HOW TO RUN EFFECTIVE ONLINE MEETINGS • NEW INFORMATION ABOUT HEADPHONE/EARBUD LISTENING

Dave Edwards

Public media consultant Dave Edwards is offering simple solutions to stage online meetings. 

Edwards’ advice is important because more webinars and group conference calls are currently replacing in-person meetings.

In his free “white paper” essay titled Running Effective Online Meetings, Edwards addresses many of the common problems facing conference call organizers. 

The essay is available for free on the Dave Edwards Media website [link].

Edwards offers planning advice on topics such as agendas, allowing for brief social time, how to keep people engaged, meeting etiquette and taking notes.

Everyone has attended a webinar, or other online session, that felt like a waste time and provided no takeaways. To make his point, Edwards quotes research showing that only 23% of webinar participants gave their full attention during online presentations. Further, 25% of participants in online meetings spent their time catching up on emails.

We wish the research did provided the stats for the percentage of people who fell asleep or “left go go the bathroom ” and never returned.

While we are discussing Edwards essay about planning effective online meetings, here are some problems we have encountered:

• Online meetings that don’t happen at the scheduled time.

• Call organizers that haven’t done a dry run and/or learned how to navigate the platform they are using.

• Roundtable discussions with several people who speak at different volumes can cause headaches.

• Difficulty finding the webinar because no one sent you the URL needed to join the meeting. This happened to us last week.

Note to Jacobs Media: Make certain that people who have registered for a webinar have the URL prior to the call.

TODAY’S TAKEAWAY FROM JACOBS’ TECHSURVEY 2020

Spark News has provided ongoing coverage of Nielsen’s problem measuring listening to audio via headphones/earbuds. 

This causes unmeasured listening that is not included in Nielsen’s PPM ratings.

Nielsen is aware 0f the problem.  PPM meters have a difficult time “hearing” the embedded watermarks.   

However, there is no agreement about the extent of the problem.

Now, thanks to Jacobs’ Techsurveys, we have a better idea of listening to station streams via headphones/earbuds for the respondents to the survey.

According to Techsurvey 2020, the percentage of the sample that listens to station audio streams is around 22%. That is up from 17% in the 2017 Techsurvey.