How to Tell Stories through New Media

Check out experts Howard Greenstein and Dean Landsman speaking about this on YouTube. The video was made for the Uplift Academy’s Better World Network. However, it’s articulate and helpful for any organization that wants to understand how better to speak to markets, understand licensing, and breaking down barriers to new media broadcasts.

How to Have Meetings that Get Results

People spend so much time in meetings that turning meeting time into sustained results is a priority for successful organizations. Actions that make meetings successful require management before, during, and after the meeting.

If you neglect any one of these meeting management opportunities, your meetings will not bear the fruit you desire from the time you invest in meeting. Take these twelve meeting management actions to guide meeting attendees to achieve expected, positive, and constructive outcomes.

Actions before the meeting are critical in establishing the groundwork for accomplishing meetings that provide results. You can do all of the needed follow-up, but without an effective meeting plan to start, your results will disappoint you.

Plan the Meeting

Effective meetings that produce results, begin with meeting planning. First, identify whether other employees are needed to help you plan the meeting. Then, decide what you hope to accomplish by holding the meeting. Establish doable goals for your meeting. The goals you set will establish the framework for an effective meeting plan. As Stephen Covey says in the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, “Begin with the end in mind.” Your meeting purpose will determine the meeting focus, the meeting agenda, and the meeting participants.

Do You Need a Meeting

Once you’ve developed your meeting plan, ensure that a meeting is the appropriate vehicle for accomplishing the set goals. To schedule and hold a meeting is expensive when you account for the time of the people attending. So, make efforts to determine that a meeting is the best opportunity to solve the problem, improve the process, or make an ongoing plan.

You may be able to accomplish your goals with an email discussion or by distributing and requesting information through the company newsletter or the intranet. Make sure the meeting is needed and not just convenient for you – you’ll get better results from attendees.

Ensure Participation at the Meeting

If a meeting is the appropriate means to accomplish your goals, check with the participants who must attend for the meeting to succeed. The needed attendees must be available to attend the meeting. Postpone the meeting rather than holding a meeting without critical staff members. If a delegate attends in the place of a crucial decision maker, make sure the designated staff member has the authority to make decisions – or postpone the meeting.

Distribute and Review Infromation Prior to the Meeting

How many meetings have you attended that started out with the meeting chair/facilitator passing out a ream of handouts or projecting a Microsoft PowerPoint slide for discussion? Frustrating? You bet. The meeting becomes a group read-in, hardly productive for goal accomplishment. You can make meetings most productive and ensure results by providing necessary information in advance of the actual meeting. Providing information including charts, graphs, and reading material 48 hours before a meeting affects meeting success. The more preparation time you allocate, the better prepared people will be for your meeting.

Documentation that will help you achieve the meeting goals can include reports; data and charts such as competitive information, sales month-to-date, and production plans; Microsoft PowerPoint slides that illustrate key discussion points; and minutes, notes and follow-up from earlier or related meetings and projects. Pre-work distributed in a timely manner, with the serious expectation that attendees will read the pre-work before the meeting, helps ensure meeting success.

During the Meeting to Ensure Effective Meetings

Effective use of meeting time builds enthusiasm for the topic. It generates commitment and a feeling of accomplishment from the participants. People feel part of something bigger than their day-to-day challenges. Therefore, a well-facilitated, active meeting, that sets the stage for follow-up, will produce meeting results.

Effective Meeting Facilitation

The meeting leader sets a positive, productive tone for interaction among the meeting participants. Effective meeting facilitation starts with a review of the goals, or anticipated outcomes, and the agenda. The facilitator helps group members stay focused and productive. Meeting design and the agenda set the framework for the meeting. An effective facilitator, who keeps participants on track, ensures the accomplishment of expected, desired results from the meeting.

Use the Infromation in the Meeting

Use or reference the information supplied prior to the meeting, during the meeting. You reinforce the need for participants to spend the time needed upfront to review material that is integral to accomplishing the desired results. You participants will prepare prior to attending your meetings and your results will bear testimony to solid preparation and leadership.

Involve Each Participant in Actions

Every work group has various personalities that show up for meetings. You have quiet coworkers and people who try to dominate every platform. Whether facilitating or attending the meeting, you need to involve each attendee in the accomplishment of the meeting goals.

This ensures that each participant is invested in the topic of the meeting and in the follow-up. You’ll accomplish more results with the whole team pulling than with one dominant staff person trying to push everyone else up the hill.

Create an Effective Meeting Follow-up Plan

During the meeting, make a follow-up plan with action items. Effective plans include:

• the specific action item,
• the name of the person who committed to “owning” the accomplishment of the action item,
• the due date of the action item,
• an agreement about what constitutes completion of the action item.

Discuss real life scenarios and barriers to success that team members may experience as they try to accomplish the items that will produce the required results. Set a time for your next meeting, if needed, while participants are in attendance.

After the Meeting to Ensure Effective Meetings

Actions and planning before and during the meeting play a big role in helping you achieve expected, positive, and constructive outcomes. Your actions following the meeting are just as crucial. Follow-up at the next scheduled meeting is never enough of an investment to ensure results.

Publish Meeting Minutes

Begin by publishing your minutes and action plan within 24 hours. People will most effectively contribute to results if they get started on action items right away. They still have a fresh memory of the meeting, the discussion and the rationale for the chosen direction. They remain enthusiastic and ready to get started. A delay in the distribution of minutes will hurt your results since most people wait for the minutes to arrive before they begin to tackle their commitments.

Effective Meeting Follow-up

Respecting and observing deadlines and follow-up will help you achieve results from your meetings. The deadline was established during the meeting. Following the meeting, each person with an action item should also make a plan for their personal accomplishment of their commitment. Whether they write the steps in their planner, delegate the tasks to another staff person, or just complete the task, the individual is responsible for follow-up.

So is the meeting planner. You can improve meeting results by following up with each person who has an action item mid-way between meetings. Your goal is to check progress and ensure that tasks are underway. Remember that what you ask about gets accomplished.

Accountability for Follow-up during the Next Meeting

Establishing the norm or custom of accountability for results begins early in your meeting cycle. Follow-up by the facilitator mid-way between meetings helps, but the group must make failure to keep commitments unacceptable. Report on progress and outcomes at the next meeting and expect that all will have been accomplished. Alternatively, check progress at the next meeting and if there is a real roadblock to progress, determine how to proceed.

Debrief the Meeting Process for Continuous Improvement

The practice of debriefing each meeting is a powerful tool for continuous improvement. Participants take turns discussing what was effective or ineffective about the current meeting process. They also discuss the progress they feel the group is making on the topic of the meeting. Another way of doing this is to ask everyone to rate the meeting out 5 on a scale from 1-5. Anything below 4 requires a conversation with the individual concerned to ensure that future meetings meet each participants needs. Note: Really good rapport would be needed for such a debrief.

Taking continuous improvement to another level, successful teams debrief their entire project as well as the process to determine how effectively they managed to create results. Future meetings reflect the evaluation. Meetings evolve as an even more effective tool for creating organization results.

Leadership Lessons From The Chairman and CEO at J. C. Penney

Donald Seibert as chairman and chief executive officer at J. C. Penney, he gained a reputation as an effective organiser and peacemaker. And in peace, the company prospered. Here are his key points for leadership in any organisation:

1. Understandyour own objectives, your own sense of mission and goals. Clarity and simplicity of the mission and objectives is vital to understanding and communicating the message.  

2. Clearly articulate those objectives to your organisational leaders and managers, and try to get some feedback as to how well they understand them. Whenever the J. C Penney’s management team prepared to issue a statement, whether it was a press release or an internal memo, they asked themselves two questions: (1) Is this easily understood? (2) Can this be misunderstood? These questions are quite different, and often the original statement failed the second test and needed to be rewritten. How do you measure whether you as a leader are getting your ideas across? A number of techniques could be used: attitude surveys, informal visits by members of the senior management committee, discussions with people at different levels of the company. If you take time to ask questions, you find out quickly what your people understand and do not understand.

3. Exercise patience. It will take time before you have enough of your staff behind you to turn objectives into working programs. There is a need to constantly communicate the organisations mission and objectives until a tipping point of sorts is reached and people become aligned with the objectives and facilitate or enable the execution of programs.

4. Take inventory of your personal resources and those available within your organisation. Management is the process of assuring that the programs and objectives we have set are implemented. Leadership, on the other hand, is the process of motivating people. Both are strategic skills. Every manager or leader needs to know what he has to work with before any work can get done. This means taking inventory of resources, understanding the personnel’s strengths and weaknesses, reviewing all personnel — the human resources — noting where they’re placed, and eliminating structural impediments. These are basic management tools. If a manager or leader is not strong in motivating, he can enlist key people who have demonstrated over time that they have influence with others. If you can identify these people and get them committed to your objectives, they can help sell your programs and motivate others to put them into effect.

Where To Invest In PR and Marketing For Tech Products & Services

Charlene Li from Forrester has put out a new fascinating reporton social technographics which looks at how consumers approach social technologies. Forrester segmented the online audience into several different stratas – what they call a ladder of participation. They found that “Inactives” are by far the dominant group (52%). They’re followed by spectators, joiners, critics, collectors and last but not least creators. This last cluster, according to the analyst firm, dabbles in lots of different activities but few do all of them. See the chart below for more.

While those who engage tend to get all of the attention, the thickest part of the ladder is in the vast majority of people who have no desire to participate. I imagine this number will shrink some in the years ahead, particularly as the generation that grew up with the Web enters the workforce. However, there will always be a large portion of the online audience that remains just that – consumers. While technology is flattening the marketing landscape, there’s a need for agencies that can help guide clients in the dynamic two-way world. Marketing and PR is best suited to thrive in this environment and getting the right mix is where it all starts.

So what can PR and marketing learn from this?

The report provides insights into what drives and motivates people to engage with the web. For each program, you can assess where your audience sits on this continuum. Are they inactives, creators or somewhere in between? The key is to then devise the right kind of communication strategy depending on what you discover. While the ladder provides the outlines marketing and PR will need to provide the appropriate creative components for the concerned audience.

Here are a few ideas:

Let’s say you have a start-up that has a new piece of software that bloggers will love. Then it would seem appropriate that executing a peer-to-peer program that targets creators, critics and collectors would be main thrust  of your strategy. In addition to the possibility of tapping into social networks, blogging and other Web 2.0 communities through the use of the peer to peer program. Media coverage targeting outlets that bloggers read would also help.

Where as if you have software like a 37 signals product that has value to a large number of consumers, then you’d want a broader mix that combines the best of new media/mainstream media, all while investing proportionately in strategies that reflects the groups on the ladder.

Why Build Credibility and Consensus To Communicate Effectively

A common question asked by employees today – Why should I do it requires persuasion. No longer the skill of sales people persuasion is much more than just selling it is a learning and negotiating process for leading employees or colleagues to a shared solution to a problem. Here are a few pointers from an HBR article:

1. Establish credibility. Your credibility grows out of two sources: expertise and relationships.
If you have a history of well-informed, sound judgment, your colleagues
will trust your expertise. If you’ve demonstrated that you can work in
the best interest of others, your colleagues will have confidence in
your relationships.

If you are weak on the expertise side, bolster your position by

• learning more through formal and informal education—for example, conversations with in-house experts

• hiring recognized outside experts

• launching pilot projects.

To fill in the relationship gap, try

• meeting one-on-one with key people

• involving like-minded coworkers who have good support with your audience.

Example: Two developers at Microsoft envisioned a controversial new software
product, but both were technology novices. By working closely with
technical experts and market testing a prototype, they persuaded
management that the new product was ideally suited to the average
computer user. It sold half a million units.

2. Frame goals on common ground. Tangibly
describe the benefits of your position. The fastest way to get a child
to the grocery store is to point out the lollipops by the cash
register. That is not deception—it’s persuasion. When no shared
advantages are apparent, adjust your position.

Example: An ad agency executive persuaded skeptical fast-food franchisees to
support headquarters’ new price discounts. She cited reliable research
showing how the pricing scheme improved franchisees’ profits. They
supported the new plan unanimously.

3. Vividly reinforce your position.
Ordinary evidence won’t do. Make numerical data more compelling with
examples, stories, and metaphors that have an emotional impact.

Example: The founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics made a speech comparing sales people’s
weekly meetings to gatherings among Christians resisting Roman
rule.This drove home the importance of a mutually supportive sales
force and imbued the work with a sense of heroic mission.

4. Connect emotionally. Adjust your own
emotional tone to match each audience’s ability to receive your
message. Learn how your colleagues have interpreted past events in the
organization and sense how they will probably interpret your proposal.
Test key individuals’ possible reactions.

Example: A Chrysler team leader raised the morale of employees demoralized by
foreign competition and persuaded management to bring a new car design
in-house. He showed both audiences slides of his hometown, which had
been devastated by foreign mining competition. His patriotic appeal
reinvigorated his team, and the chairman approved the plan.

How To Make A Point Effectively

We often grapple with the question of why and how leaders should go about making a point through their messages. In otherwords get people to understand the message when they hear it, they remember it, and they change their behavior because of it.

Messages that make a point or “sticky” messages have certain disctinctives – unexpected, concrete, credible, and emotional.

For example conisder John F. Kennedy’s message of a vision of “putting a man on the moon within the decade”? People immediately understood what he meant. (The words “man,” “moon,” and “decade” are all very simple and concrete.) They also remembered it for a long while afterward. And thousands of people changed their behavior because of it.

The key to making a point is to remember that your audience often doesn’t have your expertise and therefore the need to use language that’s meaningful to them. If Kennedy had described his vision for the United States as “being the international leader in the space industry,” he would have had far less impact.

Another characteristic of making an effective point through a message is that it helps people understand what they’re supposed to do in a particular situation and what tradeoffs they have to make, so they don’t have to keep checking back with you for direction.

A really good example, I came across of a person making a point is that of Jeff Hawkins, the guy who led the original Palm Pilot team. Hawkins walked around holding a block of wood which was the exact size of the Palm Pilot he had in mind. The wood served as a constant visible and tangible reminder of his goal for the product: “elegant simplicity.” Engineers who were tempted to sneak in more and more features just because they could, would be discouraged from committing “feature creep” when they saw the block of wood.

The Palm Pilot embodied elegant simplicity: It did only four things (including managing your contacts and to-do lists), but it did them very well. And it was easy to use. Contrast that product with pretty much any remote control device currently out in the market, and you’ll see the difference.

Other great examples are the high-concept pitches made to Hollywood movie producers. A particularly sticky pitch was “Jaws on a spaceship,” for the movie Aliens.

This simple description of the movie’s concept was packed with information that helped everyone involved make the right decisions. Potential investors could see that the project was promising, since Jaws had been so successful. And the people in charge of marketing the film, creating the score, and designing the sets could all figure out how to do their jobs based on the notion of “Jaws on a spaceship.” The director still had to provide some guidance, but he didn’t have to constantly spoon feed them information.

So how do you make a point effectively? Do you have examples if so please share it.