The Virtual Meeting Coach

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Just watched a SelfGrowth.com live-streaming TV show and I have to say I’m impressed with the courage and creativity of David Riklan!

David is the CEO and rabid advocate for his website which aggregates the work of thousands of self-help teachers and authors. SelfGrowth.com has an enviable traffic flow and I’m predicting that David’s latest experiment using UStream’s live feed plus Twitter is going to ramp up his traffic even further!

The stage setup for the show had David behind his desk with a speaker-phone co-host whose presence was made “visible” by having the phone displayed prominently, upstage, on David’s desk. David introduced one of his staff members, the onsite “Twitter manager,” who mostly remained off-stage tracking participants’ live tweets, but made an appearance every so often behind the desk with David, too. Other staff members made personal appearances – sitting next to David behind the desk – throughout the show, as well. The team seemed to have someone juggling the IM/chat window on UStream, too, although I couldn’t get it to take my input.

David collected some questions ahead of the show, using an online form he circulated to his list. He answered some viewers’ questions live and punted some to his telephone co-host to answer throughout the show.

He used a very smart giveaway strategy, encouraging real-time Twitter participation (now incorporated into UStream as the “social stream”). Asking participants to tweet a “commercial” message for him made them eligible for a live drawing of a multi-piece CD/DVD set he showed. The commercial feel of that strategy felt more than a little tacky to me, but it certainly demonstrated an interesting way to incentivize others to broadcast your message  on Twitter if that’s something you want to do with Twitter.

The experience reminded me at lot of the early days of Access TV. And, of course, the value of Access TV shows always hinges on the creativity and mindfulness of the show host. David has been developing his community for quite awhile and he’s a pretty fair show host. I look forward to seeing where else he takes this approach…

Interesting experiment! Is this Access TV on the internet… or a new kind of Virtual Meeting?

Did you attend? If so, I’m curious to hear your thoughts about the experience. Did you feel like you were in a virtual meeting with David…or was this a second-tier version of the new ABC Nightline Format (that includes Twitter participation)? What do YOU think?

Who would have thought in just 50 short years we would go from meeting and greeting people in the town square to meeting and greeting people hundreds of miles away – without anyone actually leaving home?

And, in that same short time, who would have thought we would go from buying the biggest newspaper or magazine display ads we could afford to stimulate traffic to our businesses to asking everyone we know what they’re doing to encourage their customers to write about their experiences with them in online directories?

The change is staggering. It’s enough to make my head spin all the way around!

And it’s not science fiction. It’s already happened. Elvis has left the building.

(According to Wikipedia, “Elvis has left the building!” was a phrase often used by public address announcers following Elvis Presley concerts to disperse audiences who lingered in hopes of an Elvis encore.)

As my guests on this third episode of “The Virtual Meeting Coach Show“ like to say, business people who continue to neglect online meetings and other social media – focusing the bulk of their marketing dollars on traditional tv and radio, or newspaper and magazine display ads – are marketing to a crowd that already left the building.

The old models don’t work…and the new ones do.

If the people you need to tell about your business don’t read newspapers anymore, it makes no sense to buy newspaper advertising to communicate with them. But many people are still doing just that.

In their jobs as the Pacific NW internet marketing team for Ticor Title, Matt Sweet and Rene Fabre, spend a big chunk of their time helping Realtors, bankers, and other folks in the real estate industry understand why the old models of advertising and business communication don’t work anymore… and why the new models do.

As Rene likes to say, young and old alike, people all over the world have become “searchers.” We go online daily now to self-educate and to find what we need. So, the question is, how can people possibly choose to buy your products or services unless they can easily find your compelling presence online?

Matt jokingly called this third conversation, “I Get By With A Little Yelp From My Friends.”

Take a look and a listen as the three of us talk about ways to use online review sites like Yelp, Amazon and others to help people searching for things they want FIND YOU in the process of their searching.

FYI: You don’t have to be in real estate to get a lot of value out of this conversation. Anyone who sells professional services needs to be thinking this way to make a decent living in this new economy.

“Like, love or hate this show? Can we improve? Tell us!“

SB104, a bill authorizing the use of virtual meetings for parts of state governance, passed the Delaware House today by unanimous vote, June 29, 2009, paving the way for virtual meetings to support broader participation in the democratic process across the “First State.” The bill passed the Delaware Senate earlier this month by a healthy margin.

Co-sponsored by Representative Greg Lavelle, and Senator Liane Sorenson, SB104 allows governmental bodies, including boards and commissions, to set up videoconferencing locations to facilitate participation in meetings via teleconference. If the bill is signed by Delaware Governor Markell, video locations will also be opened to the public, allowing residents who live downstate from Wilmington to participate in meetings without having to drive to the capitol.

Delaware Governor Markell calls SB104, “a good government bill.” According to Markell, ” this legislation will make it easier for members of boards and commissions to attend meetings and for the public to view the meetings without having to drive a long distance. Expanding the use of teleconferencing will help our environment by taking cars off the road, save taxpayer money and make government more transparent.”  More details on SB104 can be found here.

Some pretty exciting stuff coming our way this week from Google Voice. I’m still looking and reading, but it looks like Google Voice will allow us to package up all our “voice meeting points,” including land phones, cell phones, and VOIP phones and integrate them in one interface that manages voicemail, SMS, transcription, and conference callilng, too. How about that package?

It’s still a by-invitation-only service that requires you to be a Grand Central user. Even if you’re not one, it’s worth learning about now because the service will be open to new users in weeks.

Here’s a review at PC Mag that’s making me more curious by the second! Google Voice won’t be perfect. But it looks like it’s going to offer some terrific time-saving and confusion-reducing benefits. Take a look. Let’s talk!

What do you think?

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• Will You Be a Google Voice User? (blogs.wsj.com)

Still working out the kinks with Blip.tv and embedding the show here in the blog. Sorry for any confusion this last week!

This is episode 2 of 4 conversations I’ll be having with Matt Sweet and Rene Fabre, two wild and crazy guys who work for Ticor Title Company up here in the Pacific NW.

Our conversation this time focuses on the seriously important topic of online reputation management and how we can all help make Google smarter and smarter about us and our businesses so that Google can make it easier and easier for the people who need us to FIND us online. Matt and Rene are helping Realtors make sense of how they can optimize their social media participation so that “search-savvy” home buyers can find them easily when they need them.

You don’t have to be a Realtor to make great use of the tips and tricks these guys are sharing. Any independent business person needs to know how to do these things now. So, listen up!

We had this conversation in a vYew room again and we’re all hoping the graphics help make the things we talking about clearer for you. This is an experimental format for all of us and we’d love to hear your thoughts about how it works.

Take a look/listen and let us know what you think.

Before people are willing to heed your advice,  buy your products, or use your services, they need to trust  you. And building trust online is a bit of a tricky process.

Over the course of 20+ years learning and working online, I’ve been studying what kinds of things enhance trust when we’re working with others at a distance – and what kinds of things tear trust apart. I’ve spoken all over North America and Europe on this and other topics related to achieving high performance when people are working on teams.

This year I decided to make a course  to  share with web-workers and other people looking to learn more about trust-building, in particular.  It’s a topic of vital importance to most of us as people are searching for new ways to contribute in this volatile economy, isn’t it?

So, I’ve just published a new 10-day e-course at Virtual Meeting Startup that teaches “21 Sure-Fire Ways To Build Trust Working With Others Online.” I’m offering it free, as part the Pre-Grand-Opening festivities for Virtual Meeting Startup.

If you’d like to spend 30 or 45 minutes a day over the next 10 days considering three tips a day and doing a little homework to integrate the tips to your online meeting and online relationship strategies, please pop over and sign up.

Instead of pushing advice, I’ve made this course interactive. As you go through the daily lessons, there will always be an invitation for you to take time to do a short exercise at the end.  Day by day, as you do the “Your Turn” exercises, you will be building yourself a custom action plan that can turn you into a much more effective leader/facilitator of online meetings.

Helping people build trust as they work across differences – and distances – is a lifelong passion for me! I’m truly interested receiving feedback from people who decide to take the course.  So if you sign up, please feel free to share your honest thoughts, feelings and questions about any of the lessons.  I’ll do my best to address them here in the blog, whenever possible!

Enjoy!

For over a year, my friend, Tom Carroll, and I have been playing with free virtual meeting tools. Testing them, pushing them, breaking them, seeing which ones work best for what kinds of meetings.

My fascination with real-time virtual meetings comes from my very real, very non-technical experience as a child growing up in a divided bungalow in Chevy Chase where the upstairs bathroom of our home shared a pretty thin wall with the upstairs bathroom of our neighbor’s home.

When I was a curious little girl, I wanted more than anything to be able to “see” through that wall and “hear” what my neighbor, Don Jackson, was doing over on his side. Don was 10 years older than me and generously tolerated my crush on him by actually encouraging me to memorize Morse Code and tap out little messages back and forth with him on the bathroom wall.

I know. It sounds really silly. And it was. But that experience birthed my fascination with “distance” communication and it survives today in my desire to be able to “see” and “hear” what my neighbors around the globe are doing and thinking – without me actually having to travel around the world all the time to see them face-to-face.

Not that I’ve got anything against traveling! I love traveling more than almost anything. But I can’t live that way. After awhile, everyone wants a place they call home. But I still want to take adventures from home, too. What’s the internet for, anyway, if not adventuring?

So, from my home in Ashland, Oregon and Tom’s home in Austin, Texas, we’ve been taking adventures, using all kinds of web conferencing tools to have live, authentic conversations that incorporate all kinds of media.

Now we’ve started inviting people who have something interesting to share to join us.

About a week ago, Tom made this recording I posted today to Blip.tv. It’s the introduction to a 4-part conversation I’ll be having over the next couple of weeks with Matt Sweet and Rene Fabre.

Matt and Rene work for Ticor Title in the Pacific NW. It’s their job to help REALTORS and title people from Astoria, Washington to Ashland, Oregon, make sense of the ways that online communication has forever changed their businesses.

Matt and Rene are not quite Ren and Stimpy. But almost. They’re a couple of wild and crazy guys who happen to love exploring what makes Google tick. Their passion – and their work – is finding new ways to use social media to help professional business people make friends and influence people to buy from them. Every week they take their people into free, online meeting rooms at vYew.com to have raucous conversations about new ways they need to start  building their reputations and connecting to customers – online.

I’m still experimenting with these kinds of interviews, and Tom’s still testing out ways to record them for me, but I hope you’ll take a look and a listen to this one and let me know what you think about the format.

Over the next 3 sessions, I’m hoping you’ll get to see a little more about how vYew works and, at the same time, learn something about how you can use social media to establish a more visible/audible presence for yourself online.

Please share any thoughts or suggestions you have that will help us improve!

This week I read a stunning piece by Jeff Jarvis in Business Week.

Jeff teaches at the CUNY School of Journalism and blogs at buzzmachine.com. His piece is short but packed a big punch.

He probed around a number of key issues in the conversation about openness – or transparency – and the Internet. The whole conversation of “publicness.”  His opening line was provocative, “In the company of nudists, no one is naked.”

The longer I live here, in southern Oregon, the more I see that what’s most important to people here is having a place to live their lives in “peace and privacy.” Migrants and natives alike.

I moved here not quite three years ago from Austin, Texas, and it’s taken me awhile to appreciate just how deliberately my fellow residents of the “State of Jefferson” cultivate their disconnection from the rest of the nation – and the world. I consider myself a very “private person,” but compared to most of my neighbors, I’m a virtual slut. So, I spend a lot of time trying to calibrate my enthusiasm for online learning and virtual business relationships with the thinking of most folks I’m shopping for groceries and gardening supplies with.

All week I’ve been pondering Jeff’s point about  the obstacle to more transparency in our online relating being “control,” not  “privacy.”

Privacy and Control Are Not the Same Issue

A new friend (who’s a 30-40-something) told me this week she just signed up for Facebook and that she wanted to talk to me about some “virtual meeting coaching.”  She was in a panic about how she was going to keep her real-life friends out of her Facebook. She said she didn’t want them “in there acting like they do.”

When I asked her why not, she said she wanted to be able to keep taking crazy, fun road-trips to the beach with them – without having to acknowledge “in public” that she enjoys their carousing. She was worried that if she let them into her Facebook, they would make her look bad to the other people she wanted in her Facebook and she wondered what she could do about that.

As I listened to her, I heard a perfect testimony for Jarvis’ suggestion that our hesitation about increasing the transparency of our online communication isn’t about “privacy.” It’s about “control” of how we reveal (or conceal) our different faces.

Privacy and control really aren’t the same issue, are they?  What we want from relating “virtually” are new ways to strengthen relationships – without being misunderstood or taken advantage of.

I gave my new friend some personal advice about how I’m handling this challenge, but I’m really interested in how the rest of you are handling it. How are you handling the opportunity to become more and more transparent with your online communication?

Will you help me out by leaving some comments below?

Last week, people started asking me for five-finger tips they could use to improve their virtual meetings. This is a tough one.

On the one hand, people want the same things from you in a virtual meeting that they want in a face-to-face meeting. On the other hand, they want some different stuff, too. That’s why I wrote “The Coach’s Short List.”

But, there are plenty of things beyond The Short List that you can do to make your virtual meetings and web conferencing more useful  – and you more popular.

Here are five-fingers worth:

1. Make your meeting guests the rock stars. Besides hearing what you have to say, your VM guests want and need to hear each others’ ideas, too. Make sure you do everything possible to “pass the microphone” and “pass the chalk” around during your meetings so your guests get to show off their chops, too.

2. Give your guests a real voice. Using polls and leaving time at the end of meetings for questions is good basic online meeting practice. But, if you really want people to remember your meetings – and keep coming back for more – be sure you give them other ways to make their wishes known and their voices heard. Ask them to help you generate the agenda at the start of the meeting. Keep checking in with them during the meeting to see if they’re getting what they came for. And, before you close, whenever it’s appropriate, ask them to tell you anything they might have wished you had covered or done that would have made the meeting even better for them.

3. Make it easy. Make everything easy. Desite the fact that more and more people are having virtual meetings every day, they’re still a very new way for people to meet. Most people still need help getting comfortable with web conferencing. Make it easy to sign in and join the meeting. Make it easy for people to introduce themselves. Make it easy for participants to add their two-cents’-worth. Make it easy for them to follow up with you – and each other – after the meeting. Make everything you can think of as easy as possible. If you can’t do this yourself, get someone like me to be your producer and get them to do it for you.

4. Make it easy to refer new participants. Once someone has located you and decided you’re a useful, credible source of expertise, they are going to want to share you with their friends. It makes them look good to have found you! Be sure you make it easy for them to tell other people about you and add them to your meetings – this one or the next one.

5. Merge online and offline communities. The best thing about virtual meetings is that you don’t have to be face-to-face to have one. The best thing about face-to-face meetings is that you don’t have to use a computer or any other electronic device to have one. Some people are more comfortable meeting one way – or the other. But, especially in this economy, all of us needto grow our social networks and build new opportunities every way we can

When you’re hosting virtual meetings, do everything you can to help your guests link their online and offline resources. When you can, record your meetings so guests can share the content with offline partners and friends. Post your presentation at an online slide sharing site like slideshare.net. And, whenever possible, help port face-to-face conversations online, too. You can Tweet Live to connect people who aren’t able to be with you at live meetings. You can scan and post your handwritten meeting notes or photos to your blog so you can share them with people who weren’t able to attend.  There are dozens of ways you can help people merge their online and offline resources. Do it. They’ll thank and remember you

What are some of the easy ways you like to help people connect their online and offline resources? Post them here as a comment and let’s share the wealth!

Whew, I think I’m starting to get social media well enough to quit kicking constantly and take a little rest. For a minute.

Truly useful insights came this week from reading John Borthwick, Marcia Connor, and Tony Karrer’s thoughts about what people are doing participating on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media — including live-tweeted seminars and webinars.

As I catch my breath and let my legs dangle for a little bit, I’m relaxing into the realization that publishing and meeting are mashing up.

As more and more of us just let go of the side of the pool and swim out into the deep waters of online relationship, we’re “meeting” and “distributing” at the same time. Human communication has always served many functions at once. But the possibilities offered by social media (including live virtual meetings) are really stirring things up.

From out here in the deep, I can see that most newspapers are gonna be gonners. No amount of refinancing will change anything. And magazines are either going to become clubs where all the members publish or they’re gonna die, too. But there’s actually a lot more going on than that.

For sure, as Karen Stephenson says, human beings have begun “storing our knowledge in our friends.” But we’re also finding new ways to store other people’s knowledge in our friends, too. And that has huge implications for all media distributors. Makes my head hurt stretching my mind around that one.

Social media is a much bigger thing than I can understand yet.

Sure is nice finding ScribeFire to support my blogging this week. It’s going to take quite a bit of writing to help me get my thoughts clear while I kick around out here so far away from familiar shores.

Right now though, I notice I’m asking myself over and over, “When we meet virtually, where are we meeting?” And, “Who are we, anyway?” I’m not talking about the tools, now. I’m talking about the place of mind we meet. Where exactly is that? Who is that “we” that’s following me on Twitter? Who are all those “we’s” I’m part of when I’m following someone, especially someone I haven’t met yet F2F? And how are we ever going to keep track of all those fluid identities?

Deep water.