Website Spotlight: Zeetings

Zeetings is a new tool to interact with your audience and track their engagement. Despite the fact that we’ve got completely new capabilities in our hands in terms of technology, presentations haven’t really changed. We’re stuck with this one-way paradigm, where someone stands in front of a room and talks at a group of people.

Here a “zeeting” to show off the zeetings approach. Zeetings can be conducted remotely or in-person. Beta users included Deloitte, eBay and HP. Here's a sample zeeting created around a discussion with Irene Au from Khosla Ventures. It isn’t meant to replace presentation tools like PowerPoint. Instead, it adds the interactivity to existing presentation formats; many users still build their presentations in PowerPoint, then upload and share them on Zeetings.

To start things off, you can run through the usual set of slides outlining the vision, but then mix things up by asking your audience to participate in polls, and by starting group and one-on-one chats. There is also a section where you could take your own notes. Then, at the end a the presentation, you can ask to give the zeeting a rating between one and five stars.

You can use Zeetings “in the superficial way,” but the early beta customers have found more meaningful uses, like polling attendees at the beginning and end of a presentation to see if their minds have been changed, or using anonymous polling to get more honest answers around sensitive issues like mental health. Interactivity is important because you’re usually fighting for an audience’s attention. Plus, by tracking engagement (the metrics include copies requested, meetings requested, votes cast and the aforementioned star rating), presenters can create a “virtuous cycle,” where the data gives them a better sense of how to engage their audience, allowing them to improve their presentations, which in turn helps them collect more data.

Try Zeetings out for free to see what an impact it has on your next meeting!