Be Effective in Meetings and Use Social Media Tools

January 3, 2008 · Comments

meeting Mister Joshua Cohen asked me to talk about how I go about running meetings effectively. Josh and his business partner, Jamison Tilsner, run Tilzy TV, an Internet TV startup. I knew right away that there’s some effectiveness advice I could give that would also include examples of using social media and Internet tools effectively at the same time.

Three Types of Meetings

First, realize that for most businesses, there are essentially three types of meetings:

  • Announcement meeting
  • Status meeting
  • Brainstorm meeting

These are in order of how fast they should run, and/or how interactive they should be.

Announcement Meeting

An ANNOUNCEMENT meeting should be super fast, and is reserved for announcements that you want to make in person to the team. You might use this to announce funding, to announce the addition of a new key employee (and at a startup, EVERY employee is key), or to announce a major shift in direction. It should have one speaker (two max), and doesn’t require much in the way of social media, except that you might consider videotaping the announcement (either for future use in documenting the company’s experiences, or as potential YouTube press release material).

Status Meeting

A STATUS meeting should be reasonably quick, and it’s a chance for all teams to be heard from. However, it’s not for discussion. Instead, the project manager calling the meeting (and at a startup, lots of people get to play project manager) should have gone around ahead of the meeting to get the status. Get all the conversation out of people by hearing them fully OUTSIDE the meeting.

Then, at the meeting, the person who gathered status merely announces that she’ll be running down the current status. Mention the department or person, give their very brief status message, and move on to the next person. It’s not a time for discussion. If someone wants to open up a discussion, interrupt as politely but as quickly as possible, and state that we can talk after the meeting, but the first and foremost part of the meeting is to run down a status.

Social media and Internet tools that are useful in meetings include a wiki for simple note taking, or perhaps an internal blog might be the better tool for that job. (What do YOU think?) You might use a tool like Utterz to record the status meeting, and team members can listen to the status directly after the fact.

Brainingstorming Meeting

A BRAINSTORMING meeting is probably the most open-ended and least simple to run. In these meetings, you’re asking people together to discuss open-ended futures. This should be clearly announced at the beginning of the meeting (as well as in the invite), so that people know it’s going to be a conversation and not a quick in-and-out.

Some things to make a meeting like this run better: lay out the goals and end-points so that people know what they’re aiming towards. When discussions get too tangential, help people back towards the goals and endpoints. Another tip would be to have one person outside the brainstorming flow with an eye on the time, and also a notion of the goals, so that he or she can guide people back onto the targets at hand.

Social media tools that are useful at brainstorming sessions are a mindmapping tool like Mindmeister, which captures free form ideas in a visual way, and can be later shared in a variety of methods. Other tools for brainstorming could be a shared tumbleblog on Tumblr, where people can clip in various bits of information to share what their vision of a project can be. Need visuals? Don’t forget Flickr for finding photos to use internally for the discussion (be mindful of their Creative Commons status).

Tips for ALL Meetings

The purpose of meetings is to get more than one person into informational alignment. In some cases, that’s asking for information. In lots of cases, that’s doling out status. Here are some tips for every type of meeting you hold:

  • Brevity is your friend. Meetings over 1/2 hour are evil.
  • Start on time. Finish on time. Meetings that wait for late people get later each time.
  • The boss isn’t the boss of the meeting. If it’s your meeting, be firm, polite, and firm.
  • Copious notes aren’t a virtue. Understanding next actions are a virtue.
  • Every idea needs an owner. If you come up with what has to come next, the NEXT thing you do is find out who owns it, and when, roughly, they will accomplish their task.
  • Some meetings are just well-worded email messages and an updated project plan, meaning NO meeting necessary. Trim where you can. People loathe meetings, and the people who love them usually have something wrong with them.

Brief Note for Participants

If you are a PARTICIPANT in meetings, most of what I’ve told you can’t help. However, pointing the person who runs meetings to a post like this one, or several posts over at Lifehack.org is certainly one way to get people thinking about how they run their meetings.

Your Ideas

What are some of your ways for coping in meetings? How have you used social media combined with meetings? Have you ever shown a podcast or a videoblog as part of your presentation materials at a business meeting?

Give us your status!

The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.

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Photo credit, flgr

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  • I used to work for a boss whose meetings would drone on forever. He was a bossy boss, and always wanted to be the center of attention. Every meeting was his own personal brainstorming meeting. A "quick" meeting could go 2.5 hours.

    We made a rule that nobody could call a meeting without sending a written agenda of what would be covered. The agenda had to come out one hour before the meeting so all could be prepared.

    He resisted this at first, but the results were great, so then he acted as if he came up with the idea!

    The agenda was there to keep the meeting focused and the person who called the meeting on task. It also allowed any topic that popped up to be tabled if appropriate.
  • Andrew Wright
    Sometimes meetings are required to make a decision based upon available criteria and alternatives (assuming this is a more collaborative enterprise). These often don't go so well, as it's difficult to structure the conversation and make sure everyone's evaluating the same things. This type of meeting can be the most difficult to make productive.
  • Andrew Wright
    Full Disclosure: I'm working on something on the side w/ a client...a Web app that will facilitate collaborative decision-making meetings over the Web.
  • Good information and topic. I would like to add my two cents though. It's been my experience that most of the corporate environments that I've been involved with are extremely resistant when it comes to using any "outside" website or service.
    There is this fear and concern from the executive level about potential security breeches or loss of intellectual property because we would in essense be "sharing" our data with an external resource. No matter how much time we (IT) invest to calm these fears and try to assure them that web 2.0 is not the devil, they remain skeptical to new ideas and services.

    So, I am left with trying to make magic with Microsoft SharePoint server 2007. Imagine the dwarf Rumpelstiltskin spinning straw into gold.

    Well, believe it or not, there are some excellent social media-like tools and features available in SharePoint 2007 that can make meetings much more productive even long after the meetings.

    There's a new feature called Meeting Workspace that allows anyone in SharePoint to create an instant portal for an scheduled meeting. There are several templates to choose from depending on the type of meeting you are conducting. The most popular is the Decision Meeting Workspace that includes sections to share links to documents related to the meeting, Tasks and assignments made in the meeting, and a spot to record any decisions made in the meeting, sort of like taking minutes.

    If Microsoft continues to enhance the social media/networking features of SharePoint, then they can really go far with it. It has already become a cottage industry for specialists who do nothing else but SharePoint installation, design and customization. I installed the six month trial myself because I'm crazy that way. :)

    Sidenote: Microsoft is clever because they are linking other services to SharePoint such as their Project Server which uses SharePoint (Both use SQL server, cough...mo' money, mo' money).

    The future? Microsoft's OfficeLive Workspace (sound familiar?) http://workspace.officelive.com
    is nothing more than a web version of SharePoint's document library module. I can see them offering a full-blown www.MySharePoint.com social network somewhere down the road with web version of all office apps like Word, Excel and PowerPoint (RentAnApp) that we subscribe to on a monthly or annual basis.

    Pai
  • LOL.........I love your "Tips for all Meetings." You hit the nail on the head. Thanks for the smile.
  • Andrew Wright
    Sharepoint is definitely feature-rich, but a total pain in the ass to set up and use. I'm forced to use it with a client and it's just not intuitive...hence, I presume, the need for specialists that do nothing but install and customize it. This decision app in Sharepoint may help capture decisions, but it doesn't help teams make good decisions.
  • I also work in an environment that is resistant to using tools outside the firewall, however to spark discussion at brainstorming meetings, I started a del.icio.us social bookmarking page that lists topics relevant to the working group's mandate. Other members can contribute as well, it helps keep the group informed about our topic.
  • Great advice Chris. Thanks for this.
  • Jenn
    Excellent run down of how to facilitate various meetings. I particularly like the point about not allowing people to talk when they should be listening. People need to do their prep ahead of time instead of wasting everyone's time in the meeting!
  • A well timed post Chris,

    Only two more days of my summner holdiay to go before it's back to work for another year.

    I begin every year trying to reset our meetings back to 15 minutes and 30 minutes, we always seem to get stuck in a mind set that every meeting is an hour long and some people will fill in the space. I think an egg timer would be a great tool in some meetings.

    Good luck for the year ahead in your new endevours.
  • Thanks for the great advice, Chris. I think the pre-planning meetings with goals and end-points is the most important. Having nebulous brainstorming sessions is fun every once in a while, but taxing when you need to get actual work done.
  • In organizing many podcamps, we have weekly conference call meetings. They are often status meeting, assigning To-Do's and brain storming all in one. As a result, I have gone to the default old fashioned solution - The Agenda.

    A day or two before the meeting, everyone gets agenda for the call by email- they can add things if they want, but at the meeting, we scroll through the topics, hit each one, and take any needed discussion to other channels. Meetings can get sidetracked, and aren't perfect, but the Agenda sets a purpose and goals ahead of time, and helps keep things running smoothly.
  • Keren Dagan
    Good ideas. I plan to try few. If I may suggest using http://www.netvibes.com/ as a dashboard can help make meeting notes visual.
    I wrote about it in my blog: http://usingit.wordpress.com/2007/12/27/how-to-...

    Twitter could be a great way to avoid interruption during meetings - just type 140 characters of "what are you thinking now?"
  • I think it's important to include announcement and status meetings in a company's routine. That way, people are constantly updated on what is happening inside or outside the company that may affect it. And I also agree that meetings should always start on time.
  • Your content is good, but you diminish its impact with the studpid pictures and your failed attempts at humor and scarcasim. Your content is serious, but I have difficulty taking you seriously as a SME.
    You also make to much out of your subject. Many of us work 60 hour weeks and work in complex organizations and your ideas are very simplistic and assume that we have more time in our day then we actually do.
    I give you a C+ on the series.
  • One more suggestion. Hold the meeting standing up. The more uncomfortable people become the more they want to get out of the meeting, the more likey you are to reach a decision. The UK Privy Council meets standing up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privy_Council
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