There is no greater sign that a brand or product has become an indispensable part of culture than when their proper noun name turns into a verb. Don’t believe it? Go ahead and “Google” it … or do an internet search, which is what “to Google” has become synonymous for.

Joining Google, Uber, PhotoShop and other nouns that have slipped into everyday speech as verbs is Zoom, the cloud-based video conferencing application that not only facilitates virtual meetings, calls and chats.

“Most products start and end life as nouns. Only a select few are successful enough to become synonyms for the category they represent, and fewer still that become verbs. Once this happens, they occupy a privileged and hard-to-replace position as the default choice in the minds of most users,” writes Philip Lay in his article “Zoom – the latest product to become a verb”.

We are Living in a Zoom World

Of course, unless you just returned from deep space exploration you already knew that the past year has been all about “Zooming” during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Zoom, which went public just a year before the coronavirus crisis, became a household word almost overnight as people across the country needed a way to connect remotely for work, school and contact with loved ones.

CEOs in palatial mansions down to interns in dodgy one-room rentals logged into Zoom conference calls, and students, from K to grad school, sat through Zoom classes, while the holidays were spent with family Zoom celebrations with the bonus of muting that one uncle that wants to talk politics.

Wall Street to Main Street Discover Zoom

Businesses from Wall Street to Main Street discovered the joys of Zoom in 2020 with the easy-to-use app available across PCs, smartphones, and other devices.

Some businesses, especially smaller businesses that were forced for the first time into remote work, needed to embrace video conferencing quickly to survive. Being camera shy is still an option with Zoom’s audio-only function.

“Not everyone was crazy about using video conferencing before. Lots of people tried to hide behind the camera,” said Tom Szauer, chief technology officer for independent PR and consulting agency RF Binder. “When we switched to Zoom, part of it was a culture change and giving people the choice between an audio conference and a video conference — you can decide on the fly. Zoom created a seamless experience, switching from a call into a video.”

Szauer’s company was not the only business switching to Zoom with the company announcing in March financial results for the fiscal year that ended January 31, 2021:

• Fourth quarter 2020 total revenue was $882.5 million, up 369 percent year-over-year.
• Total revenue for 2020 was $2.65 billion, up 326 percent year-over year.
  
  

“The fourth quarter marked a strong finish to an unprecedented year for Zoom,” wrote Zoom founder and CEO Eric S. Yuan. “We significantly scaled our business to provide critical communications and collaboration services to our customers and the global community in response to the pandemic.”

Zoom Still Zooming in 2021

While the COVID-19 vaccinations are rolling out across the country and companies and employees begin a partial transition back to the office, Zoom appears engrained in daily life.

In the month of January 2021, according to Statista, Zoom was one of the leading non-game iPhone app downloads worldwide, trailing only Google, Facebook, Microsoft, WhatsApp, Instagram and Amazon.

All told, Zoom says it now has 467,100 customers with more than 10 employees, up about 470 percent from pre-pandemic levels.

Small Businesses Benefit from Zoom

It is not just large corporations that can leverage Zoom’s, but small businesses have been able to use the innovative video communications platform to build, run and grow their businesses.

Small businesses especially appreciate that Zoom offers a full-featured Basic Plan for free with unlimited meetings.

“Like many other business users, I’ve been using the free option for over two years with a consistently positive experience,” writes Lay. “Combining the smooth user experience on any device with well-thought out freemium pricing has helped Zoom to leverage its network effects to gain exponentially more users.

Here are five benefits of Zoom for small businesses:

Contact ATSI Business Communications Systems today so we can identify and install the right equipment to make your next Zoom Happy Hour a success.