Ms. New Community Manager
To steal a passage from my Programming 10 Class, nerdy T-shirts of the 1990’s, and Bill Gates’ first Tweet:
Hello, World!
Fuze Meeting has just signed on a Social Media/PR/BloggyBlog/Community Management enthusiast (me) to take the reins on keeping our users and prospects (you) up-to-date and in-the-know about all things web conference-ish and other (loosely) related topics.
That’s right! We now have a whole entire human exclusively dedicated to listening to your deepest desires and needs…er…particularly those associated with web conferencing (and more particularly Fuze Meeting)!!! Can you believe your LUCK? And you thought Chinese New Year was over.
So, don’t be shy! Make my day! Let me know what you think about our product – what do you love? What could be better? What do you want to see next? Are you really excited about the iPad or do you just think it’s going to fizzle away? What would you do for a Klondike Bar?
“Yes, Kristen, YES!”, you scream with gusto. “How ever may I communicate this valuable information?!?!!?”
Good question! We’re multi-talented and well-versed, so hit us up on Twitter, Facebook or slap a comment at the bottom of this post.
Nice to meet you folks. I’m sure I’ll see you around the circuit soon.
-k.
Customer Case Study – Arnold and Fuze Meeting – Better Online Meetings
We recently received a great testimonial from one of our customers – Arnold WorldWide – thanks guys! check it out below.
Interview with Will Burns, EVP, Director of Business Development and Agency Innovation at Arnold Worldwide
Can you provide a little background on the company?
Arnold is a creative communications agency focused on delivering strong business results for brands like Citizens, Jack Daniel’s, Hershey’s, Ocean Spray, Volvo, Fidelity Investments, Carnival Cruise Lines, truth® and more. With a commitment to Great Work that Works, Arnold provides clients with a return on idea that drives a business forward. The agency delivers services across all communication touchpoints under one-bottom-line, fueling holistic integrated programs. Arnold is owned by Havas and has full-service offices in Boston, DC, New York, London, Prague, Milan, Madrid, Sao Paulo and additional global resources in 75 countries through our network.
How have you done collaboration and web conferencing in the past?
Arnold’s product is ideas – and it is the task of the account services and business team to represent those ideas in the very best way possible. In a perfect world, you’d get to present the idea in person – but with the recession, most companies have cut their travel budgets, and it’s just not possible to meet in person all the time.
Before Fuze Meeting, we generally emailed PDFs and other files to clients and colleagues, got everyone on a conference call, and tried to navigate people through the documentation over the phone. With video, we’d typically overnight a DVD to a client and then discuss the video over the phone. One of the major problems with this method is that it prevents us from maintaining control of the conversation. People naturally want to look ahead to what’s coming next – if you send a presentation or a video ahead of time, they will run right to an idea without any setup. We try to carefully craft the argument to lead the client to the idea. All that is lost if they move ahead before you’re ready.
We’d also tried using WebEx – this worked OK for slides, but the video was very hit or miss, and often the sound wouldn’t work properly. I think it also intimidated some users. We do have videoconferencing capabilities, but we found the interaction could be awkward and distracting. In fact, we’d tried most of what’s out there, and none of it really met our needs, particularly around video and ease-of-use.
Why did you select Fuze Meeting?
At Arnold, the new business team is sort of the unofficial R&D group – we try new technologies all the time. We’re often asked to do capabilities presentations remotely, which was the impetus to try Fuze Meeting. It is the strongest when it comes to video – we can post and present high-definition videos for people to watch, and they look fantastic. Video is a very important medium for us, and Fuze makes it very easy to collaborate and present video in a seamless way. There have been times when there’s a rough cut being done in New York, while the creative director is in LA – now the account and creative teams can simply set up a Fuze Meeting, post the file and work on it together.
We were also impressed with the client experience – Fuze Meeting is also way ahead of the competition in this regard. You don’t want your client to have to download something complicated and deal with it during a meeting. Fuze makes sure they aren’t putting a burden of ramp-up on the person you’re presenting to. This ease-of-use has helped us get momentum behind using the product, both with clients and internally. And, we love that we can import any kind of file into one meeting – a research report in a PDF, creative brief in Word, a PowerPoint with sales data, and of course video. Our files tend to be quite robust and graphics intensive, and Fuze Meeting handles them easily.
How is Fuze Meeting helping you build your business?
We use Fuze Meeting extensively for new business – we recently presented to eight CEOs from eight different cities at same time – no one had a problem, it was a great meeting and a huge success. We also have a number of account people who are starting to use it regularly with clients It’s a great way to shrink the distance between our clients and the Boston office.
We’re also using Fuze Meeting for internal collaboration. One great example is when we were working on a big pitch – the creative team was at the office on a Sunday morning working on a presentation of more than 70 slides and needed to link in the president, the chief creative officer and some others to finalize the pitch. We were able to get everyone onto a Fuze Meeting – working from the office, working from home, or from wherever – to review the whole deck together and make changes on the fly. We just couldn’t have done that without this program.
We’re seeing a much more rapid adoption of Fuze Meeting than we saw with other technologies – I think with other technologies there’s a perception that it is going to be a hassle or difficult. As soon as people see how easy it is to use Fuze Meeting and the benefits, they quickly make it part of how they do business.
What are the business benefits of using Fuze Meeting?
Fuze Meeting gives us many of the benefits of an in-person meeting — the real-time collaboration, the give-and-take, the ease of moving between different media, and the ability to control the flow of the presentation — without the travel. We’re saving thousands of dollars in travel using Fuze Meeting. It also fits with Arnold’s brand – we’re an innovative agency, and using a next-generation application like Fuze Meeting helps us project this.
Another benefit is efficiency. Being able to get everyone on the same page at the same time from around the world dramatically increases the speed with which we can complete work. Fuze Meeting makes complex collaboration and presentations simple and quick.
Finally, Fuze Meeting is enabling us to better communicate and sell our ideas, and that in turn helps us close more business.
Get connected with “social meetings”
We’ve made some updates!
Your awesome feedback has helped us create the newest version of Fuze Meeting, which we are happy to announce is available today at www.fuzemeeting.com.
We’ve kept the same great low price but added some valuable features to make Fuze Meeting the most innovative and easiest web conferencing service.
Universal contacts: Access all your address and personal IM contacts from multiple applications such as Microsoft OCS [beta], Gmail, LinkedIn and more.
Social meetings: For ad-hoc webinars, share meeting links in real-time on Facebook and Twitter.
Enhanced high-definition presentations: Now supporting Microsoft PowerPoint animations, transitions and imbedded multimedia, without desktop sharing enabled.
On-demand content availability: Fuze Meeting enables pre- and post-meeting content available on-demand to all meeting participants.
All this and more for $29, less than half the cost of Cisco WebEx!
Remember the game “Operation”? It takes a very steady hand…
Operation
I used to love that game. Pinching those tweezers to remove the “Adam’s Apple” or “Water on the Knee” and trying desperately not to touch the side triggering that buzz and getting your turn disqualified. It took a very steady hand, indeed.
I was thrilled to find “Operation” fruit gummies, aka crack for kids, at the grocery store this week. I marveled at whoever the marketing smarty pants was for leveraging a highly sought-after, almost addictive vehicle to reintroduce and old game from the sixties to a new generation of potential game buyers. I bought 3 boxes for my fruit gummy main-lining 7 year old.
It occurred to me that we are delivering a similar story with Fuze Meeting. Non face-to-face meetings have been happening for a long time. First via telephone and then via the computer with online web conferencing. But, the general product offerings haven’t really changed in 10+ years. The world of web conferencing has always been a yard sale of client-server architecture, heavy downloads, clunky set up processes, and limited content capability. Gross. Fuze Meeting brings a freaky fresh new experience to an old concept. Killer UI, Fisher-Price simplicity, all in a browser (no downloads), ability to present and collaborate on HD content –even video, and mobile. You don’t need a very steady hand. Just an IP connection. It’s “wicked easy.” You really should try it. http://www.fuzemeeting.com
Posted by Patrick, on behalf Brook West.