Gain Huge Cost-Savings by
Video Conferencing Your Meetings
[Essay] by Richard Cavalier

Companies can make huge cost-savings if they convert from central meetings to virtual meetings via two-way/full-motion Video Conferencing(VC). Small companies will gain pay-back within several meetings; savings thereafter. Large companies with a central-meetings but of about $100,000-per can realize savings of at least a half-million dollars via just a few meetings.
Yet, information regarding this cost-saving phenomenon is difficult to find. Most editors of mass magazines defer to the stated opinions in the meetings/conventions trade press. Ditto, user-Associations. But those trade magazines are controlled circulation publications that sell advertising and give copies. Because the travel industry(hotels and airlines) provide most ads, the trade press is reluctant to provide any competitive information. So a grand cost-saving alternative simply languishes, damned by faint praise.

Moreover the meetings industry trade press touts the slogan: It's gotta be face-to-face!" No, "It don't gotta be nuthin'!" That slogan has never been proved and is not supported by independent research that indicates many things that are opposite to the industry's cherished views and slogans.

Equipment that costs under $5,000 per site can link any six sites, two-way/full-motion. Additional units will expand the reach by six-es. Any number world-wide can log on, audit, and speak by phone. DSL is minimum capability; cable and satellite connections are better, depending on need. Add only air-time to realize cost-savings for the life of the equipment. Details: Dan Evans, Logic Electronics: 972/390-1932.

During the Iraq war, a military commander indicated that the officers were in constant contact via VC-and on a news program, he showed the computer with camera. Networks broadcast video-camera, video-phone, and cell phone war-feeds interchangeably. Immediately after 9/11, our Federal government was run via VC, with the President and all Cabinet members in separate "safe" rooms. Ford Motors runs hundreds of training hours monthly, and university courses and corporate/university ties are legend.

So we can run a war, a country, broadcasts, university courses, and university-company training via VC…but your company is too complex to benefit via meetings? Who's kidding whom?

For additional perspective on VC, see the expanded material in the new update of Sales Meetings That Work(Dow Jones-Irwin, 1983). Cavalier's new companion books, Managing Through Training and Common Sense ISD together bracket the group communications function and make even further savings possible through proved do-it-yourself methodology. For five years in the 1970s, Cavalier was a business-meetings columnist for Crain's A&SP and later Bill Brothers' Sales & Marketing Management magazines.

To order: www.1stBooks.com or your bookseller. For wexcerpts: www.meetingsCavalier.com.