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.

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.

Playing an unlikely but crucial role in the recent Presidential elections in France was a five-minute video called the “Human Bomb”. It was produced as advisors worried that Sarkozy was being constantly demonized in the online media through videos like la France D’après, which imagines a new repressive nation state under Sarkozy with riot police, urban unrest and burning cars. 

The video drew more than 450,000 viewers attracted by an old chapter from Sarkozy’s life: as the brash suburban mayor of Neuilly sur Seine personally negotiates with the “Human Bomb,” a deranged man who seized kindergarten students as hostages in 1993.

The video offers a pensive look at this past along with equally pensive soundtrack music (“Honor Him” from the movie, The Gladiator). According to Arnaud Dassier, a strategist for Sarkozy, their “Human Bomb” video was so effective that people were literally left in tears. “We were losing the battle on Dailymotion and YouTube and before we launched this video there was not one pro-Sarko video in the top 50.”

Accorodng to the IHT – When the backstage story of this presidential campaign is written, new media will play a starring role. American campaign strategists have already traveled to France for a glimpse of the new political rituals and pronounced them “one click ahead” of techniques in the United States, as Michael Murphy, an advisor to the California governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, put it.

Decide whether it’s worth reaching for tissues when you watch it.

I cam across this interesting post from Tom Stern of FC.  If you ever find yourself caught up in work and missing out on the relationship part of life – despite your best intentions, here are a few pointers to help make reparations:

Flowers – Forget it. If you’re anything like most of us its been done to death unless she really, really loves flowers.

A Weekend Away – Always in good taste. Try to gauge the travel distance and type of getaway by the severity of your transgression.

Simple Card – Often surprisingly effective – for a few dollars or less -  if you know where to look!

Jewelry – According to Tom – A diamond is forever. Which means it will be a constant reminder of your pitiful inadequacies. That’s what engagement rings are for. Think twice on this one says Tom. I disagree with this – it works and symbolises what she means to you.

Dinner and a Movie – Be selective on this on – good chick flicks would be best, so hold off on the crash, bang and bang type blockbusters until you’re out with the guys. 

Lingerie – Hey, if you’ve got the cajones to browse in a Victoria’s Secret by yourself, more power to you.

Gift Certificate – For a favourite store or better still to Victoria Secret. Two birds with one stone. Nothing like retail therapy!

Alone Time – Perhaps the most valuable make-up gift of all. Pledging a definite block of alone time says loud and clear to your mate that she has been bravely and lovingly…penciled in. Make sure to call and confirm day-of, in case anything changes.

Spa/Pamper treats – A chance to pamper your mate, make feel and look great whilst getting away from the daily grind – always wins bonus points.

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.

Connecting with people is critical for selling, persuading or getting the point across. And one of the ways we connect with people is to tell them stories about ourselves.

I was at a business workshop recently, and the stories that were most effective (by acclamation of the attendees) were ones where the person let down his/her guard, and revealed something personal. This is one of the reasons storytelling is more effective than reciting a list of benefits to a prospect. In addition to being interesting and easy to understand, it also helps create a personal bond with the prospect. It means that you may want, in your business storytelling, to reveal anxieties, fears and feelings.In other words, to give the prospect your confidence.

According to Simon Jenkins from the Guardian, experts advise:

• Never to converse with too many because in much company, few listen
• Be brief to avert tedium and interruption
• Avoid anecdote; refer to others but not oneself
• Be eager to listen and ready to change one’s mind
• This discipline, the subjugation of anger to social ritual, is key to the exhilarating, serendipitous, controlled anarchy that is good conversation.

 While there has been quite a bit of buzz with regards to twitter, a visit to the homepage would probably leave the uninitiated rather unimpressed. Robert Scoble calls it “blogging mated with IM” and is a frequent user. While some say that it will be dead pretty soon – I do agree that at the moment it adds to the general clutter or noise and would probably not be worthwhile to most organisations. However there may well be a few uses for twitter which are as below:

1. Great for live events or as a broadcast tool.
Kim Bayne offers a few suggestions including a feedback channel for customer service, marketing ticker for journalists and analysts, and monitoring of system status. Key to this would be the ability to segment your Twitter life into different areas if it is to be relevant to various social networks. Also the ability to broadcast perspectives or conversations around a particular event or festival would become more of a usable feature. This would enable the ability to keep tabs on the pulse of an event and enable people to decide where to spend their time.

2. Promotional element
It would allow marketers to user developed content marketing campaigns and other reality based marketing campaigns could be used to encourage user dialogue and participation. It really offers an IM type dimension to the campaign without the issues of privacxy and permissions usually associated with IM.

3. Collaborative feedback
Watching content online or on TV along with others – allowing for feedback, ideas and impressions all while reading those of others could be a powerful tool.

4.  Information aggregation and mashups.
Charlene Li from Forrestor writes about being able to get Twitter Weather, Tube Twitter  and mashups like Twittermaps.com, which uses specific tagging in Twitter to map your locations. While they are cool features they have little use for marketing and PR. Dealtagger.com however is of interest in that it allows any deals that you tag on the service to also show up on Twitter.

In its current state Twitter will really only appeal to a small group of marketers. However given trends with other social networking services could well evolve with new features and functionality to actually become a useful communication and information tool.

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.

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.