go to our web site www.messageimpact.com for more information.
We recently contracted with the City of Nanaimo for an emergency broadcast voice message system. Last year due to heavy rainfall it created turbidity in the local water supply with the potential of a possible water contamination. A boil water warning was issued to the citizens of Nanaimo via the local radio, TV and newspaper as well as being posted on the city’s website. Unfortunately there was still a large portion of the city that never received the message to boil their water prior to drinking it. Fortunately from what I understand the issue turned out not to be as serious as it could have been.
The Message Impact Voice Broadcast system will be able to notify all 30,000 households in less than an hour via telephone to let them know of any critical emergency issue. The speed of the telephone communications will be key in an effective emergency notification service for the city. Messages can be delivered personally when individuals answer the phone or can simply being left as a voice mail or on an answering machine message.
We are in the process of putting together some web and audio conferencing pricing that will blow your sock off. Please stay tuned to our blog and web site for this pricing. The pricing will apply to Netspoke and ReadyConference Audio.
As we all know in business it’s more expensive for us to find new customers than it is for us to keep the existing ones. In today’s fickle and competitive customer market this continues to become increasingly important. E-mail is a common and often used communication method for most companies today. I don’t knock e-mail because I think it works, but not as effectively as it used to. Because of all the e-mail newsletters, junk mail and spam these days, you’re lucky if your message gets through to 1% of your e- mail list. Most customers are reluctant to even give you their e-mail address these days or to at least give you their primary e-mail address. Here’s a list of what I consider the pros and cons of e- mail marketing. Keep in mind e-mail marketing is suited to and will work better in some verticals that others.
Pros
Cons
Many companies have their customers phone numbers, if not you may want to consider collecting their phone numbers along with their e-mail addresses. It would be nice if we could give each and every one of our customers a personalized phone call and have a nice conversation with them about your products and services. Unfortunately this isn’t always practical, but fortunately you can get very close to this. Imagine your customer getting a follow-up phone call after they purchased your product or service or perhaps a phone call to a customer you haven’t heard from in awhile suggesting a special offer, a reminder of your services, a birthday greeting or some other message that makes them feel special or provides value to them.
Voice broadcasting sends a prerecorded voice message to hundreds or thousands of telephone numbers or telephone numbers with extensions. Your voice blast could play your prerecorded message when someone answers the phone, or it can leave a voicemail message for that individual. Best of all it has many features to make your message more interactive. Press a certain key on your phone and your customer can be transferred to a live operator. Not enough operators? No problems we can easily set your voice blast to pace its outgoing calls. You can also personalize the call with text to speech and have each call mention that person’s name, account balance, or any other information unique to that individual. A survey can also be done by asking the customer to press a specific key for a specific answer. The customer can also specify that he wants to be removed from the list.
Voice broadcasting is a quick easy and effective method for communicating with your customer base. Many companies have made voice broadcasting a part of their communication strategy with great success.
You may have concerns about the reactions you’ll get from your customer base and this is a valid concern. Please let me help you to structure your message to your clients in such a way that they will perceive value from your call as opposed to it being an annoyance. We’ve had great results in working with our clients to test voice broadcasting as an addition to their communication strategies. If it’s done right it can be a great success.
www.messageimpact.com
We have created two new short training videos for the VoiceREACH Voice Broadcasting service. These videos are flash video clips teaching you how to create and upload your lists to the VoiceREACH web site. We are planning more of these types of training videos for the VoiceREACH service as well as our fax to email service and our conferencing services.
The first video explains how to create two distribution lists in MS Excel. One test list and one distribution list. The test list is used for testing each voice blast before sending your to your main distribution list. By adding your email address to the test list the system will send a wave file (.wav) as an attachment to your email address. If you are happy with the wave file once you listen to it, you can submit that same wave file as your main broadcast by uploading it to the VoiceREACH web site. This provides two things, 1.) an electronic copy of the voice message you sent for your records and 2.) a file that can be proofed and signed off on by your management or others within your organization before sending.
The second training video explains how to upload upload your list to the VoiceREACH system via the web site.
The videos can be found here:
VoiceREACH training on list creation
VoiceREACH training on list uploading
We are starting to add the web conferencing tool Adobe Macromedia Breeze to our portfolio. This is a great product and one nice thing is that it is fully Apple Mac compatable. This will give our customers a total of 5 web conferencing tools to choose from. I’ll post some pricing and more details on Breeze soon.
I just came back from an amazing weekend fishing off the east and west coast of Vancouver Island. The scenery was just outstanding everywhere we went and the fishing was the best I ever experienced. We also did some Crabbing off the West Coast which was also outstanding. Of course we had several tremendous seafood feasts. 
Back into work mode now.
Message Impact Systems Inc. recently signed a contract with Pelican Software to provide them with sales and marketing services for their Tallys software product. Tallys a software product designed for the oil and gas industry to keep track of pipe inventory. We are excited about our new relationship with Pelican Software not only because we think it’s a great software product, but because it’s a great team of people. Tallys software is unique in this sense that there is no other software product that does what it does. It is already an industry-standard and as we help Pelican software move into other markets we expect big things to happen. More information on the Pelican Software’s Tallys product can be found here.
If you or your company are looking for sales and marketing services for your software product please give us a call or drop us an e-mail.
Recently we have had many new associations as clients. Previously they sent communications to their members by various different methods that were inefficient such as, email, fax, mailings and phone trees. Most of these were not that effective because either people are not checking their email regularly, email address were changed and not updated. Most individuals do not have fax machines. Mailing was costly and took way to long. The phone tree method usually broke down somewhere along the line and was generally a pain for most people.
Some of the associations I spoke with were reluctant to try voice broadcasting as a way to communicate with their members mainly I think because of the unknown. I sure their concerns were things like, what will the members think of getting and automated phone call, what if they get mad at us, etc… There can also be the fear of using or not understanding new technologies.
In every case where the association tried it they always loved it. Why? Once they got over the hurdle of trying it once they were amazed how simple it actually was to do, how quick it is, how inexpensive it is and that their members actually didn’t mind getting a call from their association at all. In fact most members liked getting their communications that way and the association did not get any of the complaints from their members that they were anticipating.