I’m not a big fan of showing the presenter’s video during a webinar – it’s usually unnecessary, distracting to the audience and difficult to get right. But sometimes you do need it – for example, with a video conference call. Check out this humorous video that highlights some of the things you need to keep in mind when working with video:
Expert Gold Radio: The Technology Leadership Challenge
1 April 2013 by Leave a Comment
Expert Gold Radio brings you monthly ideas, information, interviews and insights into leveraging your leadership – through better communication, on-line learning and Internet marketing.
Listen to the episode here:
The Technology Leadership Challenge – with Donna Hanson
It’s one thing to have the latest and greatest technology, but another altogether to make sure it’s being used to make yourself and your teams more productive, more effective, and even happier! Donna Hanson, who is an expert in exactly this area, talks about the leadership challenges of integrating technology into an organisation.
Out of Office: Online Meetings Etiquette
Whether you’re meeting with clients, colleagues or even competitors, some of those meetings might take place online, so you need to know how to run a good online meeting. It’s not easy, and some of the skills are different from physical meetings.
Get the book “Out of Office” here.
Content Marketing Workshops in Sydney
If you’d like to know more about content marketing and how to use it in your business, come to my two one-day workshops in Sydney in May.
The first one puts your content marketing platform in place, with blogging, special reports, article writing, and social media. Then, on the following day, we look at making your ideas more visual - through slide shows, PowerPoint, video, infographics, and animation. Come to one or both sessions – whatever suits you needs.
Find out more here:
Expert Gold Radio: Authority Marketing
4 December 2012 by Leave a Comment
Expert Gold Radio brings you monthly ideas, information, interviews and insights into the world of Internet marketing and e-learning.
Listen to the episode here:
What Do You Really Want In 2013?
I share a simple but powerful goal-setting process, which I use myself every year, and something I have shared with clients, colleagues and friends. It doesn’t replace any of the other goal-setting processes you might be using, but it’s a useful framework to take stock of where you are, and identify where you’d like to be in 2013.
Authority Marketing – with Rachel Staggs
Rachel Staggs, from SRS Coaching and Consulting, is a business consultant for financial advisers, and helps clients with one area they often need help with: marketing. In this interview, we talk about online marketing and offline marketing for experts and business owners, and how to position yourself as an authority.
Find out more about Rachel Staggs here.
Your Internet Marketing Plan for 2013
The world of marketing has changed in nine ways, and you need to adapt to stay in touch with these things: you, reputation, tribes, value, what they need, niches, experiences, frames and connection. In this coaching segment – based on the ideas in my book “Fast, Flat and Free” – I ask you 27 questions to help you create your own Internet marketing plan for next year.
Expert Gold Radio: Positioning
1 November 2012 by Leave a Comment
Expert Gold Radio brings you monthly ideas, information, interviews and insights into the world of Internet marketing and e-learning.
Listen to the episode here:
The Positioning Matrix – with Matt Church
The Positioning Matrix is an elegant tool for creating a flexible way of positioning yourself in many situations – at a networking event, on social media platforms, in writing sales copy, on your Web site, and more.
Find out more about Matt Church here.
Positioning Yourself with a Welcome Video
You can use the Positioning Matrix for many things, including a script for a short welcome video to use on the home page of your Web site. In this extract from the audio book version of “Fast, Flat and Free”, I explain how to do that.
Get the book “Fast, Flat and Free” here.
Book Review: How to Be THAT Guy, by Scott Ginsberg
This is the best book I’ve ever read about personal branding. Ginsberg himself uses a bold gimmick to stand out from the crowd (if you don’t know: He always wears a name tag), but this book has ideas for everybody, even if (like me) that sort of extroverted stunt isn’t your style. This book isn’t about your gimmick, it’s about finding your uniqueness and then making it shine – in the way that works best for you.
5 Tips to Revamp Your Social Media Strategy
If your social media strategy is floundering, and you’re not getting a return on the time, money and effort you invested in it, don’t try harder and put more effort into it. Instead, revamp it altogether.
Expert Gold Radio: The Publishing Revolution
1 October 2012 by Leave a Comment
Expert Gold Radio brings you monthly ideas, information, interviews and insights into the world of Internet marketing and e-learning.
Listen to the episode here:
The Publishing Revolution – with Dan Poynter
Dan Poynter is a world-recognised expert on non-fiction publishing. In this interview, he talks about recent changes to the publishing world, e-books vs printed books, the power of being a published author, and more.
Find out more about Dan Poynter here.
Online Collaboration For Authors
Chris and I used a number of different online collaboration tools in writing our book. In this conversation, we talk about them, including: outsourcing for transcribing and ghostwriting, working on a shared manuscript, incorporating comments from reviewers, and more.
Online Meetings Etiquette Guide
6 August 2012 by Leave a Comment
Online meetings are important for many Out of Office workers, but most people don’t know how to behave in them – neither efficiently nor effectively. In this episode, we give you 10 guidelines for online meeting etiquette, so you make the most of your next online meeting.
Listen to the episode here:
Buy the book here (available at a reduced price for a limited time).
Here are the ten guidelines:
- Find a quiet environment with good call quality.
- Be on time.
- Stay silent while waiting for the call to start.
- Identify yourself and address people by name.
- Be polite.
- Use mute when not speaking.
- Avoid distractions.
- Avoid multi-tasking.
- Stay on track and ensure private matters are solved outside the call.
- Respect people’s valuable time.
Reference: This list is from my book Best Practice Conference Calls. The main credit for this list goes to my co-author Brandon Munro, who initially created this list. We also have this list available as a free one-page download from the Web site, so you can distribute it to colleagues and clients as well.
How to Prepare for a Difficult Conference Call
21 October 2010 by Leave a Comment
Most conference calls – even when they involve participants from different organisations – are polite, orderly and even-tempered. However, occasionally you might be on a call that involves hostile participants or other types of difficulties – such as:
- Nasty participants (hostile, rude, unhelpful and the like)
- You can’t get a word in
- Someone wants to derail the process
- Hidden or inconsistent agendas
- Personal attacks on you
This sort of call requires particular skills.
Observe three guiding principles when handling difficult calls:
- Knowledge is power
- The earlier the better
- Formality and structure give control
Knowledge is power
First, the more you know about what you’re likely to face, the easier it is to manage it effectively and still meet your outcomes. This knowledge comes in many forms:
- Knowing the participants on the call
- Knowing what they really want out of the call
- Knowing who’s really got the power to make decisions (it might not be the person with the most senior job title)
- In a negotiation, knowing their walk-away position and their “BATNA” (best alternative to a negotiated agreement)
- Knowing your walk-away position and BATNA
- Knowing who is on your side, both openly and secretly
- Knowing your options if things start getting out of hand
- Even just knowing you’ll be facing a difficult call is part of the battle won.
The earlier the better
The more you can anticipate the potential problems and plan for them, the easier it is to manage them. There’s nothing worse than being caught off guard when somebody “innocently” springs a potential deal-breaking question right in the middle of a call that was going smoothly!
You can do a number of things to prevent – or at least minimise – the problems before the call:
- Do more background research yourself, so you’re clear about your facts.
- Do more background research about the other side (if there is one), so you understand their position as well.
- Ask them to honestly share their issues before the call, to help you prepare (and of course you do the same for them).
- Communicate in other ways before the call – by e-mail, one-on-one telephone calls, face-to-face meetings, or whatever is most appropriate – to understand or even resolve some of the issues.
- Enlist the help of people who can assist before or during the call to resolve the issues.
Formality and structure give control
Formal meeting procedures are the chair’s biggest weapon when facing a difficult or hostile meeting. All participants must speak “through the chair”, which means the chair can regulate who speaks and for how long. The chair can reprimand participants for breaching points of order and, in some instances, has the procedural power to expel people from the meeting.
However, formal meeting procedure is becoming a lost art in business and may not be practicable to implement for certain types of conference calls.
Nonetheless, the principle that formality and structure give control is extremely relevant and can be implemented in other ways where a call might become difficult. For instance:
- Certain technology will by their nature give the chair that level of control.
- If participants agree to follow a conference calling etiquette they are less likely to misbehave and can be called upon to adhere to their agreed level of behaviour.
- A structured agenda gives less scope for participants dragging the call off track or following their own agendas.
- If participants argue with each other, keep interrupting or talking over each other, stop the discussion and introduce a debate format (For instance, each party has 60 seconds to put their point of view without interruption).
Finally, a lack of formality or structure – for instance having no appointed chair or no agenda – will increase the risk of difficulties.
Want to make better conference calls?
My book Best Practice Conference Calls will teach you everything you need to know about being professional, credible and productive on your next conference call. The article above is from the chapter about handling difficult conference calls.
Ways to Have a Better Meeting
13 August 2010 by Leave a Comment
One of my predictions for 2010 is that we’ll see a massive growth in the use of virtual meetings – in the form of conference calls, teleseminars, video conferencing, webinars and the like. Virtual meetings save time, but they can still be time-wasters if they’re not run well – and few are!
I recently read an interesting blog post by Mitch Joel about 15 ways to have a better meeting. Both the post and the comments are worth a read.
My friend Brandon Munro and I have written an e-book “Best Practice Conference Calls”, which helps you participate in (and chair) conference calls more effectively.
You can get the e-book here or buy it in printed form here.
Even if you don’t get the entire e-book, please download our one-page conference call etiquette guide, with our compliments.
Manage your meetings with TimeBridge
18 June 2010 by Leave a Comment
TimeBridge is a service that helps with your meeting administration:
Its first feature is to help you with scheduling a meeting time. You choose up to five possible times, provide a list of e-mail addresses, and TimeBridge tells the participants to nominate which of those times are suitable.
This feature alone is extremely useful, and might be the only reason you use TimeBridge. But it goes even further, allowing you to type up an agenda, take notes, and circulate actions and minutes to attendees.
This is a freemium service, with paid versions available for phone conferencing, Web conferencing and SMS reminders.
For more great productivity tools like this, check out my Gold Star Services on-line course.
Making better conference calls
22 January 2010 by Leave a Comment
One of my predictions for 2010 is that we’ll see a massive growth in the use of virtual meetings – in the form of conference calls, teleseminars, video conferencing, webinars and the like. This is probably not a surprising prediction, because these technologies have been gradually gaining momentum over the last few years. But I’m willing to go out on a limb and suggest that 2010 will be the year they reach a tipping point. In fact, I’ll predict that face-to-face meetings will decline as a result.
There are a number of things that make me confident this will be the case, including:
- Greater access to reliable broadband Internet connections.
- Organisations wanting to trim expenses and cut costs.
- Better, affordable technology for virtual meetings.
- Educators and businesspeople becoming more comfortable with the technology.
- Greater reliance on outsourcing, off-shoring, working across remote offices and telecommuting.
- The higher cost and inconvenience of travel.
If you want to be aligned with this trend, you must learn how to perform in an electronic meeting room, whether as a meeting participant, a chairperson or a presenter.
My friend Brandon Munro and I have written an e-book “Best Practice Conference Calls”, which helps you participate in (and chair) conference calls more effectively. You can get the e-book here.
Even if you don’t get the entire e-book, please download our one-page conference call etiquette guide, with our compliments.
