Last week, my local public radio station (KCFR) was holding its annual pledge drive. I love NPR and local public radio and always give to support it. But, it’s kind of annoying when they spend an entire week asking for pledges, making me feel guilty if I don’t give, and worst of all, providing just about zero value for the entire week. That’s right, in the usual 12 hours of listening that I do each week, it turned out that the local station asked for pledges about 90% of that time and provided programming that was valuable to me only about 10% of the time. So yes, I tuned out.    

Now, I completely understand, this is public radio and this is how they get their funding. They have to operate this way. But you are not public radio and you don’t have to operate this way. So why is it that so many companies and organizations spend so much time asking for your money, your time, and your commitment and focus so little on providing value in return? Constantly selling to me and constantly asking me to help you makes me tune you out. You’re just part of the static.

Turn the balance around and focus on providing value constantly. The return will come when people start talking about how great your product or service is. They might even start talking about how awesome you or your company are. Word of mouth is priceless! And in defense of NPR, in reality, they only spend 5 days out of an entire calendar year asking me for pledges to keep them going. The rest of the year, they do provide incredible value on a constant basis. That translates to just over 1% of their time spent asking me to help them, while 99% of the time they’re providing valuable programming that I can’t get anywhere else. And that’s why when NPR has a pledge drive, I’m always willing to pitch in. Do you provide value 99% of the time?

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If you didn’t get your Facebook user name yet, you still can at http://www.facebook.com/username/. And if you did already get you user name, why not post it here for everyone to see and let us all know if you got the name you wanted.

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“Consolidate your debts and grab your copy of the Sexy Twitter Secrets at www.bz9.com/debtconsolidationunsecured” (Sexy Twitter secrets? Really, hmm, I’ll have to head over there immediately!)

“Don’t worry about managing your debt payments individually. Visit www.personal-loans-united-states.com and learn how” (Seems to be a recurring debt theme in this country these days eh?)

“I’ve enjoyed your tweets! I’m looking for help! Please refer your friends to http://GreatAgentsWanted.com if they want to make more money!” (Who doesn’t want to make more money? Good tag line, I’m there and so are all of my friends that I’ll refer!)

“Step Towards a Better Financial Future @ http://www.kooko.ws” (Not as good as make more money, but wow, sounds great!)

“Please join me. I’d like to recruit you as a spymaster to my spy ring - http://playspymaster.com” (I spy something very annoying. I don’t want to play, please stop asking.)

“good morning an thank you for the follow. please review my website at www.attainresponse.com/javau. tell me what you think” (just a bad attempt to drive traffic in lowercase. my thoughts: you should try using some capital letters and proof reading your tweets.)

“Join me on Blip.fm, it’s like Twitter for music” (I wasn’t sure if Blip.fm was like Twitter for music after getting this a thousand times. Now I’m convinced. Thanks!)

“Your small business can grow much larger if you had a bigger client base http://twttr.me/dS4″ (It’s always about size isn’t it?)

Sorry for the little rant (again), but if you want to be effective at marketing or getting me to visit your website, try building a relationship instead of getting in my face as soon as we meet. You wouldn’t do that in person (I hope), so why does it seem alright to do it on Twitter?

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1. Where 2.0: Online videos of Where 2.0 talks

I also get lots of emails with subject lines like “Time to Sleep Well” or “Succeed in a BIG Way”. And wow, to my surprise, when I opened these they were ads for, you guessed it, Viagra and Cialis that looked like this:

Tricky eh? I would have never expected a Viagra ad with the word BIG in the subject line. So, OK, this is really lame spam and I don’t think anyone reads these and I don’t think the senders really expect to get many responses either. But what about “spammers” who expect to get responses to their unsolicited ads they send to us. I get plenty of email from advertisers who believe that I’m really interested in their products or services. They may be a legitimate company selling a real product or service, but did I ever ask for this? No I didn’t. So why do companies waste their time trying to sell where they don’t have permission to sell? The better question is, why do companies try to sell to me if we don’t have a relationship?

This little romp through my junk mail folder made think of how companies and individuals are trying to sell on social networks these days. I can’t tell you how many people follow me on Twitter and lead off their conversations with me with a direct message that reads something like: “Thanks for following me. Now turn your Twitter account into a cash machine! http://somelamelink.com” or “Want to know the secret to SEO success, check out http://seo_loudmouth.com” and my recent favorite “Thanks for following me, Chris! Squirrel Chair Feeders are both entertaining and I donate proceeds to Make-A-Wish”.

I mean really, what’s with the rush to sell to me or anyone else on Twitter? Why is it that so many people and companies think that their very first interaction with folks on Twitter has to be an opportunity to sell? Why not get to me know me first? Chris Brogan put it very well when he Tweeted this about to trying to sell too soon: “In relationship terms, I’m reaching out to shake your hand and you’re trying to put your tongue in my mouth.” I couldn’t have put it better myself. Slow down partner, can’t we just be friends first?

So here’s my message to social media marketers and those who are trying to sell on Twitter: Do me and everyone else on Twitter a favor; we don’t mind if you’re trying to sell or do your marketing using Twitter, but please stop sticking your tongue in my mouth every chance you get. I’m just going to end up ignoring you anyway and you’ll be wasting both your time and mine. The better approach would be to work hard on building trust and relationships in the social media world. Then, if I really like you and what you have to say, I’ll come to you for whatever it is you’re selling…and maybe I’ll even kiss you.

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1. Social Media and Your Business
2. The power of social media and word of mouth
3. What the F**k is Social Media?
4. Enough with Bad Auto DM’s Already

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1. Social Media and Your Business
2. Social Media Marketers: Please take your tongue out of my mouth!
3. The power of social media and word of mouth

Back in February, I spent a few weeks on my back with a herniated disk and pinched nerves in my neck. (Yes, it hurt). One of the worst parts of spending time in bed was missing my daily indulgence of visiting Starbuck’s for my coffee in the morning. One morning, my amazing wife brought me home a nice, hot Starbucks mocha. I usually don’t look to my coffee cup for inspiration, but laid up and having not much else to do, I started reading “The Way I See It” on the side of the cup. I really liked the quote, but, in a Vicodin-Espresso induced haze, I lost track of the cup and forgot the quote. Well, here I am a few months later sitting in Starbuck’s sipping a mocha and what do you know, I got the same cup. Well, not the very same cup, that would be kind of gross, but I think you get what I mean. I thought, hmmm, maybe karma is telling me something. Here’s what my cup said:

“The irony of commitment is that it’s deeply liberating - in work, in play, in love. The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade as rational hesitation. To commit is to remove your head as the barrier to your life.” - Anne Morriss

Well, I’d have to say I’m glad I found this cup again and I’m glad I found it now. I’ve been very non-committed to writing my blog in the past few weeks. Things have been swirling around in my professional and personal life and I just couldn’t focus. My blogging and Tweeting had been taking too much time away from my personal life. So, I stopped really putting my all into my blog. In fact, I stopped writing all together for almost a month. Then I realized I missed it. Somehow, I needed to commit to a better balance between my real life and my “online life”. So, that’s commitment number one: I’ll continue to blog and Twitter but with a much greater respect for my personal time. It’s a commitment to those that I love and a commitment to all of you who read my blog (and yes, I love all of you too, but in a different way). OK, got that out of the way and I’m feeling good. I’m breathing again!

But more than that, this cup really woke me up (and not just from the double espresso) to my growing desire to write a book “one of these days“. I’ve had this idea in my mind for a book about the power of collaboration and it’s impact on innovation in successful organizations for some time and I’ve kept putting it off for a variety of “really good” reasons. Hmmm, can you say internal critic and fear? Apparently I can’t, so I did what Anne Morriss said, and I dressed it up as rational hesitation. I had a million excuses why I couldn’t start writing it. Well, I think I’m going to go out on a limb here and free myself by finally, openly committing to writing this book that I’ve had inside me for a long time. Aaaah, I feel better already. Two big commitments and I didn’t die, I didn’t implode, I’m still here. And because I believe deeply in commitment, I feel deeply liberated by openly making these commitments. Wow, what a great feeling!

So, what’s holding you back from doing something you’re passionate about? Maybe today is your day too. Maybe you just need to make a commitment and go for it. I promise, it won’t hurt (unless you’re committing to finally getting that tattoo you’ve always dreamed of). Go ahead and make your commitment right here for everyone else to read. Tell us what you’re passionate about and what you’re going to commit to.

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The Whuffie Factor from Tara Hunt.

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Over the past few months, I have had the good fortune to get to know Bert Decker. He is an amazing person with an incredible background. If you haven’t heard of him before, Bert Decker is a national communications expert, best selling author and entrepreneur. He founded the 100 person communications training company Decker Communications, Inc. He has been featured in the NY Times, Business Week, and on 20/20, as well as being the communications commentator for the NBC TODAY Show for the Presidential Debates. He has been a communications coach to Charles Schwab, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former Mattel CEO’s John Ammerman and Jill Barrad, Olympians Bonnie Blair and Tom Dolan, SF 49er All-Pro Brent Jones, and dozens of other executives And he is the best selling author of “You’ve Got to Be Believed To Be Heard” and “Speaking With Bold Assurance“. Bert graciously agreed to do a ten question interview with me and here are his insights on a wide range of topics.

(1) In your book “You’ve Got to Be Believed to Be Heard” you refer to “The New Communicators”. Can you explain what a new communicator is? Can you give an example of your favorite New Communicator?

New communicators connect with EVERY audience – no matter the setting – in:

• behavior

• content

• interaction

In our Decker Method courses we call it the messenger, the message and the medium – they all are one. A new communicator creates a communication experience that is energized and action oriented.

Three great New Communicators are Steve Jobs (business world), Guy Kawasaki (tech/author world) and Bono (celebrity world.)

(2) So, that covers the good communicators. Who would say is having the most trouble these days as a communicator and why?

• Richard Fuld, Lehman Brothers CEO – closed, arrogant and aloof when he testified to Congress.

• Caroline Kennedy – she lost her bid for the NY Senate seat with a monotone, halting delivery, unfocused message and a mess of ‘ums’ and ‘ahs.’

• Timothy Geithner – stiff and cold. He is not a good messenger for this very important and controversial message.

(3) There has been so much said about Barack Obama’s oratory skills in the past year. Would you consider Barack Obama to be a New Communicator?

No, he’s a good orator, not a great communicator. I’ve reviewed him often (check out Bert’s review here) and it’s fascinating – Obama is President largely because of his 2004 Convention speech, but he STILL does not use the teleprompter well (here’s Bert’s detailed take on Obama’s use of the teleprompter) And when not speechifying, he usually communicates in a professorial manner, with a halting cadence, and also many ums and ahs. Occasionally he is energetic and open and light – but rarely. So ironically, the one who became President because of communication (read oratorical) skills needs to increase his connecting skills.

(4) If you could give one bit of advice to Mr. Obama, what would it be?

• Learn to use the teleprompter so it’s not a ping-pong match – 4 seconds to one side and 4 seconds to the other.

• Leave pauses instead of filling space with non-words.

• Vary rhythm and pacing of voice – energize not professorialize.

(5) You have become a fixture on Twitter in the past year (BTW, I love your Tweets). How do you see the rise of social media tools like Twitter and Facebook impacting communications over the next few years?

I see Twitter (not Facebook) as the dominant communication tool for both text and speaking. It’s a powerful business/personal communication medium in it’s current form as text only, and will become EXPLOSIVE with the right app (the new Nambu is promising – that’s the direction it will be going.) But it will change the face of the speaking environment.

(6) Do you believe there is going to be a new breed of new New Communicators who will use social media tools to connect with people?

Yes and no. First the no – the majority of people will use the text only email/Linked-in/Twitter etc as text only – will not incorporate it holistically.

And yes, the New Communicator will embrace the social media tools (Twitter mostly) in ALL of their communicating environments – but they will be smart about it, and understand there is a difference in text, voice and in person communications – learn the differences and use them intentionally. Most people communicate at the unconscious level – our goal is to make it conscious.

(7) It seems that a big buzz these days is about the use of Twitter at conferences and presentations. What are your thoughts on the rising use of Twitter during presentations?

Twitter is going to be very powerful in expanding (or disrupting) the conference and formal speaking environment. I blogged on that here – but more is yet to come. Big business (most of our clients) are not used to using Twitter in meetings and speeches, but no longer can anyone say ‘laptops down.’ People will Twitter whether you like it or not, so you have to incorporate that in your ‘experience’ and be intentional. Those who become good at it can enhance and expand their speaking – but it will be a rocky road for awhile. Those who use it well will succeed mightily.

(8) You attended SXSW in Austin, TX earlier this year. What were the top insights you gained at SXSW this year?

One of the most amazing conferences I’ve attended (out of thousands!) SXSW Interactive was peak energy, peak connections and peak engagement. 30 meetings going on at a time, 50-75% of people in most meetings/speeches were tweeting on laptops or cells. Podcasts and audios, twitpics and Flip videos and of course tweets were going out to the world by the thousands every minute. More and more conferences will become more like this.

Again, New Communicators must have not only the messenger and the message at peak performance, but also the medium.

Critical point though, that almost ALL neglect is getting video feedback and seeing themselves – so many at SXSW have distracting and nervous habits that it doesn’t matter how good their content or medium use is – they get in their own way. Observed behavior changes. The smart New Communicators at SXSW and all conferences will get themselves on video!

(9) What blogs are you reading most these days and why?

• Well, this one: EdgeHopper - Always well written and lengthy posts on relevant communication subjects – interactive media and personal behavior.

• Presentation Zen - Garr Reynolds is the leader (along with Nancy Duarte) of slide design and communications quality. His posts are in depth, and insightful.

• Seth Godin’s Blog – At first I didn’t like Seth’s text only posts, but then they grew on me for two reasons. They are short and pithy. 80% of them are original and thought provoking. (Pareto’s Law comes into play.)

(10) Who are your favorite follows on Twitter and why?

@ed – a very unusual man of integrity, insight and influence that I have gotten to know well on Twitter.

@OliviaMitchell – great communication research, tips and blog.

@Mashable – always good, up to date links and info on Twitter and the tech world.

But it’s a very tough question because there are so many Twitterers AND blogs that are good. [Chris' note: If you want to follow Bert on Twitter, and I highly recommend it, he's @BertDecker]

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1. Bert Decker: You’ve Got to Be Believed to Be Heard
2. Learning to Speak
3. Twitter and the “New” New Communicators
4. Did we forget how to talk to each other?

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I was working from home yesterday and my 3-year old convinced me to go with him to Story Time at our local library. He’s so cute, I couldn’t resist. I hadn’t been to Story Time in years. In fact, the last time I was at Story Time was back in the early 90’s when I was a regular guest reader at the New York City Public Library. I went to Story Time thinking this’ll be a great half-hour with my little guy. I never thought I’d walk away thinking that I learned some valuable lessons myself. Ah, the expert mind…it always convinces us that we can’t learn from “simple” experiences. But after it was over, and I reflected a bit on Story Time, I realized that there were valuable lessons to take away from it that we can all use in our presentations. Believe it or not, librarians and others who read to children at Story Time may be some of the best presenters in the world, and we’ll never see them on TED or hear much about them (plus they have some of the toughest audiences in the world). If you really want to get your presentation game on, maybe you should start reading books to the itty-bitties at your local library. In any case, here’s what I learned from my trip to the library with my 3-year old:

1. Know your audience

Before you ever even head into your presentation, know who your audience is. In this case, it was 2- and 3-year olds. Understand why they’re there, what they’re hoping to get out of their time with you. And understand who they are. Don’t deliver the same canned presentation to every audience. Work at it, put some energy into it and craft your message and your presentation to your audience.

2. Say hello

You don’t have to sing the hello song to get everyone on the same page, but say something to get your audience into listening mode right off the bat. It doesn’t have to be a formal introduction of who you are; they probably already know that, otherwise they wouldn’t be sitting in the audience. But say or do something interesting to get everyone ready to listen to you.

3. Have a good story to tell

Presentations are about telling stories. We loved stories as kids and we still do as adults. Stories make an impact, they’re memorable. Maybe your entire presentation is one big story or maybe it’s made up of lots of little ones. Either way, it doesn’t matter, but just be sure to tell stories. They sink in much better than facts and figures. Imagine if Goldie Locks were told the same way we present our talks. There would be detailed descriptions and charts about the size, weight, age, and gender of each bear, their general disposition, the specific types of foods and beds that they liked, etc. Boring! Just tell the story already.

4. Use pictures

Your favorite stories when you were a kid had pictures. Imagine a Dr. Seuss book without pictures. Not quite as much fun right? And what exactly would a Crunk-Car, or a Lorax, or a Zumble-Zay mean to you without the pictures to connect the words to your emotions. News flash: We don’t change when we grow up. Vision is our most dominant sense and when you use great pictures and visuals to help your audience emotionally connect to your words, you win and more importantly, your audience wins.

5. Invite audience participation

Show of hands: How many of you have ever been to a presentation where the presenter rambled on and never engaged his or her audience? Oh, that many of you huh? It’s that easy folks. Want to involve and engage your audience: Ask a simple question.  At Story Time yesterday it was this simple to get the kids engaged: “How many of you know what a koala bear is?” The kids were instantly engaged.  For those who knew what a koala was, the anticipation of a story about a koala grew. And for those who didn’t, it was “Wow, we’re going to learn what a koala bear is!” The same thing applies to your audience even if they are all old, balding men. Engage them, get them interested in where you’re taking them.

6. Get your audience moving around

We don’t have to all get up and do the kangaroo dance, but get your audience doing something. Clapping, raising their hands, standing up…anything to keep the blood flowing. And if you’re doing anything for more than an hour, give them breaks to move around. If you’re teaching or doing a workshop, make your exercises include lots of movement. Keep the blood flowing.

7. Have a consistent theme

At Story Time yesterday, the theme was “Pockets”. We read lots of stories about things with pockets. Upon signing in, the kids got nametags shaped like pockets. The songs we sang were about…you guessed it, pockets. The reader was wearing an apron with pockets and so was Moe, her little monkey puppet. While you may not go to these extremes in your presentation, you should have a consistent theme. And by that I mean, have a key point that you’re trying to make. And, make sure that the visual theme of your slides or other visual aids is consistent and compliments your narrative theme.

8. Use your voice(s)

Oh the drone of that monotone speaker! How long can you listen to that for? Listen to a great storyteller and see how they use many voices to tell their story. I’m not implying that you need to be Rich Little or know how to do 100 impersonations. I’m talking about your own voices. Don’t use the same tone and volume throughout your talk. Whisper, shout, talk faster, talk slower. Use your own voices to emphasize points or to grab the attention of your audience. Without even trying, I bet you have at least 8 voices that you can use in your next presentation.

9. Use drama and suspense to create tension

The reader yesterday had a little monkey puppet sidekick with her named Moey. He was wearing an apron with a pocket in front. Here’s how the reader created tension and suspense with the monkey: “Do you know what Moey the monkey likes to keep in his pocket?” You could the see the tension and anticipation build immediately. The kids were all like “What, what, please tell us!” Now for the slow reveal to really create drama and suspense: “He keeps a gemstone…(she slowly takes the gemstone out)…he keeps a cookie…(oh boy, here comes the cookie)…and he keeps…a Golden Key! (using the whispering by the way)” Now the kids are like: “Wow, a Golden Key…I wonder what that’s for!” In your presentations and talks, don’t be in such a rush to pull out the Golden Key. Build some suspense, some tension. It keeps your audience focused on you and what you’re going to say next.

10. Have a memorable moment

Oh, so about that Golden Key: it opened a treasure box where Moey kept all of his favorite toys (see, wait to pull out the Golden Key…it works well in writing too). My little guy is still talking about the treasure box today. It was the single most memorable moment of Story Time yesterday. He didn’t forget it. When you do your presentations, does your audience walk away remembering that treasure box moment or do they walk away with far too much information crammed into their heads to ever remember anything. Make sure you have that magic moment in your presentation that everyone walks away with.

11. Keep it short

Story Time was a mere 20 minutes yesterday. Guess what? That’s about how long the best presentations I’ve ever seen have been too. Take a look at all of the great talks on the TED site. Guess what? They’re all less than 20 minutes! It doesn’t matter if you’re 3-years old or 30-years old, as a species, we tend to have a very short attention span. Depending on the source, the average adult attention span is somewhere between 7 and 9 minutes. John Medina of Brain Rules fame calls it the 10 Minute Rule . According to John, “What happens at the 10-minute mark to cause such trouble? Nobody knows.” We may not know what happens, but it happens. Keep it short, and keep it interesting.

12. Wave goodbye

So maybe you don’t sing a goodbye song, give Moey the Monkey a hug, or wave goodbye to your friends, but you should have a concrete, definite ending to your presentation. It’s part of the natural arc of a story: beginning, middle, and end. Don’t end by saying “So, um, that’s it” or “Well, that’s all the time we have“. End on a strong note that lets the audience know it’s over. And end early if you can. It’s the old performer’s saying: Leave them wanting more. At the end of Story Time my little guy said to me “I can’t wait until the next Story Time.” That’s how you want to end. Make sure your audience leaves saying, “I can’t wait to see that guy present again!”

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GUEST POST FROM LISA BRAITHWAITE:

Lisa Braithwaite

As a blogger, I am constantly needing new ideas for my public speaking blog. Some time ago, I committed to writing six days a week, and I’ve mostly held up that commitment, except when life has intervened, as it so inconveniently does from time to time.

As a speaker and trainer, I’m constantly trying to come up with ways to make my presentations more engaging and to get my message across to my audience. I may use the same basic structure for each presentation, but I’m always tweaking, customizing and making improvements on each one, and looking for good stories, quotes and analogies to bring my message to life.

You might find yourself with mental blocks from time to time when writing and creating, and the frustration can be all-consuming. In fact, that frustration probably sucks out your last little bit of inspiration by focusing all your energy on the black hole in your brain.

I thought I’d share some of the places I get inspiration for my blog posts and presentations, and maybe these ideas will inspire your inspiration!

1. Working out

I work out at a local community college track with killer stadium steps. I’ve also been training to throw discus for masters track meets, reviving the love of a sport I competed in during high school. My discus training has inspired several blog posts about holding yourself back, using practice to train your “muscle memory” for public speaking, and putting all the pieces together when you feel overwhelmed by details.

I’ve been inspired by people at the track who are completely out of shape, working their behinds off in search of fitness. You don’t get better at anything without working at it, public speaking included. I was even inspired once by a saying on a runner’s t-shirt to write a post on giving it all you’ve got as a speaker.

2. Athletes

To take the workout analogies a step further, I love finding similarities between athletes and speakers. During the Olympic trials, I wrote about dealing with failure, trusting your gut, fighting misconceptions, and resting on your laurels.

Other athletic inspiration has come from track meets (psyching yourself up and self-pressure to perform), football (”leaving it on the field”), cycling (the fabulous metaphors of Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen during the Tour de France), and basketball (Pat Summitt’s 1,000 victories in relation to goals, vision and persistence).

I use athlete analogies in my presentations as well, for example, talking about adrenaline and the fact that elite athletes don’t feel pumped up and ready to compete if they don’t have that adrenaline rush and accompanying pre-performance anxiety.

3. Entertainers

I’ve written and spoken about actors who are afraid of public speaking, comedians who cleverly acknowledge when they bomb, and American Idol contestants learning to believe in themselves. I write about performers like Eddie Izzard, David Lee Roth and Rufus Wainwright being memorable, being original and staying focused. Entertainers have many lessons for speakers, and whether I’m watching TV or a live show, I’m always taking notes on how they connect with their audiences, how they prepare, and how they themselves are inspired.

4. Language

I’ve always been fascinated by language, grammar and spelling, so when I come across examples that relate to public speaking and communication, I’m thrilled!

I talk about jargon, clichés, misused words, mispronounced words, and overused words. I’ve discussed metaphors, idioms, analogies, gibberish, and language that confuses rather than clarifies. Speakers need to communicate clearly, concisely and precisely, and paying attention to nerdy topics like these can help accomplish this goal. I read grammar and communication blogs for this inspiration, as well as watching and listening to speakers and performers and watching TV commercials!

These are just my most common areas of inspiration. I’m always noticing what’s going on around me and picking up ideas from what’s happening in my life, so mental blocks are actually quite rare.

I hope you’ll find some inspiration in *my* inspiration, and open your mind to the world around you when searching for topics for your presentations and your writing.

ABOUT LISA BRAITHWAITE

Lisa Braithwaite is a public speaking coach working with individuals and groups to build their skills and confidence as speakers. Her philosophy of public speaking is that it’s fun, it’s an awesome way to express yourself creatively, and that authenticity and passion are worth more than a thousand techniques. She is also the author of Speak Schmeak, a blog about speakers and public speaking.

Before launching her public speaking coaching business in 2005, she worked in the nonprofit sector in Santa Barbara for 16 years as an advocate, educator and trainer, creating and implementing programs, curricula, and training materials for nonprofit organizations. Her areas of expertise in the field of training and education have involved gender equity, domestic violence prevention, media literacy, adult learning principles, and communication skills development

In 1997, she co-founded Body Electric, an organization promoting sports, physical activity and gender equity for women and girls. In 2003, Lisa was honored for her work with Body Electric with the Louise Lowry Davis award, named for a pioneer in women’s sports.

Lisa received her B.A. in Theater from Pomona College and her M.A. in Education from UC Santa Barbara.

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The coolest thing about this workshop was that there was not a computer in sight. The workshop didn’t focus on how to do things in PowerPoint or Keynote. It was not about the tools. It was about learning how to design an effective presentation. In fact, every exercise we did in the workshop was done in analog mode. Garr and Nancy did an amazing job of making people stop and think about the design and content decisions that they make even before they fire up PowerPoint. Garr kicked the workshop off by helping us to understand how to think like designers. His main point was that we are all creative, we are all designers…we just don’t know it. He talked about the beautiful Zen idea of beginner’s mind and how we can use it to unleash our creativity. And by the way, if you’ve never heard Garr’s impression of Yoda, it’s spot on. Here are Garr’s top ten tips on how to think like a designer:

1. It’s not about tools
2. Start in analog mode
3. Lose the fear and take a risk
4. Look for the story
5. Put yourself in their shoes
6. Show restraint
7. Vision trumps all other senses
8. Aim for a high signal-to-noise ratio
9. Embrace empty space
10. Learn to see the lessons all around you

Nancy took over the next session and talked about the value of stories in your presentation and how they connect you with your audience. She emphasized that presentations are about creating ideas, not creating slides. The best takeaway from this session was the Presentation Slidemap. It’s a very simple tool designed to make you think about who your audience is and who you, as the speaker, are to them. The tool also helps you to map out how to best reach your audience before, during, and after your presentation. But my favorite part of this tool is the section of it that deals with the Big Idea…the story and call to action. It makes you think about where you want to move your from to where you want to move them to. It’s the story arc of your presentation. The other cool thing this tool helps you do is identify where in your presentation and slide deck you have your analytical information, your emotional spots, and your S.T.A.R. Moment (Something They’ll Always Remember). This really helps you understand the flow of emotion and information during your presentation and helps you arrange your analytic and emotional components for the most impact on your audience. Between Duarte’s Presentation Slidemap and the Decker Grid that I learned about last year, you can’t go wrong in your presentations.

After a nice lunch with some other workshop participants, I took a walk around Duarte Design’s building to see how they worked. It’s an awesome collaborative workspace and you could easily see teams of designers working closely together. Someday, I’ll have to ask Nancy to if she’ll do an interview on the use of collaborative spaces in building successful businesses and designs, but that’s a topic for another blog post.

In the next session, Nancy dove head first into how to display data, how to use diagrams, and just some general design goodness. One of my favorite exercises in this session was a wordstorming exercise. The class was divided in two and each half was given a typical slide cliche…our group had the water ripple cliche. The idea of the exercise was to have our group use a whiteboard and pen to write down words in a free association manner that led us away from the cliche. Very cool exercise. Some of the words made no sense but you just throw them up them and try to get away from the obvious cliche. What this does is help you stop, step away from the computer, and really put some energy into thinking about your design decisions. It’s helps you get out that box of stereotypes and into the creative solution. And when you do that, you really stand out from the crowd when you’re speaking.

Garr wrapped up the day talking about the actual delivery of your presentation. In addition to all of his great stories, he also showed quite a few of my favorite TED videos to demonstrate how the best-of-the-best present. What I love about Garr, and Nancy for that matter, is that neither of them ever said “This is good” or “That is bad”, they simply presented a framework or structure to work within that really creates the freedom to explore your ideas. There were no formulas, no processes to follow, but instead they presented an approach for how think about your ideas and presentations from a different point of view.

It was really a great workshop and both Nancy and Garr are very engaging presenters as well as excellent teachers. They’re both extremely knowledgeable about their subject area, but both also have a great sense of humor and calmness that really helped them connect with the class. Nancy and Duarte Design have ongoing 1-day Slide:ology workshops throughout 2009 and I would highly recommend that if you missed Presentation Reboot, you try to attend one of Duarte’s workshops this year, you won’t regret it.

Here are some interesting resources that I found about during the workshop from Nancy, Garr and my classmates:

Websites:

Presentation Zen: Garr’s blog

Slide:ology: Nancy’s blog

iStockphoto.com: Great resource for professional stock photos

GraphJam.com: User submitted graphs and data.

BrainRules.net: John Medina’s awesome blog and website about his 12 principles for thriving at work, home and school.

Kuler: An awesome place to pick up some great color palettes

VoiceThread.com: A great tool for collaborative and distributed teams

The Best Job in the World: Check out the shortlisted applicants

Books:

Of course, Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds and Slide:ology by Nancy Duarte

Show Me the Numbers by Stephen Few

Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath

The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda (one of my favs)

Related posts:

1. Presentation: Becoming Agile
2. Abe Lincoln: The Original Presentation Zen?
3. Guest Post: 7 Ways to Use Twitter to Engage Your Audience
4. The 5 Step PowerPoint Recovery Program
5. GeoGathering 2008 Presentation Online

Seth is an amazing guy and it’s statements like these that make him so likable and so successful at what he does. He’s a great storyteller and has been an absolute inspiration to me. So, please, enjoy the video, and if you read yesterday’s blog post, take my advice and listen. Thanks for the great interview Andrew.

Andrew Warner

Andrew Warner is an ambitious internet entrepreneur. In 1998 he used credit card debt to launch Bradford & Reed, an online greeting card company which reached annual revenues of over $38 million. After selling the company in 2003, he launched Mixergy.com, where ambitious startups learn from experienced entrepreneurs.

This video is also available on Vimeo.

Click to SUBSCRIBE to the EdgeHopper Podcast in:

Related posts:

1. More Seth Godin “Tribes” Goodness
2. Get Seth Godin’s Tribes for FREE
3. Seth Godin and persistence
4. Tribes Seminar MP3 Download
5. Guest Post: Where there’s people, there’s problems

Maybe we can learn an awful lot from Emerson’s words. And maybe we can apply these words on a less ethereal level. Let us be silent that we may hear each other. As executives, managers, mentors, and team members our silence can be an incredibly powerful tool. Sure, I like to write a lot about presentations and speaking, but sometimes, allowing silence to fill the room allows for other voices to be heard. Important voices. Those of your staff, your peers, your teammates.

I think that today, it has become commonplace to value the sound of our voice and our own opinions over those of others. Most people want to be heard more than they want to listen to others. We do it in meetings, on our blogs, on Twitter. It’s all about us isn’t it? Well, not if you want to be really successful. By quieting our anxious voices and letting silences exist in our daily conversations and meetings, we allow others to be heard and to fill our own world with new information. It allows us to widen our world view. We gain insights we wouldn’t have if we didn’t take the time be quiet and listen.

This skill, or rather, this discipline is really important for managers. In an article for StickyMinds, Esther Derby once wrote:

“In a social situation, a 50/50 balance between talking and listening feels comfortable. But management conversations are different. Managers need to understand how people are working, and where they need help. Managers need to understand the status of work, risks, and obstacles. 30 percent talking and 70 percent listening is a more appropriate balance for management conversations.”

I think Esther hit on the head in her statement. As managers, we should be listening more than speaking. Now, that doesn’t mean you wait around for others to say something. You have to engage people to get them talking, and that means asking questions instead of dictating answers. When you ask your questions, allow silence to fill the space to allow the conversation to breath naturally instead of forcing and rushing answers.

By using silence and increasing your listening skills, you can help create a dynamic, innovative environment.   If people don’t think their ideas are heard or accepted, they’ll stop presenting them, effectively reducing your team’s knowledge base and innovative ideas. You want to open the space up to allow innovative ideas to flow, and by talking less and listening more, you can do it. And if you’re still more concerned with your own success than that of your team, here’s a nugget for you too, a key trait of the most influential people is facility with listening and understanding another’s perspective. So, maybe it’s time we all started talking a bit less and started listening more.

So, how do you start listening better? Here’s some great advice from Jamie Walters, the founder and Chief Vision & Strategy Officer at Ivy Sea, Inc. in San Francisco, CA.

Be present

• Resist distractions (noises, interruptions, fidgeting, prejudices, etc.).
• Don’t do five things at once. Do one: listen to the person with whom you’re speaking.
• Demonstrate your full attention by leaning forward slightly, focusing your eyes on the speaker’s face, and trying not to fidget or glance away too frequently.
• Follow the golden rule. Take a moment to realize that every person is important and deserves your attention. How does it feel to talk with someone who doesn’t seem to be listening, or be ignored or treated disrespectfully?

Bracket

• Keep an open mind and be flexible to others’ ideas; release your need to be right, if only temporarily. Our need to be right can cause us to be contentious, or even inflammatory.
• Don’t tune out because you disagree. You just have to listen and understand, not agree.
• Don’t jump to conclusions before you’ve heard the whole message.
• If you find yourself reacting to what another person says, your body language will communicate your reaction. Try saying, “You can probably see I’m reacting a bit, but it’s important to me to understand your point of view. Please tell me more about ?”

Reframe

• Ensure your understanding by saying something like, “I want to make sure I understood you correctly. You’re saying ?” or “So your concern (or idea) is ?”

No related posts.

Guest Post by Jurgen Appelo:

I once read that “managing is harder than programming, because making people do what is needed is far more difficult than making computers do what is needed”. (Don’t flame me if you don’t agree. I’m quoting from an unknown source here.)

This quote kept running through my mind when I recently encountered a number of, well… let’s call them disciplinary challenges, like…

• Not being at a meeting, without notice, despite having accepted the request,
• Not keeping systems or task boards up-to-date with latest task/story statuses,
• Not linking code or time registration to issues or user story numbers,
• Not actively checking if there’s overrun on a budget,
• Not responding to a show stopper problem within promised response time,
• Not storing project documents in the shared repository,
• Etc…

Is this a case of hanging out the dirty laundry? Not really. We’re all people, employees and managers alike. We’re not computers, we all make mistakes. If you don’t have similar problems in your organization then I will assume you’re working with robots, not with human beings.

Still, they are problems nonetheless. If my computers were this unreliable I would throw them out the window. No, actually I would carry them all the way up to the tea room in our office building, and then throw them out the window. But we don’t do that with employees anymore these days. That’s because managers have discovered how to be humans themselves, and they can understand the reasons for people’s non-disciplined behavior, with excuses like: I-Didn’t-Know-This-Was-A-Rule, Sorry-I-Forgot, There-Was-Too-Much-On-My-Mind, I-Was-Kept-Busy-With-Some-Major-Problem, I-Was-Sick, My-Dog-Was-Sick, My-Dog-Ate-My-Agenda, My-Dog-Ran-Away, and of course My-Dog-Died.

So, we all understand being human. But what to do about the problems?

One solution that people often come up with is that some supervisor should be made responsible to inspect everything. This is of course step 1 on The Road To Bureaucracy, and it is a direction that agile and lean people fervently argue against. However, other people argue that some of those steps are nevertheless very useful.

For example: Mary and Tom Poppendieck, famous for their books on Lean Software Development, argue that inspection to find defects is waste, and they call for zero-inspection. They claim that resources should be spent on preventing problems instead of fixing them, because it’s cheaper.

On the other hand: Tom and Kai Gilb, famous for their work on Software Inspection (among other things), teach people how to inspect documents to find and measure defects. They even have certificates for inspection, like Inspection Leaders and Inspection Process Owners!

What’s going on here?

Can these different viewpoints be aligned? Can I earn myself a certificate for doing zero inspections? Or do we have a chance of witnessing a clash between the two most celebrated family duos in software development? An epic battle between father and son Gilb against husband and wife Poppendieck?

Well, I admit that would be a sight to see, but my guess is that their viewpoints are simply two sides of one and the same coin. Yes, preventing problems is cheaper than fixing problems, but only for 95% of the problems. In fact, it has been noted before that zero defects is the wrong approach, because preventing those last few problems is far too expensive. Which means that we have to allow some problems to flow to the next phase in the process, where detecting and fixing them can be cheaper. I discussed the staged approach to discipline in one of my earlier articles:

1. People have to show a high level of self-discipline;
2. They have a coach to help them in becoming more disciplined;
3. Their discipline must be subjected to peer pressure;
4. There should be tools to assist in mistake-proofing the process;
5. Last of all, there might be some supervisor doing regular inspections;
6. And if everything fails, the dirt will land on the manager’s desk.

It is almost always cheaper to solve problems higher up in this stack. Supervising and inspecting is the final gate where problems can be detected and prevented from ending up at the manager’s desk, or worse… the customer’s desk. Fewer inspections are better. But zero-inspection is like full code coverage. It is a lofty goal that, in practice, is unattainable because of its exponential costs. There will always be some work left for some supervisor to inspect, certified or not.

So, in solving the problems I mentioned earlier, before giving work to a supervisor, I will try and make sure that I have done all I can to prevent needing him in the first place!

And of course, the principles of discipline apply to my own work as a blog writer as well… juicy title: check… teasing opening paragraph: check… re-reading ten times: check… silly jokes: check… spell-checking: check… hyperlinks and mark-up: check… great pictures: check… making fun of celebrities: check… conclusion: check… OK, ready for the next phase… Chris, will you inspect this post please?

About Jurgen Appelo

Jurgen is the Chief Information Officer at ISM eCompany, rated (a while ago) as the #1 fastest growing technology company in The Netherlands. As a manager, he leads a horde of 100 software developers, development managers, project managers, business consultants, quality managers, service managers and kangaroos, some of which he hired accidentally.  He also write a blog called NOOP.NL: A Guide to Development, Management, Things & Stuff.

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2. Guest Post: 7 Ways to Use Twitter to Engage Your Audience
3. Guest Post: Andrew Warner and Seth Godin Talk Tribes and a Whole Lot More

Most people associate improv with acting or comedy. But, you don’t have to be an actor or a comedian to apply improvisation to your work. In fact, I think there is more opportunity for improvisation in the professional world than most people think. Gary LaBranche of the Association Forum of Chicagoland says:

“Board meetings and committee meetings, dialogue with colleagues and other everyday situations give professionals plenty of opportunities for improvisational responses. Improv is all about adapting to constant change and unexpected situations, which is familiar territory for most professionals.”

I think Gary’s statement is right on the money. We have more opportunities to use improv as professionals than we realize. In fact, a few weeks ago, I wrote about Pixar and their use of improv in their creative process. Pixar boils down their use of improv to two essential principles:

1. Accept every offer. You don’t know where that offer is going to go. But one thing is for sure: If you don’t accept that offer, it’s going nowhere! So you have a sure thing on one hand: a dead end. And you have possibility on the other.

2. Make you partner look good. That means that everybody on your team is going to try to make you look good and vice versa. It’s about saying “Here’s where I’m starting. What can I do with this?”.

I think Pixar was able to break down their use of Improv into these two principles because of their long, shared experience with improv. I like these two essentials principles of improvisation for innovation, but wanted to expand on a few other principles for teams and organizations that are just starting to experiment or have never used improv before. So, to add to Pixar’s principles, I would advise those new at improv think about these as well:

1. Keep questioning what works. Good is the enemy of great. When something is really awful, we know we need to fix it, and we usually do. But when something is good, we settle. We don’t necessarily think about how we can make it better. So, take a look at what you do everyday. Consider the things that are good and ask yourself or your team “Can this be better?”

2. Be a risk taker and take chances. Sure, you can do things the way you’ve always done it. And you’ll probably get predictable results and that might be good enough for you. But if you want to be innovative, you need to break through barriers, take risks, take chances. You may not always be successful when you take chances, but if you don’t, you won’t ever have the chance to really innovate. The most innovative companies and creative people have failed more than they have succeeded. But, when they did succeed, it’s been with market-changing and world-changing innovations.

3. Always be changed by what is said and what happens. Innovative people and innovative teams always uncover new information. But more than uncovering new information, they learn to react to that new information. Instead of locking up when change comes along, these innovative people let that change inspire new ideas and let what unfolds next guide them on. They welcome and thrive on change. And they allow themselves to be changed. They have the beginner’s mind and are always able to learn and change.

4. Create shared, dynamic plans and agendas. The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry right? We’ve all heard that a thousand times before. So, why stick to a plan that is going awry? The answer…DON’T. Abandon them to serve the reality of what is right there in front of you. That’s right, ABANDON them. Let your plans and agendas emerge in real-time in response to what’s right there in front of you.

5. Be fully present and engaged. So, you get your team to abandon static, concrete plans. You’ve gotten out of planning and into being. But, this comes with a caveat. To do this, your team has to be completely engaged and have their attention completely focussed. You have to always be ready and able to ask the question “Yes and?“. You have to be engaged and present to always be asking this question. 

6. Keep moving forward. When you’re constantly in the flow of improv and innovation, you can’t stop to analyze. It slows you down and stifles creativity. When something unexpected happens, take advantage of this new situation and move forward with it. If something goes wrong, learn the lesson and move forward. The whole idea is to keep moving forward. The road behind you is not the road that leads to innovation. Keep moving forward.

7. Understand the good of the whole. When you personally understand what is good for the whole, you have a deeper understanding of when to hang back, when to grab the reigns and how to grab them, and how to support the other members of your team. When the whole team has this attitude and understanding, it creates a truly collaborative, improvisational environment.

8. Lose control. We don’t want anyone on our team to be the star or orchestrator. We want to make sure that no one gets into the “controlling mind“. As soon as one person assumes control or seeks the spotlight, the creativity, improv, and innovation of the team suffers. We need to lose the control aspect of the team and allow everyone to respond to the moment.

9. Self-organize. Creativity is naturally a self organizing system. Teams that allow themselves to explore and play find this self-organization with ease. The team may set some very basic guidelines of play, but once they do, their roles and organization emerge naturally and creativity flourishes. This type of self-organization allows all kinds of things to be possible.

From my own personal experience, the most innovative teams I’ve ever worked on embraced these basic principles of improv. In fact, a few years ago, I worked on a truly creative, innovative team. That team always asked the question “What else can we do with this?”. We opened our minds to all possibilities. There were many times we said, “We’ve never done this before”. Often, we had no idea how the idea would play out. But we always accepted the offer to see where it would go. Sometimes we failed. But, we learned and moved on. And, when we were successful, we produced some of the most innovative software the mapping world had ever seen. I don’t think we ever tried to be improvisational or purposely forced these improv principles. It emerged naturally on a team full of incredible talent with no egos, and I think that made all the difference in the world.

Related posts:

1. Pixar’s Randy Nelson on Learning and Working in the Collaborative Age
2. Innovative design is simple
3. Short duration teams
4. Tools for Distributed Teams
5. If scrum only had a heart

Today, the incredible organization Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres) is trying very hard to bring attention to this tragedy in the Congo through their program Condition: Critical, Voices from the War in Eastern Congo. Condition: Critical is a multi-media initiative launched by Doctors Without Borders aiming to bring global attention to the humanitarian consequences of the intensifying war in the Congo.  Through testimonies, photos, and video, Condition: Critical goes beyond headlines and news reports to document how civilians are struggling to survive in Congo’s North and South Kivu provinces, Ituri province, and the Haut-Uélé region - where violence, displacement, and sexual violence are mainstays of daily life.

In addition to these efforts to bring this crisis into view for the world, Doctors Without Borders continue to carry out emergency surgery, treating injuries including gunshot wounds and burns; run mobile clinics to reach those who have fled to safer, more remote areas; provide health care in hospitals and health centers; respond to epidemics like cholera; provide medical care to victims of sexual violence; and provide psychological support for those traumatized by what they have experienced. The scale of this humanitarian crisis in the Congo is extremely large. In 2007, Doctors Without Borders employed more than 2000 field staff and spent more than 39 million euros to fund its projects in the country, most of them coming from private donations.

I personally implore you to please, at the very least, watch the video clip here and if you feel moved to help, please visit the Condition: Critical website or the Doctors Without Borders site to volunteer or donate whatever you can to help these amazing people on their difficult but important mission.

“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.” - The Dalai Lama

The Girl Effect.  Global Oneness.  (Red)Wire.  Starbucks. People Doing Good Things.

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Profile Dashboards

For each of your multiple-profiles that you manage with HootSuite, you can view an individual profile dashboard:

There are some basic tabs in the dashboard that allow you to view all of your updates, replies and direct messages related to each profile. For each Tweet in the list, you can reply, direct message or retweet easily using the small icons on the top right of each Tweet. You can also view all of the updates you’ve sent and filter the results by those you sent today, this week, this month or this year. And, you can filter the Tweets you see in the Sent tab by specific date ranges.

SCHEDULED TWEETS

You’ll notice a Pending tab in the profile dashboard. This allows you to see all of the pending scheduled Tweets related to this profile. You can see what time the Tweet is scheduled to be posted and you also have the ability to edit the Tweet before it is sent, set an e-mail notification for a scheduled Tweet or delete it before it’s Tweeted.

Speaking of scheduled Tweets, yes, you can schedule Tweets with HootSuite. It’s very easy. Simply create a new Tweet from a profile. In the new Tweet dialog, enter the text for the Tweet, enter a URL to shorten if you need to, and then use the scheduler at the bottom right. Click the Later radio button, set the date and time for your Tweet and if you want an email notification when the Tweet is sent, check the alert me box. Click submit and you’ve scheduled a Tweet to be sent. The newly scheduled Tweet will now show up in your Pending tab on the profile dashboard. This is a great feature if you have specific times you’d like to send Tweets. I’ve used it to send Tweets at times when I’m flying. I can still Tweet even when I’m not there!

TWEET STATISTICS

One of the coolest features of HootSuite is its statistics about each of your Tweet’s click-throughs. When you create a Tweet, you have the option of using HootSuite’s URL shortener ow.ly. If you shorten your URLs with ow.ly, HootSuite can track the number of clicks each of these shortened URLs receives once it’s been Tweeted. When you click on the Stats tab in the profile dashboard, you get a view of of the aggregate statistics for all of your Tweets. These can be filtered by stats for today’s Tweets as well as Tweets from this week, this month, and this year. You can also filter Tweet statistics by specified date ranges.

You get some cool stats like total daily clicks on all of your Tweets, where those clicks came from, and what the top referrers were. It’s not overly robust, but if you’re looking to get an idea if your followers are clicking through on your URLs, this will get you there. By the way, thanks to the Twitter army for clicking some URLs for me so I could show you this sample click data (you know who you are, so, thank you). In addition to getting some basic stats, HootSuite also shows your most popular Tweets based on clicks.

If you want to dig in deeper on your Tweet stats, you can get statistics for individual Tweets as well. First, go to the profile dashboard, and click on the Sent tab. On the right side of each Tweet you’ll notice a little blue bar chart. Clicking on the bar chart brings up the statistics for each individual Tweet. In this example you can see a few days worth of data for a single Tweet.

You can mouse over the days to see specific stats for each Tweet. You can also click and drag over the chart to dynamically define the date range on the statistics chart.

TWEET SEARCHES

HootSuite has integrated Twitter’s search functionality. You can use the HootSuite search to search through your own Tweets or the entire public timeline. If you’ve used Twitter search before, this shouldn’t be too foreign for you. The nice thing is that HootSuite saves your keywords as buttons so you can use them again for future searches. It also provides some out-of-the-box buttons for replies (@yourprofile) and Tweets from your profile (from: yourprofile).

If you’ve never used Twitter search, here are some ways you can used Twitter’s search syntax to find what you’re looking for:

The HootSuite Hootlet

The last cool feature of HootSuite is its Hootlet bookmark toolbar applet. To install the Hootlet, just drag the Hootlet logo to your bookmark toolbar. Currently, Hootlet works in FireFox, Safari, and Internet Exporer.

Once it’s on your bookmark toolbar, just click it to quickly Tweet about the pages you’re browsing. When you click the Hootlet, it will open a Create Tweet window. First, select the profile you want to Tweet from if you have multiple profiles.

After selecting your profile, HootSuite pre-populates the Tweet dialog for you with the title of the page you are browsing, it automatically shortens the URL with ow.ly and appends it to the end of your Tweet. You can edit the Tweet and the URL if you want. You can also decide if you want to send the Tweet now or schedule it for later. Click on submit and you’re done.

So, there you have it, a guided tour of all of the features in the current version of HootSuite. Hope you start using it soon.

Related posts:

1. How to Use HootSuite: Part 1
2. How to Use Tweetdeck: The Ultimate Twitter Client
3. Guest Post: 7 Ways to Use Twitter to Engage Your Audience
4. How to Get (and Keep) Followers on Twitter
5. Who to Follow on Twitter

GUEST POST FROM OLIVIA MITCHELL:

Olivia Mitchell

Audience engagement and participation is a common goal for presenters. But participation in particular can be hard to get by traditional means. People enjoy the comfort zone of being passive in the audience and often need significant prodding to do anything.

But now we have a new tool to get engagement - that’s Twitter. Many presenters are scared of presenting while people are twittering. But as Dean Shareski says:

The more I’m allowed to interact and play with the content the more engaged and ultimately the more learning happens.

Twitter makes it easy to engage. There’s not the risk of humiliation which is always present when you say something out loud. And if there’s a power heirarchy in the room, it gets flattened somewhat - everybody has 140 characters to have their say.

So rather than seeing the Twitter back channel as an intimidating third force in your presentation, embrace it.

Later this month, I’m going to be presenting remotely from New Zealand at PresentationCamp in San Francisco. I’m going to experiment with using Twitter as a channel to get active participation from my audience.

Here’s a variety of ways that you could use Twitter to engage your audience.

1. Introductions

If you would normally get people in your audience to introduce themselves, why not do it via twitter. Many people dread the round-robin introduction - doing it on twitter is quicker and less onerous.

2. Poll your audience

If you haven’t been able to find out about your audience before the presentation (which I do recommend), then ask a question and get them to respond on Twitter. In the past, I’ve seen presenters ask their audience what they want to get out of the presentation by going round the room and writing it up on a flipchart or whiteboard. This can get tedious. Ask out-loud, but get the responses on twitter. Ta-da. Instant recorded feedback.

3. Encourage questions through twitter

Instead of waiting till the end for questions, encourage people to tweet their questions as soon as they occur to them.

4. Active engagement with the substance of your presentation

My session at PresentationCamp is on developing the core message of a presentation. My plan is to have people tweet their core messages (which conveniently should be under 140 characters long) as they develop them through the session. How could you get your audience engaging, rather than just listening, with the substance of your presentation?

5. Encourage audience members to add their own ideas to yours

The best presentations are the ones that spark insights and ideas for your audience. Encourage them to tweet these ideas.

6. Get input and feedback from your audience

Consultation-type meetings have always been tricky. I’ve used flipcharts, post-it notes, forms for people to fill in. With a twitter-enabled audience, all that paraphernalia will be a thing of the past.

7. Gather evaluations

Presenters have already realised that twitter is a great way to get real-time evaluations by reviewing the stream of tweets that happened while you were presenting.

Paul Gillin Having recently waited six months to get audience evaluations from one presentation, I can tell you that the immediacy of the tweeted feedback was wonderful.

So make it official - at the end of your presentation - ask your audience to tweet their evaluation of the presentation.

Practical stuff

To create a stream of tweets just for your presentation, you’ll need to create a special hashtag for your presentation and then use an application that tracks just those tags (hashtags.org, spy, eventtrack, twitter search).

You may also want to display the tweet stream on a screen so that everyone - including you - can easily see it. If you want the stream to be on display all the time, you’ll need a second laptop, datashow and screen. But you could also display the stream at certain breaks in your presentation, in which case a second laptop plugged into the datashow will do fine.

Your thoughts

Have you used Twitter to engage your audience? What ideas do you have for how it could be used?

About Olivia Mitchell

Olivia Mitchell is a presentation trainer and blogger from New Zealand.  Olivia blogs at Speaking about Presenting. Visit her blog for more tips on how to prepare and deliver an engaging presentation.

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5. How to Use Tweetdeck: The Ultimate Twitter Client

Manage Multiple Twitter Profiles

One of the first things you’ll notice about my HootSuite dashboard is that there are multiple Twitter profiles being managed from my HootSuite account (two are fakes I’m using for this demo).

From, the HootSuite dashboard, we can get a quick glimpse of the recent activity on each profile. You can also quickly create a new Tweet from any of the profiles by clicking on the Create New Tweet button on each profile. Adding a new profile to your HootSuite account is as easy as clicking the Add Twitter Profile button in the upper right and filling in the short Add New Twitter Profile dialog:

You’ll notice that the dialog allows you to select multiple-editors for the profile, a feature I’ll discuss a little later. The ability to monitor and manage several Twitter profiles from one centralized location is great, especially if you’re managing a personal profile and other profiles for your company, blog or website. You can manage your profile settings in the Settings area. Simply click Settings in the upper right, and then click on the Manage Profiles tab. From here, you can synchronize your profiles with Twitter and synchronize your avatar as well (something you’ll have to do the first time you set up a profile, unless you like the default Twitter avatar 0_o). You can also edit individual profile login credentials and the editors on the profile. And finally, you can add a new profile or delete any existing profiles from here as well.

Multiple Editors/Users

While we’re on the settings screen, let’s take a look at the multiple editor feature in HootSuite. This feature allows you to create multiple users on your HootSuite account. Once a user is created, they can be assigned to any or all of the profiles on the account. Again, this is particularly useful if you manage a personal profile and a corporate profile. For instance, I may want to manage and track my own personal profile as well as one that I Tweet on for my company. But, I may want other people from my company to be able to Tweet and see stats, etc., for the corporate account, but not my personal account. No problem with HootSuite. Just add them as users and assign them as editors to only the corporate account. Here’s how it works. First, go to the Settings screen and click on Manage Users tab:

Adding a new user is as simple as clicking the Add User button and completing this dialog:

And voila, a new user on the account:

You can now see we have an account Admin (Chris Spagnuolo) and three editors (Dave, Ted, and Luke) that we can assign to our profiles on the account. The account admin by default can Tweet from and access all profiles on the account. So, let’s assign some editors to the profile called 101_owls. We simply return to the Settings screen, click the Manage Profiles tab, click Edit on the 101_owls profile and check the boxes next to the editors we want to allow for the profile.

Done. Now, just Save Changes and Dave and Ted the Editors can now send Tweets and access stats and other information for the 101_owls profile.

Let’s stay on the settings screen and check out the other features you can manage for your entire HootSuite account.

General Account Management

Clicking on the Account tab gives you access to your general account settings. No big surprises here: manage account name, profile info, time zones, email addresses, etc. But one cool feature you’ll notice is the little checkbox that says Enable Auto Initial. This is a nifty little feature that comes in really handy when you have multiple editors. By checking the box and adding your initials, HootSuite pre-populates your Tweets with your initials. If you want keep track of who Tweeted what, definitely use this feature.

Google AdSense Support

The other cool thing you’ll find on the Account tab is support for Google AdSense. You can generate money from your tweets by adding Google AdSense code to enable ads on your Tweet links when you use HootSuite’s ow.ly URL shortener. Simply set up a Google AdSense account if you don’t already have one, set up a 234X60 banner ad, copy the AdSense code and paste it in your account settings like this:

After you enter your Google AdSense code, you can select which profiles you want to apply AdSense to. When you add your Google AdSense code and use the URL shortener from an active AdSense profile, HootSuite adds a banner to the linked website with some ads from Google. Half the time, the banner contains your ads and half the time, it will contain HootSuite’s ads. The banners look like this when linked to from the ow.ly URL shortener:

Tweet Your RSS Feed

The last tab in the settings area is the RSS/Atom Feeds tab. This tab allows you to send automated Tweets when your RSS feed is updated. This is really great if you’re a blogger and want to send a Tweet out to announce your latest blog post. To add your feed for auto-Tweeting, simply click the Add Feed button and fill in the requested information.

You’ll notice that you can select the frequency of Tweets for your RSS updates. You can select 1 through 5 Tweets for selected time intervals that range from every hour to 24 hours. I would recommend not being annoying and doing no more than 1 Tweet every 3 hours. More than that and I think you start to look spammy. Aside from Tweet frequency, you can also prepend these automated Tweets with whatever you like. Just remember that your RSS item title is going to be the Tweet text so plan your 140 characters accordingly. I would recommend that you use something like Blogged: or Latest post: to prepend these Tweets if you want to. Finally, select which profiles you’d like to send these RSS Tweets from. Click Save and you’ve now automated your announcements of updates to your RSS feed.

That concludes Part 1 of our tour of HootSuite. In How to Use HootSuite: Part 2, we’ll cover how to schedule Tweets, Tweet statistics and tracking, date range searches and more.

Related posts:

1. How to Use Hootsuite: Part 2
2. How to Use Tweetdeck: The Ultimate Twitter Client
3. How to Get (and Keep) Followers on Twitter
4. My Outsourced Life: Maybe I should try this
5. Who to Follow on Twitter

“It began a month ago. I was midway through The World Is Flat, the bestseller by Tom Friedman. I like Friedman, despite his puzzling decision to wear a mustache. His book is all about how outsourcing to India and China is not just for tech support and carmakers but is poised to transform every industry in America, from law to banking to accounting.

I don’t have a corporation; I don’t even have an up-to-date business card. I’m a writer and editor working from home, usually in my boxer shorts or, if I’m feeling formal, my penguin-themed pajama bottoms.

Then again, I think, why should Fortune 500 firms have all the fun? Why can’t I join in on the biggest business trend of the new century? Why can’t I outsource my low-end tasks? Why can’t I outsource my life?

The next day I e-mail Brickwork, one of the companies Friedman mentions in his book. Brickwork—based in Bangalore, India—offers “remote executive assistants,” mostly to financial firms and health-care companies that want data processed. I explain that I’d like to hire someone to help with Esquire-related tasks—doing research, formatting memos, like that. The company’s CEO, Vivek Kulkarni, responds, “It would be a great pleasure to be talking to a person of your stature.” Already I’m liking this. I’ve never had stature before. In America, I barely command respect from a Bennigan’s maître d’, so it’s nice to know that in India I have stature. A couple of days later, I get an e-mail from my new “remote executive assistant.”

Dear Mr. Jacobs,

My name is Honey K. Balani. I would be assisting you in your editorial and personal job…. I would try to adapt myself as per your requirements that would lead to desired satisfaction.

Desired satisfaction. This is great. Back when I worked at an office, I had assistants, but there was never any talk of desired satisfaction. In fact, if anyone ever used the phrase “desired satisfaction,” we’d all end up in a solemn meeting with HR.”

Jacobs goes on to detail hiring a team of people in Bangalore, India to live his life for him – answer his emails, call his coworkers, argue with his wife, and read bedtime stories to his son. It’s fascinating. So, after listening to this podcast I thought, hmmm, I could use some of that. Then I wondered, what are the low-level tasks that I would love to outsource to free up my time to do more meaningful things. I don’t think I’d go to the extreme of outsourcing story time with my kids (it’s too priceless to me), but there are things I would actually consider, especially in my ever increasing involvement in the world of social media. So, here are some of the things I would really pay someone else to do for me:

• I spend a lot of time reading (and yes skimming) over 200 blogs each day. On average, I read/skim probably between 200 and 350 posts each day. Then, I make selected clippings in NetNewsWire to read in more detail or make notes on later.  I also flag posts to share with you all on this blog and on Twitter. I would LOVE to outsource some of that. Give someone my RSS feeds and say, skim these and look for things people would be interested in. I probably wouldn’t outsource writing this blog, but I would consider outsourcing posting interesting links to Twitter. It takes a lot of time to do. Here’s what I’d ask them to do: Look for interesting stuff out there. When you find something useful, use HootSuite to schedule a Tweet sometime later in the day. Basically, I’d ask them to fill the HootSuite schedule with Tweets of interesting items to be dispensed throughout the day. That would free up my Twitter time to interact more with everyone instead of just posting links. I would be able to focus on connecting instead of broadcasting.
• I would love to outsource just about everything on my Facebook account! They could throw water balloons for me, catch beads, give hugs, wish friends Happy Birthday and finally answer my 25 questions for me! They could even scan old school-days pictures and upload them for me and add some witty captions so my old friends still think I’m funny. They could find people I knew way back when and invite them to be friends. I’d love it. All the things I want to do on Facebook but just don’t have time to do, they could do it for me!
• Find interesting people on Twitter for me to follow. As much as it seems Twitter is about getting followers, I actually enjoy finding and following new, interesting people. In fact, every few days, I search Twitter on keywords that interest me and see who pops up. If their profile and recent Tweets are interesting, I follow them for a while. Sometime I follow up to 200 people who aren’t following me! What I’d love to outsource is the time consuming searching part. If I could pay someone to find me 100 interesting people to follow each week I gladly would. That would make my life simpler. Then all I have to do is read their updates and decide if I still want to follow them or not!
• Manage my LinkedIn account. I can never seem to keep LinkedIn up to date. I also manage two LinkedIn groups (Agilistas and Rally Software) and I’m a terrible moderator. I always forget to accept new members and to check what’s going on in my group discussions. Easy spot to outsource. Manage the groups and give me a weekly digest of what’s going in the discussions.
• I would definitely get help keeping my Flickr account up to date. Most of my family and my wife’s family live out-of-state, so they rely on Flickr to see the latest goings-on of our five- and two-year old boys. We’re both terrible parents about keeping it up to date. We take plenty of pictures. We just never upload them. Again, I’d gladly pay someone to go through our cameras and on a weekly basis pick the best shots and post them on Flickr with some family-friendly descriptions. That would make our families so much happier! I’d probably have them update my Posterous and TwitPic accounts while they were at it too!
• I’d even have them do some old-school clearing for me: email. I have 7 different email accounts and get hundreds of emails every day. If they could weed through the accounts and delete spam and junk, and flag only the things I need to respond to, that would be amazing. I get way too much email and this would cut down so much time from my day! If they could answer my email, that would be even better!
• Another thing I’d outsource from my online life is managing my Dopplr travel account. I do a ton of travel for my job and our team uses Dopplr to keep each other updated on where we’re at. We also use it to track our carbon footprint. But it’s such a burden to have to keep getting my travel details from our corporate travel agent and transferring them into Dopplr. I’d outsource that with no problem.

I figure that if I could just outsource these simpler tasks in my life, I’d have at least one more free day every week. And that goes a long way to getting me to my goal of achieving Timothy Ferriss‘ much fabled 4-hour Workweek. But I have a feeling that if I outsourced these simple things, I might start getting like A.J. Jacobs and want to outsource more! I mean, what scares me is at the heart of it, I’d probably outsource everything if I could just so I could spend more time with my wife and kids and have more time for cycling the beautiful roads of Colorado. After compiling this short little list, I might actually try outsourcing some of it to see how it works. I looked into pricing for basic executive assistants and A.J. Jacobs is right, you can get a week of assistance for the price of a nice dinner. Pretty cheap, but I think that’s what troubles me on a moral level. I’m not opposed to the outsourcing part, but am opposed to paying people unfair wages for their work (but that’s a whole other blog post). If I can get around my moral objections I might try it. If I actually do it, I’ll be sure to keep you posted.

So I’d like to hear from all of you now: If you could outsource the little things in your life, what would they be and how would you use that new found time?

Related posts:

1. The Myth of Managed Multi-tasking
2. How to Get (and Keep) Followers on Twitter

Frankie Andreu

But the commentary itself is not really what troubled me. What troubled me was that during yesterday’s great stage from Merced to Clovis, Joe and Frankie did a short interview with Road Magazine’s Neil Brown. Neil gave a good interview and also spoke a little about his use of Twitter to provide cycling news and to engage the cycling community in discussion (you can follow him at http://twitter.com/neilroad). And that’s where it all fell apart. Joe and Frankie, in particular, began joking about and then criticizing Twitter and the use of it by some professional cyclists and managers. Then Frankie began dismissing Twitter as an invalid source of information. Frankie actually said (and the quote may not be precise, there’s no replay on the live stream) “It’s ridiculous that Lance Armstrong is Twittering and people are quoting his Tweets. That’s not a real quote!” Frankie’s tirade continued, bashing Armstrong and other cyclists for Tweeting nonsense and for the public wanting to follow it. Neil teased Frankie a bit and suggested that maybe he should try Twitter. Frankie’s response “Oh yeah, I could say Frankie ate breakfast! or Frankie took the kids to school!” Based on his argument and his tone of voice, I guess we won’t be seeing Frankie on Twitter any time soon.

Frankie is what my friend Bert Decker would call an Old Communicator. In his commentary itself, Frankie is not connecting with his audience. (And please, don’t say it’s because it’s a boring cycling race. Phil Liggett, Paul Sherwen, and Bob Roll have been doing it for years and people love them!) Aside from his unemotional commentary, the statements like those he made about Twitter would indicate to me that Mr. Andreu isn’t very interested in connecting with people at all. I’m really not picking on Frankie here. I’m just using him as an example of an Old Communicator. They see the world in their terms and don’t make the effort to connect and engage with people. More importantly, they don’t motivate people to action. And that’s the other problem with Frankie. The Amgen Tour of California has a goal to support the fight against cancer. Many times during the race, Frankie and Joe interviewed folks from various organizations who are helping in this fight. Because of the basic lack of connection to the audience, I’m really afraid that the call to action for these guests was probably lost. That is the real shame here.

Lance Armstrong

Now, let’s look at the flip side of this coin. And since Frankie brought him up, let’s talk about Lance Armstrong in particular. (Disclaimer: Yes, I’m a Lance fanboy, but this post has nothing to do with that.) Lance is an excellent communicator. All during his reign as 7-time Tour de France champion, he always communicated well with the media and the public. Sure, he had his ups and downs and was under fire numerous times. But, he always maintained his cool. Lance also connects with people. I’ve seen him speak at numerous events and watched him connect both onstage and off with people. He cares enough to take the time to talk with them and get to know them. And he really takes the time to connect with cancer survivors. But more importantly, Lance not only connects with people, he truly motivates them to action. So, according to Bert’s definition, I’d say that Lance Armstrong is a New Communicator.

But I’d like to define Lance as even more. I’d like to define him, in direct response to Frankie’s statements, as a “New” New Communicator. Lance has gone beyond the traditional forums of communication and has embraced the new world of social media to further his connections with people around the world. Lance, and other cycling stars including Lance’s manager Johan Bruyneel, have taken the big plunge into Twitter, blogging, TwitPics and more. And they’re good at it. Really good at it. We’re not seeing Tweets or blogs about taking the trash out or feeding the dogs. We’re getting a real insight into what its like to be Lance Armstrong, professional cyclist and cancer fighter, on a daily basis on Twitter. We’re getting inside photos of Lance’s travels as he trains, races, and spreads his message around the world on TwitPic. And we’re getting real information that motivates people to action from Lance’s own blog and videos on his Livestrong website. And in case you’re wondering, it is Lance who is doing this, not some PR firm. People are interested in Lance and Lance knows that. And he’s making connections with the people who are interested and motivating them to do something. So, if I can revise Bert’s definition, here’s my definition of a “New” New Communicator: “New” New Communicators don’t just provide information, they influence and motivate others to action through the emotional connections they make, both in-person and through a wide variety of other interactive media. And according to that, I’d qualify Lance Armstrong as a “New” New Communicator.

[Start of mini rant] As for Frankie Andreu and his statement that Twitter and other social media sources can’t be quoted, I have this to say: Yes they can. And they are! You don’t get to make the rules anymore.  Until the Old Communicators learn that these new mediums of communication are valid and important in our ever shrinking world, they’ll remain Old Communicators. As long as the Old Communicators believe that “information” can only come from certain sources, they’ll remain Old Communicators. And until Old Communicators realize that they DO need to connect with people to be successful and motivate people, they will remain Old Communicators. There is hope, but just know that there are still many Old Communicators out there to be converted. [End of mini rant.  I feel better now]

Related posts:

1. Who to Follow on Twitter
2. How to Use Tweetdeck: The Ultimate Twitter Client
3. Guest Post: 7 Ways to Use Twitter to Engage Your Audience
4. Are you Twinfluential? The confusing world of Twitter rankings
5. Ten Questions with Bert Decker

GUEST POST FROM NATE CHENENKO:

Part-time pedicab driver Nate Chenenko gives tourists a lift on weekends to supplement his full-time job as a contract specialist and says “Pay what you like!”.

(Photo credit: Richard A. Lipski - The Washington Post)

O.K., I confess: I’m a moonlighter. On weekdays I write and administer government contracts, but on the weekends I pedal a bicycle taxi, also called a pedicab, around the streets of Washington, DC. I really enjoy the physical and social aspects of the job, but it’s the economic and business aspects that truly intrigue me. I’m particularly attentive to the intricacies of pedicab ride pricing, and I’d like to use this opportunity (thanks Chris!) to discuss the theory behind pedicab pay-what-you-like pricing.

It’s tough to sell pedicab rides, and I estimate that I typically experience a failure rate of over 99%. When people visit a shopping mall, they visit because they are either interested in buying clothes, or interested in the idea of browsing, of seeing clothes to buy. When people visit the National Mall, they don’t come to buy pedicab rides, they come to visit the museums and photograph the monuments. Since I only expect one person out of one hundred to indicate any interest, it’s critical that I convert that an interested person into a customer.

The first question potential customers typically ask is “how much do you charge?” When I answer, they don’t realize how carefully I’ve crafted my response: “Whatever you think is fair. Pay when we get there!”

This statement comes as a shock to some people and a surprise to most. Our economy, once so centered on bartering and trade, has in recent years become much more fixed in its pricing schemes. I’m only 22, but I remember when my father taught me how to haggle with the hot-dog vendors in Manhattan. That was ten years ago. Try to do that now and they’ll laugh you straight to the next block. But take a pedicab ride in many cities across the country. You’ll enter a scenario where you’re receiving a service with no concept of what you should pay the service provider.

The second question I typically receive from potential riders is “Why? Don’t you get cheated a lot?” My answer: “Very rarely.” Again, riders don’t realize the consideration behind that sentence fragment, but the response is completely true. I rarely get cheated. I rarely get cheated, but I do many rides where I receive less money than I’d like. Often I’ll take customers on a long ride and receive a four-dollar tip when I would have asked for ten or 15 dollars.

So if it’s common to receive low tips, isn’t that great justification to start charging a set fare? Absolutely not, and there are four reasons to avoid set pricing. The first reason is a loose application of opportunity costs. For example, if a family of three with a toddler asks for a ten-minute ride, they might be willing to pay five dollars. What if I ask for seven dollars? A six-hour shift yields an average of only ten to 20 rides, and an average of $150 in gross earnings. After a half-year spent on the pedicab, my gross fares average out to about 25 dollars per hour. With that data, I know my opportunity cost is $25 per hour, and I should engage in any activity from which I expect to earn more than $25 per hour. Theoretically, I can do six ten-minute rides in an hour. At $25/hour, this means that my opportunity cost for ten minutes is just over four dollars. This means the family of three who is willing to pay five dollars for a ten-minute ride exceeds my opportunity cost. I should certainly take their business and provide a ride. If I were to set a fare of seven dollars, I lose a hard-to-find customer. I’ve failed to consider my opportunity cost when making business decisions, and I’ve lowered my potential profit for the day.

A second rationale for charging a pay-what-you-like rate is purely related to marketing: I want people in my cab. I want the hundreds on the sides of the street to see that laughing toddler as his pedicab speeds down the road. I want people to see a cab not as a gimmick that no one actually uses, but as a legitimate, enjoyable mode of transportation. More rides at noon leads to more people in my cab for the rest of the day. This is why I don’t mind competition from other pedicabs – competitors help put the idea of a pedicab ride into the minds of pedestrians.

The third reason for avoiding set fares focuses on the entertainment aspect of pedicabs. At the beginning of the ride, that cute toddler’s parents were willing to pay five dollars. At the end of the ride, when the child says how much he’s enjoyed himself, that ride might be worth ten dollars. Setting a fare at the beginning of the ride keeps that additional five dollars out of my pocket. Ever buy a book and absolutely love it? If I get halfway through a John Grisham novel, you might be able to sell me the second half of the book for twice the price. Prior to purchase, my expected level of enjoyment was just that: an expectation. On page 200, however, I have a higher level of information about the product, and my demand adjusts accordingly. A pay-what-you-like pricing system accounts for that change in demand as one consumes a service.

But it’s truly the fourth reason that ensures I will never charge a set fare. This is a risk-management concern, and it’s heavily influenced by economics as well as observed evidence. Readers who invest in the stock market have no doubt heard of upside potential and downside risk. I think about these devices constantly while working on my pedicab. Let’s use the example of a fare for which I would typically expect (and typically receive, based on evidence): 15 dollars. A 15-dollar fare might take a customer from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial. My downside risk on this ride is 15 dollars – it’s possible the customer could jump out and run away. This is highly unlikely, but it still represents the lower bound of the risk spectrum. My upside potential is infinite, as it’s possible I could get a multimillion-dollar tip. Unfortunately, this is also unlikely.

Let’s narrow the parameters based on the evidence. I’ve received four dollars for a 15 dollar ride, and, as a result, I’ve “lost” or “been cheated out of” nine dollars. I’ve also received 50-dollars for a 15-dollar ride. How many “losses” can that 35-dollar gain cover? About four, and that’s the reason I don’t charge a fare. Pay-what-you-like pricing allows for the possibility of that 50-dollar fare while reducing the opportunity for losses to five or ten dollars. In other words, I’ve tightly limited my downside risk while preserving my entire achievable upside.

Pay-what-you-like pricing maximizes the customer base because price details will never turn a customer away. This in turn contributes to my bottom line as well as my marketing image. It allows for the retrieval of otherwise-lost “demand” that occurs during service provision. Additionally, pay-what-you-like pricing allows me to capitalize on the big tipper, the guy at the top of my upside potential spectrum. But maybe it’s possible to make my system better. If you have suggestions or comments, or you simply enjoyed this piece, please post below in the comments. I’d also love to hear feedback directly. Please, email me at Chenenko@gmail.com.

Related posts:

1. Guest Post: 7 Ways to Use Twitter to Engage Your Audience
2. Guest Post: Where there’s people, there’s problems
3. Guest Post: Andrew Warner and Seth Godin Talk Tribes and a Whole Lot More

They have an incredible library of films available for free on their website. The hope of the project is that by showing the diverse ways oneness is expressed—in the fields of sustainability, conflict resolution, spirituality, art, economics, indigenous culture, and social justice—others will be inspired to create solutions to personal and community challenges from their own lived understanding of oneness.  Each one of the videos is downloadable for iTunes, iPod and also in HD Video.  They’re all subtitled in at least twelve languages and are open for sharing under a Creative Commons license.

You can subscribe to the Global Oneness Blog here and the iTunes Video Podcasts here.

Here’s a beautiful trailer for the project that is very moving and indicative of the quality of the materials available on the website.

The Global Oneness Project is a special project of Kalliopeia Foundation, a private grant-making foundation in northern California committed to honoring the unity at the heart of life’s rich diversity.

Related posts:

1. Podcast: Global Avian Influenza Mapping and Agile
2. Sustainable design interview with Greg Lee, CFO of LiveStrong
3. Condition: Critical, Voices from the War in Eastern Congo

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Greg Lee, the Chief Financial Officer of the Lance Armstrong Foundation and Livestrong, about the design and buildout of the new Livestrong world headquarters in Austin, Texas. Livestrong is in the process of converting a 30,000 square-foot, 1950’s-era industrial building into a modern, green, collaborative workspace for their foundation’s efforts to combat cancer. You may have seen some video clips of Lance Armstrong touring the new facility yesterday here on EdgeHopper. In this interview, Greg gives us a more detailed look at all of the sustainable design elements of the new building and discusses the long-term financial savings they will provide. He also delves into the collaborative nature of the space and the teams at the foundation. I was going to turn the interview into a blog post, but Greg provided so much great information in such a passionate way that I wanted to have you hear it from Greg himself. To that end, this blog post is also about introducing the first edition of the new EdgeHopper podcast series. As I do more interviews in the future, I’ll try to include them as podcasts here on EdgeHopper and through iTunes as well. Hmmm…launching a new venture on Friday the 13th, gutsy eh? Anyway, I hope you enjoy this first interview with a fantastic person from an amazing organization.

Click to SUBSCRIBE to the EdgeHopper Podcast in:

At the Lance Armstrong Foundation, we fight for the more than 28 million people around the world living with cancer today. There can be - and should be - life after cancer for more people. That’s why we kick in at the moment of diagnosis, giving people the resources and support they need to fight cancer head-on. We find innovative ways to raise awareness, fund research and end the stigma about cancer that many survivors face. We connect people and communities to drive social change, and we call for state, national and world leaders to help fight this disease. Anyone, anywhere can join our fight against cancer. Join us at LIVESTRONG.org.

About the LIVESTRONG Global Cancer Campaign

Lance made the decision to return to cycling because he thrives on competition. For his Foundation, the competition is the global threat of cancer. Cancer is poised to become the world’s leading cause of death by 2012. The Global Cancer Campaign is a worldwide initiative uniting everyone from survivors like Lance to world leaders and policymakers who must commit to the effort to avoid a public health catastrophe. To put it simply, we’re going to build a global movement against cancer, and we’re going to win.

Related posts:

1. LiveStrong Headquarters: Great Green Design
2. Twitter and the “New” New Communicators
3. Global Oneness: Raising consciousness through storytelling

In addition to the tour of the facility, if you’re a bike geek like me, you also get a sneak-peek at Lance’s new time trial bike that he’ll be on when he wins the Time Trials at the Giro d’Italia this year!

There is also a great conference room that Livestrong is going to make available for any Austin-area non-profits that want to use. Such an awesome commitment to non-profits! Giving back is what it’s all about.

I’m also really impressed with the open and collaborative space. You’ll notice no offices and glass walls on the conference rooms; total visibility and transparency. It’s so great to see so many organizations incorporating collaborative practices directly into their spaces.

For more green goodness, you’ll notice lots of natural lighting to help lower the use of electricity for lighting. And check out the low-walled cubes with half-glass partitions that allow the light (and good collaboration) into the work spaces. And as you’d suspect, the building has a nice gym and shower area too. I love it!

And if you’re in Austin, Lance has invited anyone to stop by for a tour of the building. The headquarters is at Sixth and Robert Martinez Streets on Austin’s East Side.

At the Lance Armstrong Foundation, we fight for the more than 28 million people around the world living with cancer today. There can be - and should be - life after cancer for more people. That’s why we kick in at the moment of diagnosis, giving people the resources and support they need to fight cancer head-on. We find innovative ways to raise awareness, fund research and end the stigma about cancer that many survivors face. We connect people and communities to drive social change, and we call for state, national and world leaders to help fight this disease. Anyone, anywhere can join our fight against cancer. Join us at LIVESTRONG.org.

About the LIVESTRONG Global Cancer Campaign

Lance made the decision to return to cycling because he thrives on competition. For his Foundation, the competition is the global threat of cancer. Cancer is poised to become the world’s leading cause of death by 2012. The Global Cancer Campaign is a worldwide initiative uniting everyone from survivors like Lance to world leaders and policymakers who must commit to the effort to avoid a public health catastrophe. To put it simply, we’re going to build a global movement against cancer, and we’re going to win.

Related posts:

1. Sustainable design interview with Greg Lee, CFO of LiveStrong
2. Green IT: You can do it too
3. Twitter and the “New” New Communicators
4. It’s Not Easy Being Green
5. Global Oneness: Raising consciousness through storytelling

In his very casual and easy style, Nelson starts off by talking about how PIxar uses improv as a method of collaboration. In that method, two principles have surfaced that have guided Pixar:

1. Accept every offer. You don’t know where that offer is going to go. But one thing is for sure: If you don’t accept that offer, it’s going nowhere! So you have a sure thing on one hand: a dead end. And you have possibility on the other.
2. Make you partner look good. That means that everybody on your team is going to try to make you look good and vice versa. And it’s not about judgement or saying “This is pretty good. How can I make it better?”. It’s about saying “Here’s where I’m starting. What can I do with this?”. Nelson calls this “plus-ing“.

I passed this video along to my friend Bert Decker, CEO of Decker Communications, to get his take on this as it is right up his alley. Here’s what Bert had to say:

“Randy talks about ‘plus-ing’. Sue [Walden of ImprovWorks] calls it “yes, and…” What we mention in our advanced course is two essential rules of improv that you can apply to all communications, (and life for that matter) is:

1. Always positive (yes, and…)
2. Support your partner

And of course there’s ‘forward lean’ but that comes even before improv….”

Based on those two principles, Pixar looks to find people who are really good at something. And Pixar is really good at being innovative. So, how do you find people who are really good at being innovative? If something has never been done before and it’s truly innovative, how do you find the people to do it. According to Nelson “You look for people who have seen failure and figured out how to make something from it. The core skill of innovators is error recovery not failure avoidance. We’re looking for resiliency and adaptability.” Wow, how many places think like this? I mean really think this way and not just pay the lip service. Not many trust me. It’s so great to see a hugely successful organization express this attitude out loud and really mean it.

What Pixar has realized is that a great predictor of innovation is mastery of something. It could be mastery of anything. The important thing is the personality that goes along with mastery. It’s that sense of “I’m going to get to the top of that mountain” that you can use in your enterprise. It’s called depth. Nelson goes on to say that given the fast pace of business these days, there’s very little chance that people are going to achieve mastery on the job. You want them to be masters coming in the door.

Another predictor of success is breadth. No one-trick ponies. We want to find people with lots of experiences (not necessarily “experience”). People with a breadth of experiences are deeply interested in many things. My favorite quote from Nelson: “We’re looking for people who are interested…not interesting.” Interested is tough, interesting is easy. Interested is a real skill. If you say “I’ve got a problem”, interested people lean in. They amplify you. They want to know what YOU want to know.

The notion of breadth leads to Nelson’s third predictor, communication. Another awesome quote, especially for all of you developers and techies out there: “Communication involves translation.” If you just emit tech, nobody really hears you. The translation gets pushed to the receiving end of the conversation and gets garbled. Do the translation at the SENDING end so that it doesn’t have to be done at the receiving end and the listener can say, “I understand”. So, no non-communicative techies! Nelson says that “Communication is not something the emitter can measure.” You can’t declare yourself as articulate or a good communicator…only your listener can. People who are interested are more likely to view communication as a destination rather than as a source. Nelson postulates that breadth and a broad range of experiences is the thing that fuels that. To me, this notion of communication as a destination not a source is extremely crucial to the success of teams comprised of so many different skillsets and levels of technical expertise.

According to Nelson though, the most important predictor of success and innovation is collaboration. But what is collaboration? Real collaboration? It’s not cooperation. We’ve been conditioned to jump to this answer very quickly. We all think “We have to cooperate to get our jobs done. That’s collaboration.” But, all this really means is we’re not getting in each other’s way. Nelson says that the things that get done in a cooperative enterprise could, in effect, all be done by one person if we had enough time and resources. He says that there is nothing in a cooperative workplace that job one does that can make job two better. Job one can prevent job two from getting done, but there’s nothing job one can do to make job two better. Collaboration is not a synonym for cooperation.

So what does collaboration mean if it’s not about cooperation? Nelson says that collaboration for Pixar means AMPLIFICATION. It means connecting a group of individuals that are INTERESTED in each other, that bring separate DEPTH to the problem and that bring a BREADTH that gives them interest in the entire solution. And most importantly, it allows them to COMMUNICATE on multiple different levels: verbally, in writing, feeling, acting, pictures. In all of these ways, Nelson says “They find the most articulate way to get a high fidelity notion across to a broad range of people so they can each pull on the right lever”. I absolutely love this definition of collaboration and it’s all rooted in a collective vision that everyone understands and can relate to.

After listening to Nelson walk through these four points with passion and enthusiasm, it’s no wonder why Pixar has been immensely successful in their endeavors. After a little digging and emailing, I found that indeed, Pixar’s HR department uses all four of these predictors for the basis of their hires. They don’t just look at a candidate’s experience or resume. In a 2006 New York Times interview, Nelson said:

“The problem with the Hollywood model is that it’s generally the day you wrap production that you realize you’ve finally figured out how to work together,” Mr. Nelson said. “We’ve made the leap from an idea-centered business to a people-centered business. Instead of developing ideas, we develop people. Instead of investing in ideas, we invest in people. We’re trying to create a culture of learning, filled with lifelong learners. It’s no trick for talented people to be interesting, but it’s a gift to be interested. We want an organization filled with interested people.”

The things Nelson describes are intangible, you can’t write them down. But when you talk with and work with people who possess these traits, you know who they are right away. And they’re the kind of people you want on your team. Give me 10 people like this over 100 people with years of experience and you can do incredible things.

Related posts:

1. Learning to Speak
2. Learning from Quincy Jones
3. Agile adoption: Why isn’t this stuff working?

Here’s my main TweetDeck screen:

I have 5 columns displayed: All Friends, The A-List, The B-List, Replies, and Direct Messages. Let’s take a look at each column and how I use them.

All Friends: This is my complete Twitter stream. All 21,540 of the people I follow show up in this column. About every hour or so, I scroll through this column and look for any interesting links or conversations to join in.

The A-List: The A-list is a TweetDeck Group Column. I use this group to pull a stream of people that I follow very closely. These are people that I work with, people that I have an established relationship with, or people that I find the most interesting to follow. I try to keep this group limited to no more than 25 people at any given time. Beyond that, I find it difficult to keep up with Tweets on a regular basis. Whenever TweetDeck detects a post to my A-List, I get a visual and audible alert. Unless I’m seriously engrossed in my work, or coaching a team, I usually check my A-List when my alerts go off. The visible alerts are small popup windows that look like this:

The B-List: The B-List is another TweetDeck Group Column. This is a group of people that I follow closely, but not in a critical way. This is a mixed group of people I’d like to get to know better, people who are top Tweeters (like Guy Kawasaki, Arleen Anderson (Aloha Arleen) and GaryVee), brands and companies that I’m observing to understand how they use Twitter, people that I find interesting or funny, and other friends. I get visual and audible alerts when Tweets are posted in this group as well. However, they’re usually not critical Tweets, so I read them whenever I have some free time. I try to check this stream about every half-hour or so.

The Replies Column: This is a standard TweetDeck column that searches Twitter’s public timeline for any @replies to your username. This is really useful to keep track of who is talking about you or with you. It allows you to quickly respond to any conversations directed toward or about you. I have visual and audible alerts set for this column and usually check these as they come in (unless I’m busy). It let’s me interact with the Twitterati effectively and I try to respond to anyone who @replies to me (unless it’s really Spammy).

The Direct Messages Column: Another standard TweetDeck column. This keeps track of all of the Direct Messages sent to you and those sent by you. I really like this functionality. The only problem is, I autofollow anyone who follows me. So, if those people have automatic direct messages sent whenever someone follows them, you guessed it, they end up in this column. Unfortunately, that means that some important DM’s get buried in an avalanche of DM’s that say “Hey, thanks for the follow. And check out my website at http://IAmDesparateForSubscribers.com!” or “Great to meet you @<username>. If you’re looking for real estate in the Tri-State area, check out http://I’mALameRealEstateAgent.com!”. (BTW: Have you noticed that real estate agents seem to outnumber everybody else on Twitter these days?). Now, I have nothing against auto-DM’s, it’s nice to at least get some confirmation when you follow someone. Just don’t make them pushy, I hate that. OK, sorry for the mini-rant.

So, that’s my main TweetDeck setup. You can order these columns however you want to by sliding them left or right. I keep these 5 columns visible all the time on the left of my TweetDeck screen. I also have several other columns to the right of these that I can scroll to when I want to check them. So, here’s the other half of my TweetDeck screen:

On this side, I have a few search columns, another group column, a favorites column, and a TweetScoop column. Here’s what’s in each one:

Search EdgeHopper: This is a TweetDeck Search Column. It allows you to specify a search term and then scours Twitter’s public timeline for that term. It displays all Tweets containing that term to the search column. I use this search column to see who is Tweeting about my blog called EdgeHopper. It let’s me monitor the public timeline for people including, but not limited to, my followers who are discussing or commenting on my blog. It’s very useful and allows me to interact with people very quickly.

Search Chris Spagnuolo: This is another Search Column. This one searches for my name: Chris Spagnuolo. Unfortunately, after the NY Giants were eliminated from the NFL playoffs and their defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo was shopping for a new job, a lot of people were talking about him…and they all showed up in my search column. And before you ask, no, we are not related.

Cycling Column: I’m seriously into cycling and am a cycling fan-atic. This is a TweetDeck Group Column that I use to keep track of several professional cyclists who Twitter (including Ivan Basso and Lance Armstrong who is a great Tweeter and TwitPic user). I also follow several cycling coaches, some bike shops, a few cycling news streams, and a couple of cycling political action groups. Very handy for keeping track of a special interest without doing broad search term columns.

Favorites: A standard TweetDeck column that keeps track of Tweets that I’ve favorited. Very nice feature as it let’s me go back to these Tweets whenever I want to re-read them or use a favorite link that was posted.

TwitScoop: This is a standard TweetDeck column based on an integration with TwitScoop. TwitScoop crawls hundreds of tweets every minute and extracts the words which are mentionned more often than usual. The result is displayed in a Tag Cloud in the TwitScoop column. It’s a really cool way to stay on top of what’s buzzing in the Twitterverse at any given time. It also has a Trending Topics section that shows emerging trends in Tweets.

The one column type I haven’t been using (but probably will) is TweetDeck’s 12 Seconds TV column. This keeps track of your 12 Seconds TV stream if you have one. Nice feature, I just haven’t done much in 12 Seconds TV yet.

In addition to breaking your Tweets into topic or group specific columns, you can filter the stream within a column based on one of several attributes including keywords in the Tweet text, Twitter user name, source, or even time frame. This gives you complete control over what you see in your TweetDeck columns.

In addition to the filter tool, there are several other tools at the base of each column. They enable you to slide the column left or right, mark all the Tweets in the column as seen, clear all of the seen Tweets, and clear all Tweets in the column.

Also, from any Tweet, you can click on the user name of the Tweeter and TweetDeck will display that user’s profile and Tweet stream as well as a follow button in case you’re not already following them. Here’s my buddy Bert Decker’s profile à la TweetDeck:

Other Cool Tools in TweetDeck

So, that’s the basic set up for columns and separating your Twitter stream. But, beyond breaking your information into easily digestible bites, TweetDeck has a great collection of tools built in to help you Tweet better, smarter, and faster. First, there is the nice Tweet Window:

Easy Tweet entry in the Tweet Window. It even has a spell checker built in. It also keeps track of your remaining character limit and turns the entire Tweet Window red if you’ve exceeded your Tweet character limit:

The Tweet Window also includes some cool tools for URL shortening. Just enter the URL in the Shorten URL window below the main Tweet Window and click the Shorten URL button. And, voila, a nice, short URL. You can also select from several different URL shortening services if you have a particular preference:

If that’s not enough, there’s a great little TwitPic integration. Just click the TwitPic button while your writing a Tweet and it opens a dialog box to select a picture from your desktop. After you select a picture, it automatically uploads it to TwitPic for you and adds the URL to the picture into your Tweet automatically:

There is also another nice integration with TweetShrink. TweetShrink tries its best to fit your text within the 140 character limit of a tweet by replacing common phrases and words with shorter representations. Kind of like running your new text through the dryer or sending it to fat camp. I don’t use this much, but if you’re from the cell-phone-texting generation like my 20-year-old niece, my guess is this works for you. In any case, with one click on the TweetShrink button you can go from this:

to this:

Another nice feature is the Twitter API Limit Tracker. The API Tracker allows you to see how much of your Twitter API limit you’ve used and at what time your API limit will reset to 100%.

And speaking of your API limit, you have complete control over how TweetDeck is using your API limit for each type of function. Within the TweetDeck settings dialog you can control what percentage of your API limit is dedicated to your entire Twitter stream, your Replies and your Direct Messages. This essentially controls how often TweetDeck updates each category:

And since we’re in the TweetDeck settings panel, you can control where you want your Tweet window, how you want update notifications to occur and your column widths from the General settings tab.

And finally, you can manage the appearance of TweetDeck to suit your personal style through the Colors/Font tab in the settings panel:

So, that’s my guided tour of TweetDeck. If you’re looking for a great client for Twitter, look no further. This is the only Twitter client. But don’t take my word for it, Guy Kawasaki says ” I swear by Tweetdeck and Tweetie.” You can’t get a better endorsement than that. And no, I didn’t build TweetDeck or have anything to gain by sharing this except to help you find an awesome client for managing your Twitter stream. Have fun and keep Tweeting!

UPDATE February 12, 2009: TweetDeck v0.21.5

From the TweetDeck Blog: Since this is a point release, rather than a full new version, it contains mainly minor functionality updates and bug fixes but there are one or two interesting new features:

TweetDeck v0.21.5 from Iain Dodsworth on Vimeo.

Update:March 16, 2009: TweetDeck v0.24 Pre-Release

TweetDeck v0.24 Pre-Release is out today for downloading. Key feature: Facebook Integration http://is.gd/nz1V

Update: April 8, 2009: TweetDeck v0.25 Release

TweetDeck v0.25 is out today.  Key features/improvements:

• Major memory leak fixed
• FaceBook integration
• Short URL preview in TweetDeck
• TwitPic preview in TweetDeck
• Record 12seconds Videos direct from Tweetdeck
• Option to have usernames auto-complete in the tweet box.
• Option to automatically include hashtags when replying to messages.
• Removing the ability to DM yourself, and in so doing stopping many of you from feeling foolish.
• Updating the list of URL shortening services to the top 5 only and adding the Digg URL shortener.
• Making it easier to tab between the tweet box and the shorten box.
• Removing unread counter at top of each column.

The update will automatically be pushed out to everyone using TweetDeck today or it can be downloaded direct from http://tweetdeck.com.

Related posts:

1. How to Get (and Keep) Followers on Twitter
2. How to Use Hootsuite: Part 2
3. Guest Post: 7 Ways to Use Twitter to Engage Your Audience
4. Who to Follow on Twitter
5. How to Use HootSuite: Part 1

Twellow: Allows searches by category. The category search is based on what people have in their Twitter profile.

TwitSeeker: From the same folks who brought you twInfluence, TwitSeeker helps you find others by allowing you to enter search terms and searching through actual Tweets for keywords.

Mr.Tweet: A lot of buzz around this one lately. Looks through your network and tweets and regularly suggests good people and followers you are missing out on.

Just Tweet It: Users enter their Twitter name and place themselves into categories within a directory. You can search the directory by category and find users that match your interests.

Find and Follow: This is a brand new one with a lot promise from my buddy Dave Bouwman. Users enter their Twitter name and tag their Tweets with categories. You can find people to follow based on these tags. Still in Beta so give Dave your feedback, he’s a great guy (and now he owes me $20).

Twubble: It searches your “friend graph” and picks out people who you may like to follow. Not exactly sure what that means, but it finds people for you?!?!

So that should at least get you started in the right direction. I thought it would be good to provide you with some other interesting starting points as well. I could just list the Twitterholic Top 100, but you can find that anytime. Instead, here are a few lists of some of the more “interesting” people that you can follow on Twitter. And, you can always follow me on Twitter too.

My Personal Top Ten

1. Guy Kawasaki: Yes, everyone follows Guy and for a good reason. He’s awesome.
2. Andrew Warner: Founder of Mixergy.com. Great Tweets and he’s always talking to interesting people.
3. Bert Decker: Founder and chairman of Decker Communications. Always interesting Tweets and just an all-around nice guy.
4. O’Reilly Media: They Tweet more useful information in a day than some people do in a year.
5. Ben McConnell: Co-author of the Church of the Customer blog. The blog is like “the word of mouth gospel”.
6. Jackie Huba: Ben McConnell’s partner in crime at the Church of the Customer blog.
7. Nancy Duarte: Author of Slide:ology and an amazing presentation designer
8. Kathy Sierra: Web developer, author, former blogger (we miss you Kathy), and another all around good person
9. 37 Signals: A few guys who know a thing or two about elegant interfaces, thoughtful features…you know, design and usability
10. Doug Ulman: The CEO of Livestrong, the Lance Armstrong non-profit that believes everyone has the power to make their life better.

The Cool Geeks (Technology and Social Media Experts)

1. Chris Brogan
2. Leo Laporte
3. Chris Pirillo
4. Jason Calacanis
   
5. Robert Scoble
6. Tim O’Reilly
7. Shannon Paul
8. Gary Vaynerchuk
9. Brian Carter
10. Pete Cashmore

Celebrities (If you’re into that sort of thing)

1. Tina Fey
2. Jimmy Fallon
3. John Cleese
4. John Hodgman (The Daily Show/PC guys from the Mac ads)
5. Elijah Wood
6. Demi Moore
7. William Shatner
8. Luke Wilson
   
9. Wil Wheaton
   
10. Yoko Ono

Athletes

1. Lance Armstrong
2. Andy Murray
3. Eli Manning
4. Jerry Rice
5. Kerry Rhodes
6. Michael Phelps
7. Natalie Gulbis
8. Shaquille O’Neal
9. Shaun White
10. Wil Carling

Politicians

1. Barack Obama
2. Al Gore
3. Joe Biden
4. Hillary Clinton
5. John McCain
6. Karl Rove (I guess he counts)
7. Chuck Grassley
8. James Demint
9. James Inhofe
10. Arnold Schwarzenegger
    

Musicians

1. Dave Matthews
2. Willie Nelson
3. Oasis
4. Colplay
5. Rivers Cuomo (Weezer)
6. Snoop Dogg
7. Pearl Jam
8. Bjork
9. Lil Wayne
10. MC Hammer (dated, but funny)

Tweeting Brands

1. Starbucks
2. JetBlue Airways
3. Carnival Cruise Lines
4. Comcast
5. Intuit
6. Best Buy
7. Home Depot
8. Whole Foods
9. Zappos
10. Dunkin Donuts

Agile Software Development (It’s what I coach)

1. Ryan Martens
2. Jean Tabaka
3. David Anderson
4. Martin Fowler
5. Mike Cottmeyer
6. Kent Beck
7. Jurgen Appelo
8. Brian Marick
9. Dave Bouwman (and GIS)
10. Esther Derby

And a few cyclists (I love cycling)

1. Ivan Basso
2. Team Slipstream
3. Dave Zabriskie
4. George Hincapie
5. Axel Merckx
6. Johan Bruyneel
7. Christian Vandevelde
8. Tom Danielson
9. Taylor Phinney
10. Michael Rogers

Related posts:

1. How to Get (and Keep) Followers on Twitter
2. How to Use Tweetdeck: The Ultimate Twitter Client
3. Guest Post: 7 Ways to Use Twitter to Engage Your Audience
4. How to Use Hootsuite: Part 2
5. How to Use HootSuite: Part 1