Friday Focus: Utilising Free Video Conference Tools

In case you missed our first exciting edition of "Friday Focus" please find it below, and here is the link to the notes.


It would be impossible for us to cover everything, and there's other platforms out there for your business to try but here are some top tips which you can apply to all video conferencing tools:

1. Consider your internet speed. We sadly are not all blessed with fibre internet and video conferencing needs a lot of your bandwidth. So, consider, do you need to show your face or will just voice work? You could also look at plugging in your laptop direct with a LAN cable. Disconnect other  devices from the wifi, you don't need to be on your phone checking Facebook when business calls!
2. Have an agenda for the call. As we covered in our stream, some platforms give you a limited amount of time in their free versions. With an agenda there's no excuse to get cut off! With everyone at home, surrounded by their own distractions, it's very easy to go on a tangent so stay on message to ensure the most effective use of everyone's time.
3. Elect a chair for the call. We don't mean find somewhere comfy! As it's so easy to get distracted have someone who chairs the call, the same way they would chair an actual meeting. This helps you stay on message, it also is a good way to police the call and help everyone be heard.
4. Have patience and don't interrupt. One of the key struggles people have is waiting their turn to speak, we all struggle with it so don't feel bad, but just be mindful and let everyone have their turn. Using the tip of having a chair above, hopefully everyone will have their turn to speak and time for questions and queries we be made. Don't be afraid to ask to return to a point so you can get your point across.
5. Location. We appreciate that whilst on lockdown the choices for locations are limited! However do your best to be in a room by yourself and as quiet as possible. Having your dog interrupt the call doing something cute is only tolerable so many times! Think about the potential background noises and distractions around you and do your best to isolate them. The less distractions the easier the call will go and the faster you can go back to doing your work!

If you are interested in our next stream, it'll be on Friday 3rd April at 1pm and we will be covering using Trello to Keep Track of Team Tasks. You can view it on www.digitalucs.co.uk/live or head to our Facebook page  to view direct. Give us a like to be notified when we are going live. You can also find the schedule for the upcoming streams on our website. What are your top tips for video conferencing?

Twitter To Ban All Politicial Ads

Twitter, in a interesting move, have announced that they will be banning all political based adverts from the site. This is coming shortly after Facebook have come under fire for saying they would not block political ads despite the potential of ads declaring false information.

Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, tweeted “We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought.”. This will come into effect on the 22^nd November, globally banning ads of a political nature. This will mean Twitter will not feature ads for the UK snap Election.

We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. Why? A few reasons…🧵

— jack 🌍🌏🌎 (@jack) October 30, 2019

Dorsey went on to explain there reasons behind for it in a chain of tweets, saying that the organic spread of a political message should not be compromised by money. The current technological climate allows for misleading and even fake information to be spread and, although, Twitter already has rules and restrictions in place for their ads, they have perceived they still need to take stronger actions.

This comes shortly after Facebook came under criticism for allowing ads to be published without third party fact checking, allowing misleading and ungrounded political targeted ads to run. Mark Zuckerberg defended this by saying his company would prefer to "err on the side of greater expression" as without advertising on social media platforms it could aid to the favouring of certain politicians who are heavily covered in other forms of media. Facebook have already been criticised for allowing the Re-Elect Trump 2020 campaign to run a video with an unproven conspiracy theory surrounding Joe Biden and his son.

Dorsey evidently believes this stance isn’t enough, tweeting “For instance, it’s not credible for us to say “We’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad… well… they can say whatever they want!“. Complete with wink face, many believe this is a intentional dig at Facebook.

For instance, it‘s not credible for us to say: “We’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad…well...they can say whatever they want! 😉”

— jack 🌍🌏🌎 (@jack) October 30, 2019

This announcement seems to have had a widely positive reaction, including Hilary Clinton tweeting “This is the right thing to do for democracy in America and all over the world. What say you, Facebook?”. Following the announcement, #BanFacebookAds was trending on Twitter. Twitter seems to be attempting to pave the way for a fairer and equal battle for politics, BBC Political Editor Laura Kuenssburg stated “ lot of political content is produced in the hope it gets shared for free, rather than being ever paid for.”. However, some are viewing it as an attack on freedom of expression and unfair to censor politicians and the ads they chose to run. 

What do you think? Is Twitter correct in their attempt to make a level playing field or should Facebook stick with their current stance. With Twitter having a smaller number of active users, September reporting a 126 million users for Twitter versus 1.92 billion on Facebook, will it even make a difference? Which ever view you take, it will be interesting to see how this will change the representation of the UK snap Election who’s social media campaigns are just getting under way.