Hidden costs of virtual meetings

I just got off two conference calls with slideshow-style Webinars in two consecutive hours.

In the first one, the meeting started at least five minutes late while participants struggled to get the Webinar slideshows to appear on their screens.

In the second one, the same problem held the meeting up for a couple of minutes. Not so bad. But about halfway into the call, a participant put the conference on hold, meaning the rest of us heard "holding pattern" beeps every 10 seconds or so from that one person's phone line.

Virtual meeting technology, be it WebEx, Adobe Connect, LiveMeeting etc., serves a good purpose for companies with distributed operations, consultants and vendors pitching their wares, or cross-enterprise collaboration. I have two conference calls a week with my teammates in the Georgia WebMBA program (we're more than halfway done now, woo hoo!), and without those, we'd fly off the handle in a hurry.

We know the benefits of virtual meetings, especially the speed and low cost of putting groups together. But days like today leave me wondering how much time we waste fiddling with what should be commonplace technologies by now, and dealing with people who never learned good practices or etiquette for using them. Those are the hidden costs of virtual meetings, and I sense they're greater than most of us ever ponder.

What do you think? What's the over/under on virtual meetings in your shop?