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Blue Jeans Network Reveals the State of the Modern Meeting Is Face-to-Face, No Travel Required(Marketwire Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 12/17/13 -- Blue Jeans Network today introduced its second semi-annual State of the Modern Meeting Report, which benchmarks trends in collaboration and demonstrates how technology is reshaping meetings throughout the world. The vast majority of people (94 percent) feel face-to-face communications improve business relationships.* The use of cloud-based video conferencing has grown explosively, with usage of the Blue Jeans service up nearly 400 percent in the last year. Women continue to lead the modern meeting charge, and Q1 2014 is poised to be the busiest meeting season of the year. The way we work has changed as technology makes it easier to connect and collaborate with colleagues, partners and customers on a global scale. Blue Jeans, a video-centric collaboration service in the cloud, makes meetings mobile, productive, and cost-efficient by allowing people to meet face-to-face from anywhere. From sales pitches and interviews to customer support, board meetings and training sessions, video-centric collaboration is powering our most critical business communications. The majority of us spend half our days in meetings, so it's time to make them matter. The State of the Modern Meeting Snapshot: No Face Time, No Deal: Nearly three quarters (71 percent) of people believe they lost a deal due to the lack of face-to-face interaction and six percent have admitted to falling asleep during an audio-only meeting.*Conferencing Is Converging: Meeting owners are tiring of having to decide in advance whether a meeting will be an audio conference, video conference, or web conference, and are instead choosing converged conferencing solutions like Blue Jeans that integrate all of the above. Thirty nine percent of video-centric meetings also have at least one audio-only participant, up from 35 percent in June. Thirty percent of video-centric meetings include screen/content sharing for presentations, documents, or video-clips, up from 26 percent in June.Meeting the Holiday Hangover: While there is a 60 percent reduction in meetings the day before a holiday, the meeting bill comes due with a 118 percent increase in meetings the day after a holiday. Q1 2014 is poised to be the busiest meeting season of the year with the post-holiday spike and 25 percent more meetings taking place in February than any other time of the year.Women CAN Have It All... All the Meetings: Women lead the meeting charge, attending 14 percent more meetings than men (up from 11 percent) and are 12 percent more likely than men to attend meetings on weekends.Running Late? Not in the Midwest: While most of us (55 percent) join meetings late, meetings in the Midwest are more likely to start on time than meetings on the East or West Coasts. CEOs, CTOs and founders are most often late to meetings. Additional findings in the report include: Skipping Skype in Preference for a Web Browser. Desktop and laptop business users are increasingly skipping proprietary solutions like Skype for the ease and ubiquity of the web browser thanks to technology advancements like WebRTC. Today, 90 percent of Blue Jeans desktop/laptop participants use a browser. No Travel? No Trouble. Budget cuts or winter storms may hinder travel, but businesses still conduct meetings. In 2013, winter storms resulted in 20 percent more meetings than a typical day. The total distance of travel saved in 2013 by Blue Jeans is the equivalent to 558 million laps past every storefront in the Mall of America or 900 million Macy's parades. Meeting Role Call: What Your Title Says About Your Meeting Style Forty-one percent of meetings begin on time, but CEOs, CTOs and founders continue to arrive late to meetings most often. CTOs, founders, product managers and salespeople average the most meetings per week, but executive assistants, administrative assistants and those in the legal department average the longest meetings. Classic Video-centric Use Cases While video is great for any meeting where the participants are unable to get to the same location, the five most common business use cases for video-centric collaboration include: (1) Team meetings, especially for geographically distributed organizations. (2) Sales and Marketing -- for both customer presentations and internal reviews. (3) HR for both recruiting and training. (4) Executive meetings and board meetings. (5) International meetings with partners, vendors and employees to reduce travel time and expense. Mobile Matters in Meetings One-third of all meetings include one or more attendees participating from a mobile device. Where are they coming from? The most popular city for mobile users is New York, followed closely by San Francisco, and then Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston. Mobile traffic spikes in the evening and morning, with three times more participants joining at 6 p.m. versus 5 p.m. on their mobile devices and two times as many at 7 a.m. versus 8 a.m. Timing Is Everything The average business meeting lasts 45 minutes and has almost five participants. Nearly one-half of meetings take place between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. and most workdays conclude by 10 p.m.Forty-one percent of meetings take place on Tuesday and Wednesday, which are the most popular meeting days of the week.Weekend meetings have declined by more than a third in the past six months, from one in 10 to one in 15 meetings occurring on the weekend. Professionals are taking back the lunch hour with a 20 percent decline in meetings from noon to 1 p.m. "There has been a monumental shift in the way meetings are being conducted. If an in-person meeting is not an option, more than half of business professionals prefer a video meeting over an audio-only meeting," said Stu Aaron, chief commercial officer at Blue Jeans Network. "This new way to collaborate means that bad weather, budget cuts, holidays and a geographically scattered team are no longer threats to business productivity as you can easily conduct face-to-face meetings with nearly any browser-based device -- from any location." State of the Modern Meeting Methodology The report is based on more than one million participants who used Blue Jeans Network for meetings from 177 countries across all seven continents. *National survey of 391 business decision makers conducted on behalf of Blue Jeans Network by Instant.ly in November of 2013. For more information about Blue Jeans Network and the State of the Modern Meeting, including an infographic on the data, visit http://bluejeans.com/modern-meetings. About Blue Jeans NetworkAt Blue Jeans Network, our mission is to make video communications as easy and pervasive as audio communications, enabling more effective collaboration at work, at home, and on the road. Our cloud-based conferencing service makes this possible by enabling customers to connect with each other seamlessly anytime, anywhere, and from practically any device. The Blue Jeans Network extends high quality video communications beyond the traditional boundaries of specialized conference rooms and into the mainstream, allowing individuals and employees throughout an enterprise to interact more effectively with each other, and with their customers, partners, suppliers, family, and friends. Blue Jeans Network is a private company headquartered in Mountain View, California. For more information go to: http://bluejeans.com or follow the company @BlueJeansNet Media Contact Morgan Mathis Highwire for Blue Jeans Network 415-963-4174 x37 [email protected] Source: Blue Jeans Network |