Sure, Money talks™ - But what exactly is Premium Phone Conferencing?

As we all know, regular phone conferencing is nothing new. It has been around for years, and there are many companies pushing even more brands in the hope of capturing a slice of this particularly lucrative pie. Applications might include a company that deploys it in order to hold a sales briefing with their remote workforce.

In the UK, such services are typically offered ‘for free', in return retention of a proportion of the accrued revenues generated by participants calling in to conference.

Premium conferencing, as the name suggests, simply takes that concept one stage further. Participants do not call a 0845 ‘sharecall' number to take part - rather, they call in on a premium rate number instead.

The conference is hosted by anyone that adds value to the call in order to justify the premium rate element: this could be a celebrity, a sports personality, astrologer, lawyer, or expert in any given field. That person then receives the majority of the accrued revenue - not least since they initiated the calls in the first place.

Such technology can also be used to hold fundraisers: celebrities, for example, could agree to donate a proportion of the funds generated to their favourite charity. Good PR for both the celeb and, for a change, premium rate - and useful money for a worthy cause in the process.

The success of such phone ‘events' depends on the combination of the perceived value of the cost of the call to the caller together with how the event is marketed.

If such conferencing is to be used in a ‘one-to-many' format, having a hundred or so callers simultaneously call in means that the ‘open' conference is out of the question - just one participant with a screaming child in the background would end up ruining the entire event for everyone.

To this end, upon calling, participants are asked if they would like to join the queue for a chance to speak to the host, who can monitor all activity on their conference in realtime via their internet-enabled PC. He or she then talks 1:1 with the first caller, with all others listening in, including those that elected not to be placed in the queue - so audience participation is an option, not a prerequisite.

Alternatively, such technology can be deployed to facilitate ad-hoc ‘one-to-one' revenue generating value-added phone calls, such as legal advice: the lawyer need not invoice the caller: rather, the caller pays for their counsel on a per-minute basis instead.

Furthermore, since premium rate billing already features in most developed countries, money can be made on a global scale, and not just a national one. Such numbers can be promoted in conjunction with the world's first truly global medium, the internet, allowing conference hosts to make money from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.

In those countries that do not offer premium rate billing, the participant makes a regular International Direct Dial phone call, with the revenues being split with the ‘terminating' telecommunications carrier in the country to where the calls are sent, and the conference service provider. This is globalization at its finest.

It allows conference hosts to make money per minute on each incoming call, irrespective of the country in which the caller is located and whether they are actually talking to them or not. Since this is User Generated Content, the success or otherwise of any given event depends largely on the host and their personality: since the conference happens in real-time, they must have the kind of ego and constitution to be able to ‘click away' any disruptive callers, who at least paid for the privilege.

In summary, premium conferencing effectively allows anyone with something of value to say to instantly operate their own live premium rate service, and is an outstanding example of the ongoing convergence of existing telephony and internet technologies.

Marc has been a consultant in the pay-per-call industry since 1994 and was first-to-market with cellphone ringtones in 2000. http://www.chatterwith.me - Money talks™