The Best Online Meeting Software for Marketing Agencies - #AgencyToolbox

Welcome back to episode number six of Agency Toolbox. I'm your host, Gray MacKenzie. Today we're going to be talking about something that I wind up talking with agencies about a good amount, which is what is the best online meeting or conference call software platform for marketing agencies. So I can give you guys a little bit of the backstory on what we used at Guava Box and what we've wound up settling on, which is Uber Conference. Before that, I think way back in the early days, we started using Google Hangouts, we were using Skype, a couple other services. I can't even remember what all the different services I know we used. Join me for a little while and eventually we settled on using GoToWebinar. That was just kind of the tool that most people were accustomed to. But there are a number of just kind of clunkiness Factors associated with GoToWebinar in the Citrix products that we struggled with. And so we wound up settling on Uber Conference. So I'm going to take you guys inside of a call that's going on right now, and then we're going to kind of walk backwards through the software from there. Let's dive in. So I'm live on a call right now with Ben from the Do Inbound team. I have us both muted right now, but this is the interface. So as you can see, this is a web app. I've got my custom URL here, uberconference.com askaraymackenzie and you'll notice right away you can call in with your phone or you can join using your computer's audio, which is, I think every tool out there has those capabilities. But there are a couple of unique things about this tool that I'm going to share with you, features wise, in a second. But before we do that, I just want to kind of show you how this works. So basically, you can use your LinkedIn profile to automatically pull in when you join a call. You're requested to enter in your name and email. And you can also sign in either with an Uber Conference account or it'll pull in maybe your LinkedIn information. And so that's where your pictures will come from if you don't have an account. Now, if you don't sign up with LinkedIn, you don't have a picture. It's going to show you a map of where the person is located in the world. So it'll be zoomed out a little bit. So for me, this would show you Hermitage, Pennsylvania, which is where I'm recording this from right now. And you'd probably be able to see, I don't know, 30 miles, like a 30 mile radius around where I am. So it's not pinpoint. Here's exactly where the person's located, but you gives you some idea of where people are calling in from. So right now I have both of us muted. If I were to unmute myself. So here you can see, I can see the social info that it's pulled in about me and I've entered in some of that information because of my Uber Conference account. I can also mute myself or I can hang up and same thing with Ben, so I can see what does Ben have going on from his profiles. I can unmute him. If I unmute him. There you go, there's Ben. And you can see that he's speaking right now. And I am not recording my computer's audio, but I just heard a whole lot of what Ben's got going on right now through my headphones. So unmute myself. And now Ben can hear me speak. And obviously there's the indicator for who's speaking at any given point. You get the call duration, you've got the ability to add new participants. You, you can record the call. And this is just with a free Uber conference account right now, everything that I'm showing you, I am still on a free Uber conference account. I can mute everybody. I can also lock the room. So if I lock the room right now, I'm now preventing anyone else because this is always the same URL. Unlike a GoToWebinar solution, anybody else could conceivably jump in and join if they wanted to at some point. So I would see them coming in, I would have the opportunity to, to boot them out. But locking the room will prevent anyone else from joining in. So now Ben and I are the only two people who can be in this room. Obviously, the opportunity to hang up on the call, I can rename what this call is and it's going to send a call summary after the call that will pull in that name. So I will have that set up. If I'd scheduled this ahead of time, that would also pull in that name. Now what you might notice is unlike Google Hangouts, unlike Skype, unlike GoToWebinar and a number of the other solutions out there, there's no way to share video with Uber Conference. So it's got a great screen sharing mechanism where I can share my screen. I can share just a specific window. If I just want to share my Chrome browser that I have going on right now, this specific Chrome profile Or I can share a file and the screen sharing works really well. But there is no video chat back and forth. So for video chat we still stick with. Well, we use, we use a couple different tools. Occasionally we use Skype, but we use appear.in for the most part, which is just appear.in that's a free tool as well, but it doesn't have the recording capabilities and the ability to send out agendas and send over scheduling information ahead of time. All that kind of stuff that Uber Conferences so I want to show you guys what a live call looks like. Now I'm going to hang up, I'm going to end this call and and walk you through a couple of the other features inside UberConference, why we're using it, and then any questions that you have, I am happy to hear those as well. So end the conference, get a quick call summary. You can see what was going on. Now in a couple minutes I'm going to get an email with a call summary and that call summary is going to include information on how long, how many minutes each person was speaking for. So that one will have me speaking for the vast majority of it. So here is if I just go to uberconference.com escrowemckenzie and I'm logged in, here's what I'll see. I can either start a conference right away or I can schedule one. And if I schedule a conference, there's a really easy picker here. Test conference call happening tomorrow. I will pick a time 10:45am a duration recurring or non recurring. Now for this feature you do need to be upgraded to Pro Confirm the time zone that I'm in. It already identifies what time zone I'm in, but I may need to change that if I'm going to be somewhere else or I'm scheduling it for somebody else's time zone here I can just pull in. Who do I want to invite? One of the cool things about this that GoToWebinar doesn't have. So one of the major attractive features about Uber Conference is the ease of joining this. You don't need to go through a download and install something. You don't need to have an account already set up like a Skype or Google Hangouts. You can call in on your phone or you can log in on the computer. Just enter in your name and email and you're good to go. But to make it even easier, Uber Conference and there are other alternatives that do this as well can dial out to participants. Again, that's a pro feature, but they'll call your meeting participants at the specific time. So I'm going to complete this. It has sent the invites for me and we're ready to go now. I can copy the information for folks to go ahead and I can chat that over to people or send it via email, but we're good to go there. So now that call is scheduled and ready to go. All right, let's jump out of the actual Uber Conference window here and I'm gonna take you over the pricing info. So right now on the free plan, I can have unlimited conferences, up to 10 callers. Awesome audio. I can record the call. It is gonna make a little notation that says this call is being recorded. So everyone's gonna hear that as they join. I can lock the calls, I can use the apps that they have and it pulls in their profiles. The other thing is if I'm waiting on there, you can, you can set up. There's a lot of customization as far as what's gonna be the hold music, all that kind of stuff. Pro is $10 a month per user and nobody has to deal with pins. You have more callers, you get to pick a custom conference number. The dial out that I mentioned and those are really the big features that at some point we will be upgrading this tool. I personally just don't use it enough. I don't have enough day to day calls going on through Uber Conference to where I've upgraded. But at some point I would imagine that we'll be moving in that direction. Let me give you a couple cons of Uber Conference. I've already hit on the biggest one, which is video. The other thing is that there is no webinar solution here. So this is obviously you could come up with a way to do a webinar mute everybody screen share with up to 100 callers. And that could kind of work around it. But unlike the Citrix platform, you don't have GoToWebinar on the back end of GoToMeeting. So that's, that's the other thing that kind of discouraged us from making the switch until later. But it's really clean, it's really easy for your users to jump in and use. The audio quality has been awesome. Obviously it's a free platform. There's no affiliate bonus or anything else for me to promote this platform. But just want to share with you what our experience has been using Uber Conference. If you have any questions about getting it set up for yourself or what our experience has been, or if you found another platform that you like better let me know at some point in the future. I'm going to hit on how we run webinars right now and how we have things set up for that, but for now, I just wanted to talk about conference calls, since this is a topic that comes up an awful lot. All right, well, that is enough blabbing on my part. I appreciate your time today here in episode number six of Agency Toolbox. You can always contact me grayoinbound.com if you have any questions or comments, and we will see you next time in episode seven of Agency Toolbox.