If you think your teenager racks up a huge phone bill...One company spent $16,000 to hold its quarterly sales conference online using Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro.

Adobe raised its eyebrows (the service costs as much as 32 cents per person per minute), but the company was satisfied. Their expenses for flying attendees to one city and putting them up in a hotel for two days would have come to $40,000.

With the cost of gas and air travel skyrocketing, an increasing number of companies are cutting travel expenses by, well, not traveling so much, and instead hosting meetings online. Web conferences are time- and cost-efficient but aren’t without their drawbacks; the lack of face-to-face contact makes it tempting to multitask and isn’t exactly conducive to forging new business partnerships. The question isn’t whether to use these services; it’s when.

Get More Online

One thing’s for sure: More companies are avoiding business travel. Diane Clarkson, travel analyst for JupiterResearch, reported that in 2007, 37 percent of online business travelers reported they intended to travel less, and she expects this trend to continue. Also in 2007, 22 percent of road warriors (people who go on at least ten business trips a year) said their companies were instituting stricter guidelines for warranting a business trip.

When employees can’t travel to meet only one client, Web conferencing becomes the next best thing (or better, if they weren’t looking forward to traveling in the first place). Dan Russo, manager of online product group marketing at WebEx, said more than half of Cisco WebEx MeetMeNow’s clientele report that the biggest benefit of Web conferencing is the reduced cost and need for travel.  

Philips Healthcare regularly uses Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro to conduct one- to two-hour sessions on clinical and technical training of the company’s medical equipment. Philips can train its employees and customers and archive Web lessons to replay for newer audiences later. “Our employees are distributed over 60 countries, so we can do it efficiently for them,” said Douglas Dell, director of learning services for Philips Healthcare’s global customer services organization. “From a customer perspective, too, hospitals are not telling people they can go anywhere for training, so bringing training to them in an online fashion benefits them as well.” Other popular uses, in addition to training, include product demos and sales meetings.

Certain features are standard across various Web-conferencing services. Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro, Citrix GoToMeeting, WebEx MeetMeNow, EM2 Redmeeting, InterCall Web Meeting, and Global Conference Partners InstantConference all allow for screen sharing, public and private chatting, and webcam use. The host of a Web meeting will typically see a small dashboard displaying a list of attendees and any questions submitted. Participants, on the other hand, will see the host’s screen inside their Web browser.

Avoiding Tune-Outs

Many of these services’ features are designed to replace—or at least replicate—the liveliness that follows when people sit around a table together. Particularly during lengthy meetings, however, it’s all too tempting to check out mentally. While few people can get away with pecking away at their BlackBerrys during physical meetings, anyone can check their e-mail or finish a report without offending their online host. As time- and cost-efficient as Web meetings are, they also place more of a burden on hosts to make their presentations interactive.

That’s where polling comes in. This feature, common to all the major services, allows hosts to gauge engagement by asking questions to their Internet audience. Sometimes these polls are directly related to the content (e.g., “Is everyone in favor of this plan?”), but others ask listeners to weigh in on the presentation itself (“Does everyone follow me?”). Hosts can also pass control to other participants, who can then share their screens with everyone.

Philips Healthcare caps these sessions at 25 people to allow for shared interaction and uses polling to make sure everyone is absorbing the lessons. This also allows for making content adjustments in real time. “People might not want to raise their hands,” Dell said. “You can get an instant read on how people are feeling about the course. We’ve been able to fine-tune a live course by using the polling features.”

How Much Will You Save?

Organizing a Web conference is, in some ways, like planning a business trip; you’ll pay more if you wait until the last minute. All of the major services have a variety of cost matrices, including annual, monthly, and pay-per-minute plans. Of course, the larger a commitment your company makes up front, the smaller the flat fee and the larger the number of minutes and potential participants. Some companies use annual accounts to empower individual employees—say, members of a sales staff—with the ability to court new business online. Some solutions, including Adobe’s, let companies buy licenses of the program and run it behind their own firewall. The software company SAP, for instance, has globally licensed Connect Pro for video conferencing and virtual meetings.

Because of the potentially mounting costs, then, Web meetings are best for shorter appointments with fewer attendees. Note that many of the low- to midrange pricing plans offered by Web-conferencing services allow for only 5 participants at a time.

When Travel is Still Worth the Cost?

The consensus among travel analysts, customers, and the Web-conferencing providers themselves is that online conferences are best for time-limited, routine meetings, in which the content is neither urgent nor sensitive.

Dell said he’s most likely to book in-person meetings when he can string together several meetings, when a client needs an installation, or when he expects to talk at length about a sensitive issue. JupiterResearch’s Clarkson added that initial meetings, and issues having to do with relationship management or requiring trust, are still best conducted in person.

“My philosophy is when you can meet in person, it’s superior,” said Michael Crandell, CEO of software company RightScale, which uses Citrix GoToMeeting for online product demonstrations and sales conferences with customers and employees in places as far-flung as Russia, Sweden, and India. “The problem is, with the sheer volume of meetings we have and the cost involved, we couldn’t possibly go to them all. When you’re in person you can judge someone’s facial expression and there’s the ability to bond if it’s a bigger relationship or a longer-term relationship.”

Clarkson noted that some companies bridge the gap between in-person and online conferences by having “blended” meetings, in which some participants gather in person and others—perhaps junior members of the team whose travel expenses a company can’t justify paying—connect to the rest of the group through a Web-conferencing service. The result is a democratization of meetings.

“It’s much more inclusionary to do teleconferencing,” Clarkson argued. “It’s changing the composition of who’s participating.”