A few weekends ago, I wanted to order some sandwiches for deliver to my house. I assumed that since there were two locations of a chain within a reasonable drive to my location, that surely they could keep their “freakishly fast” promise. After being denied at both locations, I decided to look and see exactly how far they were from my house.

The two sandwiches places were mapped out to be five miles away and searching around the sandwich site, I didn't see anything that restricted delivery mileage and it seemed it should have that information.

Your website is the portal to your business and what you offer to customers. So does your website deliver the truth to customers?

Are there old promotions hanging out on different pages? Take an hour and go through your landing pages to make sure that you are still honoring the offers on the site. Trust me, if there’s a deal available online, a customer is going to find it and ask for it. If you find anything that’s old or out of date you should change it or update it.

Are the terms and conditions clear? If a promotion requires new customers to send you a picture of them talking into a banana like a telephone, then make sure you put that on the website. If a customer understands the things that have to be done to have a special deal they can make their own decisions, then it builds transparency between you and the customer.

Most customers can understand why or why not a company can do something as long as they don’t try to hide the reasons and requirements behind it. How do you make your websites and promotions transparent for customers?

Inflection is a fancy way to describe your tone of voice when speaking. It’s not just the volume level that you may speak at but also the tone, pace, pitch, and cadence at which the words of a presentation come out of your mouth.

In order to host a successful presentation on a conference call, you usually only have one tool – and it’s the way you speak. Your voice will get participants to tune in, listen carefully, and stay engaged throughout the call.

If you’re finding that participants are less than engaged or everyone seems to be waking up from a long nap when it’s time for Q&A, maybe it’s time to evaluate the way you speak to make some improvements on your voice inflection.

Where’s the emphasis? Listen to a recording and determine where you are putting the emphasis on your words. Are you putting the emphasis on the end of all your sentences? If you are – it’s not a good thing, as it triggers your audience to think that the statement is a question. The proper emphasis can direct people to focus on strength, confidence, and clue into important parts of the conversation.

Do you speak softly? While volume isn't the most important thing about voice inflection, it is an important aspect of making a great presentation. There are a lot of distractions around the participants and the last thing that you want to do it make them have to work to pay attention to you. Your voice should command the attention of those listening – even the ones who are completely focused on Facebook.

Are you speaking too fast? If you’re blowing through the words like you’re that guy from those 1980s Matchbox car commercials (Google it), you’re talking too fast. When it comes to making a presentation, people don’t want to have to work to listen to you – they want their experience to be easy and enjoyable. If they are struggling to keep up with you they are probably just going to tune you out. You want a natural cadence that best reflects a conversational tone.

Improving voice inflection is not something that can be done overnight. If you think you need to work on your speech patterns you’ll want to start as soon as possible by recording your next conference call and evaluating your speech.

How have you improved your voice inflection? What are your tips for improving tone, cadence, and the overall quality of a speech?

It’s true that delivering a powerful, moving, and emotional speech can sometimes be a make it or break it point. Imagine a coach trying to motivate his team, the boss trying to encourage employees, or a teacher trying to push their students to make it through the end of the year. Emotional speech can be a powerful tool to motivate and encourage those around you – but what happens when the line is crossed and you are suddenly speaking offensively and with a lot of anger in your voice?

I’ll tell you what happens – people check out of the conversation. You immediately become “the crazy person” who can’t control their emotions or can’t listen to a differing opinion without raising your voice and shaking your fist around. Perhaps to you, what you are feeling is just passion for your opinion, but there is a fine line between “speaking passionately” and “letting emotions drive the conversation”. There are a limited number of times when you really want to let emotions drive you in a speech and most of the times, it’s best to buckle them up into the back seat and let reason and logic rule the way.

How we identify these emotional situations and how we are reacting to them are important testaments to our character. When should we leave emotion at the door and take a “just-the-facts-ma’am” approach?

In Debate or Arguments

Engaging in a civil debate with another person means that you are agreeing to keep emotions out of it. I’m not talking about the kind of emotional response that is going to make you be passionate about your beliefs; I’m talking about the emotional response that will be triggered in a response to your opponent that includes a lot of f-bombs or punches being thrown. Those kinds of emotional responses have no place in debates and arguments.

At the Workplace

It’s best in meetings to present information in a calm and succinct way. If you have the facts to back up your position, then be ready to go with numbers and cold hard information to defend your position. It’s not always that easy, I know, but the honest truth is that the more you let yourself get angry, or upset, the more you’re just going to get worked up and getting worked up doesn't leave people with the idea that you know what you’re talking about.

When you feel your emotions rising to the boiling point, take a deep breath and count to ten before you respond, or you can ask to be excused or resume once you’ve had a moment to get your thoughts together.

While passion drives our ambitions, I think that once our emotions get out of hand, it’s time to reel a few things into perspective. Are you the person that people avoid at meetings? Is your line always forcibly muted on conference calls? Maybe you should consider a little less emotion the next time you open your mouth to speak.

What do you think? Is there a difference between passion and emotion? Do you think the louder a voice rises, the more someone is right or wrong? When do emotions get in the way of your message?

As many of you know, our offices are located in beautiful Fort Worth, Texas and many of the employees and owners of this company have grown up in the area. We are proud members of the community and like to get involved with local events to support local charities and organizations.

A few months ago we told you about Circle of Friends, which works with Cook Children’s Hospital to provide aid to families with a cancer diagnosis. Now we’d like to bring your attention to another great local Fort Worth charity and an upcoming event.

AccuConference is pleased to be a sponsor for the Parenting Center’s 13th Annual Tee it Up Fore Kids Golf Tournament. The Golf Tournament will be held at the Shady Oaks Country Club near downtown on November 5, 2012.

As all the locals know, the fall months here in Texas are some of the most beautiful and the greens are always filled with the amateur golfer. Why not take your love for the outdoors and the game of golf and do something to help a great charity like the Parenting Center?

The Parenting Center offers skills training classes and parenting education all with the hopes of preventing child abuse and neglect. What makes the Parenting Center so unique is that the classes are designed to help parents with any kind of neglect. What if the parent can’t get a toddler to stop throwing temper tantrums and time out just isn’t working in your house? Skills classes teach some different approaches from how to care to newborn and how divorced parents can learn how to co-parent in a healthy environment.

Contact the Parenting Center at 817-332-6489 for more information on teeing off for a great local cause!

Transcription services may be at an extra cost but there are unique benefits to using them that you might not think about. Usually, we think about transcriptions we think about them for medical purposes or legal documentations of conversations and while these are great uses of a transcription there are many more reasons that adding this service to your conferencing routine can benefit your business in a number of ways.

Here’s a couple of other ways that AccuConference customers are making transcriptions a part of their usual conference calls routine.

1. Any conversation that is “on the record” should be transcribed so that there is no deviation from what was said. Recording your conference calls is one way to get extra posterity for conversations, but a transcription can be sent out to those who want to keep written documentation.
2. For videos not only are you making the content within in the video able to be crawled by search engines, you’re also providing an easy way to mark sections for editing. If you’re reviewing a video and need to send a few more notes over to the editor, you can transcribe the text with a timestamp feature and highlight the times that require additional review. This makes it easier for the editor to go into your video and make quick changes. The process speeds up when the editor doesn’t have to go searching for phrases and gestures to remove.
3. Under Regulation Fair Disclosure mandated by the SEC in 2000, requires that any information released to investors or analysis must be made public. The purpose of the regulation was to even the playing field between all kinds of stock holders and prevent the large investment companies from getting a “heads up” on information that could affect stock prices. Regulation FD requires broad dissemination to the public of stock information and is usually done by conference call playback or by a transcription.
4. News stories are optimized for mobile devices when you include the transcription of the video together. I check my news applications constantly and I am more likely to “read” a story than to stop and watch the accompanying video on my phone. It will also make your news stories accessible to people who do not have the latest smartphone technology or have access to cool tablet computers.
5. Did I mention that the content of your conference call suddenly becomes searchable? Imagine that you get an opportunity to host an incredible interview with someone and you upload it to your website and hope that people are able to find it. If you can post the text on your website somewhere your interview content can be returned as a result in Google search.

What useful things can you think of for having conversations transcribed?

Every year we provide voluntary flu shots for the company. We feel like if we can keep one person from getting the flu, then it was a success.

There are those who disagree with the value of flu shots. I've met people who swear they have actually gotten the flu after receiving a flu shot. In addition, there is a Dr. Robert Rowen who states that:

1. flu shots contain mercury
2. 97.3% of adults don't even need flu shots because research shows only about 2.7% of adults get the flu (is this per year?)

Ok, so now I'm curious and I have decided to do some research on my own (especially since the doctor who quotes the research provides no links to said studies).

As a general practitioner and the owner of a hospice company in Fort Worth my brother, Dr. Brian Byrd, deals with the elderly and sick a lot.

So, what is his take on flu shots?

"It probably won't help you individually, since you most likely won't get the flu. The example I use is this: If 3,000 people in a community are vaccinated vs. 3,000 who aren't, at the end of the flu season, there are a lot more flu cases, hospitalizations and deaths in the non-vaccinated group."

Ok, so I take the flu shot for the communal effect, not personal effect. I'm ok with that. But others aren't.

Can you get the flu from a flu vaccine?

"About 5% of people who get the flu shot feel crummy after. The vaccine uses a killed virus, so it's impossible to get the flu from the vaccine. It is a foreign substance, so it might make you feel like you are sick."

What are his thoughts on the 97.3% study?

97.3% is a mild season.

Other thoughts?

"Vaccinations have eliminated polio and smallpox. If we had stopped vaccinations back then, we would still be living with the threat of those as well as flu. It's a process. I just treated a one year old who had a bad case of whooping cough. His parents would not vaccinate him. Now, he will probably have a lifetime of asthma as a result."

Thank you Dr. Byrd.

Here are some other things I found:

Some (not all) flu shots contain thimerosal. Thimerosal is a preservative containing ethyl mercury. So far I have not been able to find anything concrete regarding the toxicity or safety of using thimerosal as a preservative in flu vaccines since 1999. Most of the articles I found related to multiple vaccines in infants can be dangerous because the amount of ethyl mercury can accumulate in children who have difficulty metabolizing the ethyl mercury. I have yet to find any studies/articles pertaining to ethyl mercury and danger to adults.

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/09/26/flu-vaccine-exposed.aspx

The CDC states that "on average 5% to 20% of the population gets the flu and more than 200,000 people are hospitalized from seasonal flu-related conditions." These numbers contradict Robert Rowan's numbers of 2.7%. I guess he is going off a mild season.

http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/disease.htm

This is from the American Lung Association:

"The flu shot. The viruses in the flu shot are inactivated, which means that someone receiving the vaccine cannot get influenza from the flu shot. The exposure to the inactivated influenza virus helps our bodies develop protection by producing antibodies. The amount of antibodies in the body is greatest one to two months after vaccination and then gradually decline. After receiving the flu shot it usually takes about two weeks for the body to develop immunity to influenza."

http://www.lung.org/lung-disease/influenza/preventing-influenza.html

So, will we still be giving out voluntary flu shots this year? Absolutely. Do you have to receive one as an employee here? Absolutely not. You are a free American and can chose. Thank you to the men and women who have died to give us that freedom.

Do you get a flu shot each year? Do you believe in vaccinations for adults? What about for children?

As I’m sure everyone has realized that I like a good sporting event. While baseball is my sport of choice I like any event where I feel like I can get emotionally invested in something happening on the field or court. Last week, I watched some of the Giants / Cowboys NFL opening game because it seemed like it would be a good one. This week, ESPN released its Ultimate Team Standings for 2012, which polls “fans” on their approval or disapproval of professional sports franchises.

The teams that ranked in the top 10 were not at all surprising, ranging from the NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder to the MLB’s Arizona Diamondbacks. (Sidenote: Congrats to my Texas Rangers for ranking #9!) In determining top ranked franchise teams there are a number of factors that ESPN takes into consideration and since we’re all trying to get “fans” on various social networks and boost referral customers, I thought I would break down some of the factors and how you can apply them to your business.

Fan Relations.

Are you providing excellent customer service to your fans? How accessible are you day and night for your customers to get the help that they need? Do you respond to Facebook comments or even negative remarks about your company? It’s important to meet your customers’ needs and be ready to respond if they need something.

Bang for the Buck.

When it comes to a sporting event, fans expect that their experience should be worth the amount of money they have spent for all aspects of their time at a park. This is everything from ticket prices to food prices, and even parking. If a fan doesn’t feel like it was money well spent, they won’t rank that team to have a good reputation and they probably won’t visit again. This one is pretty simple – a business should make sure a customer is getting what they are paying for.

Players.

Are the franchise team players accessible? Is it easy to get an autograph or attend a warm up practice? Even the demeanor and attitude they have in television interviews can be a factor in determining a player’s effect on fan perception. Step back and take a look at your customer service representatives and make sure that they are going above and beyond for clients. Do they smile while they are on the phone? Are they patient and understand when trying to walk a customer through steps? These are factors that will make a mark on customers that will affect your team, and business, as a whole.

Those are just a few factors that can cause a positive or negative reception of your team and business. While the Toronto Maple Leafs (dead last) and the Sacramento Kings (next to dead last) haven’t quite figured out how to make their fans happy, your business has a unique opportunity to learn from the mistakes of those franchises and improve customer relations immediately.

After all, fans always reward their team in the end, one way or another.

For all the weather geeks out there, James Spann is a man that everyone turns to when it comes to all things related to Alabama weather.  Over a career that spans nearly 40 years, Spann has solidified himself as the model study for meteorologists. He’s an Emmy winner, the recipient of the Edward R. Murrow Award, and has been voted best meteorologist in the country numerous times by the Associated Press.

On top of all this, James Spann is a social media advocate. He is the most followed meteorologists on Twitter and Facebook and on the day of April 26, 2011 as tornadoes roared through Alabama, thousands of people were posting on his social media outlets to report damage and even ask for help. Even if you don’t know who James Spann is or you’re not a weather nerd like me, you’ll find the video below as interesting as I did.  At the Alabama Social Media Association conference earlier this year, James addressed the Alabama media about the use of social media in a weather situation.

• "If you put others first, that’s when life gets good." As a meteorologist, James often has to field questions from those who do not know much about weather, how storms form, or how they track. Rather than ignore the “stupid question” James answers them because that’s what he is there for. When a question is posed to him it’s because someone respects and needs his answer, so he answers.
• This is how the world communicates. We often wonder if automation is good or bad in social media and James has found that his determination is based on the expectations of his audience. In high stress situations where response is critical to life and person (like EF-4 tornadoes bearing down on metropolitan areas) automation doesn’t work. People can tell when a message is automated and the expectation on a network like Twitter is that the updates are "real-time". The opposite has proven true for Facebook as the network, at least in his business, is more about sharing the information than looking for up to date information.
• Let’s be honest. James Spann is, in fact, James Spann and people are going to follow him, they are going to send him information, and he will have questions to answer and a huge network of people that will help him do good. We don’t all have that and our experience on Twitter or Facebook might be different, but no matter what, these are basic foundations to any successful social media plan.

I’ve shared the video because I find it to be an interesting commentary on social media from someone who is, technically, “not in it to make money.” Social media is simply a tool for James and the rest of the ABC 33/40 staff to provide weather updates and, as you’ll see, much more. The length is 45 minutes but the information is great and James is such a great communicator that he’s very easy to listen to.

Tell me what you think – do you feel that social media is a good platform for a meteorologist to embrace to warn the public? Is it a good place for someone in marketing or business development? James certainly feels like his updates and social media activities saved lives on the day of a historic tornado outbreak. Do you think it’s possible for Twitter, Facebook, and other social channels to make that much of an impact, or are James’ situations the exception to the rule?

That super sweet image of James telling you to obey the polygon is credit to his Google + account

Can you believe it’s almost September? Where has this month gone? Here in Texas, we’re looking forward to getting rid of the heat and bringing in the best season ever - fall. As exciting as the fall season is, one thing that is also on the way is your beginning and end of the month responsibilities. It could be something as simple as updating spreadsheets or it’s time for your monthly conference calls again.

Consider a registration page for your weekly and monthly status meetings. Registration pages do a lot more than simply creating a link for signing up. If you’ve found that your weekly or monthly meetings have been a bit out of control from people not attending or unwanted participants, a registration page adds the security and tracking abilities for your mandatory meetings.

Check attendance for those calls that can’t be missed. When company policy changes, it often requires a company-wide sign off and understanding from the employees affected by the changes, and using a registration page is a great way to keep track of compliance. When someone registers for a call, the host will be able to keep track of registrants along the way and be able to go back and see who dialed into the conference, and who didn’t.

Send reminders to your participants. Human beings are naturally forgetful and when it comes to important can’t be missed meetings you can set up registration pages to automatically send participants reminders to attend these compliance calls. This way even if they forget to put a call reminder on their own calendar, our system will send them an email up to one hour before the start of the call to remind them to attend.

Manually approve or deny registrations. In our March newsletter, we talked to the author of the Modern Meeting Standard and one of the suggestions in the book is to make sure that you are only inviting the people who have to attend the meeting. If there is no need for the CEO / VP / Marketing Manager to be on the call, then they shouldn’t attend and with a manual process you can deny their participation. It will also help to make sure that only employees are able to attend your conference and keep press or competitors off conferences with sensitive information.

Conference code security options. When using a registration page to boost security and check attendance, our recommendation is that you set up the conferences codes to fall under what’s called “one code at a time” so that the conference codes cannot be handed out to others to use. The first person to call into the conference will be the one that can use the code. While it’s not a perfect system of being able to validate who the person is when they join, it will help the conference from having lots of unexpected guests dialing in on one conference code.

These are just some things that can be done to increase security and hold participants accountable when it comes to attending mandatory meetings.

Any type of noise on your conference call is a nuisance because it interrupts you and your customers trying to get business done. While conference call services do their best to try to design services that limit or remove static on your conference, there are some things that can cause conference feedback that you may not realize.

Check Your Equipment

Many times, feedback is caused by the phone or headset you might be using. Like a pair of headphones that are old and have lost connectivity in the wires, your phone cords and headset connections can do the same thing. If you hear feedback on your conference, start by listening to the conference on a handset and see if the feedback goes away. If it does, then you know that your headset should be replaced due to a short or some other problem in the equipment.

It Could Be Your Provider

Many of us don’t realize that the noise we hear on our phone line could be related to the company that provides your phone lines, like Qwest or AT&T. When your company is doing work on the phone lines or even having a technology issue miles away, those issues can affect the quality of your phone calls with or without being connected to a conference service.

While any phone service can have issues that may cause static on your line, we’ve found that one of the most common culprits of these issues is a VoIP service. We wrote a run down on some of the problems that you should consider when switching to VoIP and why it’s important to pick a VoIP provider that has a great reputation. If you’re using VoIP I would recommend that you go over and read that to ensure that you and your company have taken steps to choosing a VoIP provider with a lower instance of these occurrences.

Moderator Controls

If static is causing a problem in your conference call, use your live call screen feature to mute and unmute individual lines to see if the problem can be isolated. Don’t forget to test your own line just in case it’s your phone that is causing the noise. Once you identify the line you can keep it muted to prevent the noise from continuing to disrupt your conference call.

Bonus Tip:We recommend that if you will have more than five participants on a conference call that you go ahead and place the call into lecture mode to prevent static or background noises from interrupting your call.

Unwanted noises on a conference call are a nuisance and are incredibly frustrating when you’re trying to conduct business. If you’re in a situation where you can’t pause the conference to run through all of the troubleshooting steps, hop on chat with one of our operators (you can access it right from our website) and let us help you work through the problem.