Whether you conduct your own, or pay a coach to conduct one for you, here are some things to keep in mind:

The Advantages

Teleconferences save time and money. Participants don’t have to go anywhere; they simply pick up phone and dial in. This can save hours out of a person’s day.

You don’t have to pay transportation for a speaker, and there are no refreshments or equipment to arrange and no facility to book. The logistics are minimal. You can see advantages already.

Teleconferences also expand your choice of presenters. You can choose best person for job – internationally – not just best person in your town, or someone whose transportation you can afford to pay.

People taking teleconferences can be exceptionally comfortable and receptive because they can be in their own home or office. There are few distractions such as there would be in any room, where your mind can wander as you look around, hear announcements, have someone else get up to leave for restroom, or watch staff coming and going. Teleconference allow for total focus.

The Disadvantages

Not everyone is experienced or skilled in what it takes to conduct a meeting or training over telephone. It’s important to book a coach or trainer with experience in teleconference work. You cannot see participants faces to read their expressions or receive feedback, so presenter must know how to work around this.

Why? The other day I spent morning with a friend working on a joint project which involved meeting somewhere, then driving to next place. As we got into car for drive, she told me she would have to dial in to a telemeeting, but not to worry, we could keep working. She dialed in, put her phone on mute, and continued conversation with me. She un-muted at end of hour to sign off.

The astute teleconference or telemeeting conductor knows how to make call interactive enough so that participants must stay tuned in, engaged, and actively participating.

If you’re working internationally, you also have to consider time zones, and there are some localities that can’t be worked in, day or night. In that case, you will have to have two separate sessions.

Here are some things you need to know:

1.You can rent teleconference bridge lines for free or for little cost.

Start with a free one and see if you like it. Here are three places you can try http://secure.konferex.com/konferex.asp http://www.freeconference.com/?Source=Google/freeteleconference http://conferenceup.com/conference.html

Managers: Paying for PR-Lite?

As a business, non-profit or association manager, your public relations expenditure may give you names in newspaper or product plugs on radio. But what about key stakeholder behavior change – kind that leads directly to achieving your managerial objectives?

Since that’s public relations’ strongest suit, shouldn’t you be getting that first, THEN incremental publicity exposure? Especially when persuading those important outside folks to your way of thinking can move many of them to take actions that help you achieve your department, division or subsidiary objectives?

Bounce this notion off public relations team assigned to your unit: people act on their own perception of facts before them, which leads to predictable behaviors about which something can be done. When we create, change or reinforce that opinion by reaching, persuading and moving-to-desired- action very people whose behaviors affect organization most, public relations mission is accomplished.

If they buy into it, you’ll have a simple blueprint that gets everyone working towards same external audience behaviors insuring that your public relations effort stays on track.

Consider possible payoffs: customers starting to make repeat purchases; community leaders beginning to seek you out; welcome bounces in show room visits; membership applications on rise; prospects starting to do business with you; fresh proposals for strategic alliances and joint ventures; higher employee retention rates, capital givers or specifying sources beginning to look your way, and even politicians and legislators starting to view you as a key member of business, non-profit or association communities

But, like everything else, there’s no free lunch in PR either, and work looks like this. You need to find out who among your important outside audiences is behaving in ways that help or hinder achievement of your objectives. And then, list them according to how severely their behaviors affect your organization.

Of course it’s unlikely that you have facts and figures you need to pull this off because you aren’t real certain just how most members of that key outside audience perceive your organization.

There’s also a good chance you don’t have budget to accommodate expensive professional survey work. So you and your PR colleagues (they should be quite familiar with perception and behavior matters) must monitor those perceptions yourself.