Chapter 34. Be Effective in Meetings, and Use Social Media Tools

Joshua Cohen asked me to discuss how I go about running meetings effectively. Josh and his business partner, Jamison Tilsner, run Tilzy.TV,[163] an Internet TV start-up. I knew right away that I could give some effectiveness advice that would 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:

  1. Announcement meeting

  2. Status meeting

  3. Brainstorm meeting

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

ANNOUNCEMENT MEETING

An announcement meeting, which should be superfast, is reserved for announcements that you want to make in person to your team. You might use this to announce funding, to announce the addition of a new key employee (and, at a start-up, 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, which should be reasonably quick, is 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 start-up, lots of people get to play project manager) should have ...

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