Caleb Booker

This comes up a lot:

What is the difference between a meeting in a virtual world and a conference call?

Here’s your definitive answer.

For someone very new to meetings in a virtual environment, this question makes a lot of sense. 15 minutes into their first meeting they stop looking at the screen, start poking around in some other application, and just talk as if it was any other call.

So they think: “If I’m not paying attention to the screen with the avatars, what’s the point?” Those same people, after their fifth virtual meeting or so, start to really like them but don’t really have an answer to that question yet.

Then something happens: an old-fashioned conference call comes up. They walk down the hall, gather in a conference room, and pull up a speaker phone. Now a series of thoughts go through their heads:

1. “Wait… which number do I dial again?”
2. “Oh ok, so I was supposed to hit pound, fine…”
3. “Wow they’re loud! I can’t turn them down!”
4. “Wow they’re quiet! I can’t turn them up!”
5. “I have a note on that back at the office… oh well I’ll have to email them later. Meanwhile they’re going on and on about it…”
6. “This part has nothing to do with me but I can’t leave, or review the document, or catch up on email…”
7. “Uh, yeah, I’m here. Yes, I can hear you. Yes, I’m here. Yes, I can hear you.”
8. “Wait, is Joe here? He’s not? I thought they said he was here! Well then why did I bother talking about all of that? Well I couldn’t SEE that he wasn’t here could I?”
9. “Oh my god who is the guy with the crinkly plastic wrapper?”
10. “Damn, the meeting’s over and I wanted to chat with Frank and Josie privately but we’ll have to set up a separate call for later I guess…”

Now, compare that to the virtual world meeting experience:

1. If you’ve ever logged in before, you’ll remember which building to walk into without having to look it up.
2. No surprise interface or passcode changes.
3. You can turn the volume up.
4. You can turn individual people down.
5. You are physically still in your office, with access to all of your stuff.
6. You can do email (or whatever) during the part of the meeting that has nothing to do with you. Nobody will be offended because you won’t be distracting anyone - they won’t even know.
7. People know, just by looking around the room, that you are indeed still there and can hear them.
8. You’ll know if key people are there just by looking around - no need to take people’s word on it or get them to report back to you while talking over each other awkwardly.
9. Every single person can toggle their microphone off when they’re not talking. Go for that crinkly plastic wrapper candy all you want!
10. When the meeting is wrapping up you can casually ask whoever you want to do a little follow-up with to stay online for a minute or join you in the next room. No need to dial into another conference, or worry about eavesdroppers, or reschedule with them just to have a five minute conversation.

… and that, in a nutshell, is the difference. Questions?

Posted on September 5th, 2008 under futurism, new media, virtual worlds. RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback.