Productivity in meetings

A while ago, I stumbled across an article on my Twitterfeed called "7 reasons people hate being in meetings with you" in PR Daily. While I was at first offended by the title, it secured my attention and I clicked on the bitly link to open it. I'll cut to the chase; here are the 7 reasons:

1. You have no agenda.
2. You talk at them, not with them. 
3. You barrage them with data.
4. You're overly familiar. 
5. You look at your phone, not at them.
6. You talk over people.
7. You talk just to show you have value, even when you don't. 

Pretty comprehensive list, huh? Although this advice all sounds pretty obvious, it resonates with me very well. As a former intern at a company with a lot of meetings, Mojo TA who has 3 meetings/week and an involved student, I've experienced those and a few more. Here are some more awkward happenings that take away from overall productivity. 

Starting too immediately. 

Even though there is usually a meeting agenda, an uncomfortable situation can arise if you get to the details too quickly. If the meeting begins with the cold, hard dissemination of information immediately after sitting down, it is never effective. Take a very brief amount of time (2-3 minutes) to establish rapport between the group before getting down to business; it will make a difference. Whether it's the weather or current events, chat about something.

Make introductions when necessary
If you're in a group where everyone doesn't know everyone else or credibility needs to be established, don't be afraid to wrap around and review names or titles. It helps when answering questions later. 

Too personal too soon

The author's point on familiarity addresses this, saying "Too personal- working with people you know and people you don't know in the same room. Don't cut the boundaries and be too familiar." This is especially difficult when working with a group where you are already acquainted with some people and not at all acquainted with other team members.

Consider this situation. You're in a large group project and your roommate happens to be in the same group. At a break in time, you guys talk about everything that happened at dinner last night. The rest of the group, despite or not if they care, still has to listen and feels closer to you than ever expected. Be careful about personal talk if you want to get things done. 

Interrupting people
You'd think everyone has learned this by now, but that is definitely not the case. Even if you have something to say, watch the body language to assure that the person speaking appears to finish their thoughts before being the interrupter. 

Adding value

I'm trying out the whole speak when spoken to thing this semester, and so far it's going decently well. You'll appear more credible if you contribute when you have a strong, developed point - instead of speaking to agree and attempt to make yourself credible.

Teamwork

As reflect on my college experience and lessons learned, I can't help but think of a group of people who really defined my last undergrad semester of college.

Team Maven after presentations this April

A significant part of my last spring semester in 2012 (about 200 hours) was spent working on my capstone project, a campaign for Mojo Ad. Mojo is the Missouri School of Journalism's student-run advertising agency, where we work to create three full-service campaigns for a national client. While my team worked on T.G.I. Friday's, here are some things I learned from the experience. 

1. Importance of relationships

Building a relationship with each team member on an individual level was vital to operating in the group. Whether it was chatting with them about a class, knowing who their boyfriend was or being familiar with their other commitments, this information became relevant to their work style. While there is a threshold that can be crossed, having these relationships made people want to be together and meet to work on our campaign.

2. Patience

Work must be productive if you want it to be completed with ten people in the room. Discussions required little interruptions and patience to develop the great ideas, because if someone was in a rush or felt anxious, everyone could tell and the feeling spread. 

3. Being concise

Making your point directly in a group conversation instead of beating around the bush when talking is incredibly important. Being on my Mojo team taught me to articulate well and think of things in terms of the key takeaway instead of the process of doing it.

4. Working together instead of silo-ing off 

My Mojo team met so much not to discuss what everyone's roles were doing, but to do work then and there. Instead of somewhere to talk about what we would do, we would sit with 2-4 people and crank out the content after discussing its purpose. This is where teamwork shined, whether we were working on a Google doc or collaborating to make a video. 

Because of exhibiting these behaviors and presenting our work in an engaging manner, my team won the internal competition of the best campaign! I'm still in touch with most of them today, and four of us were at the Career Fair on behalf of Mizzou or a company they work for. Thanks to Mojo for a great experience!

Hannah, Taylor, me and Lauren at the Meet & Greet reception before the Career Fair

TIPS: Sending emails in corporate America

This semester, I'm the teaching assistant for a course I took in 2011 called Management of Strategic Communication. One of the memorable class periods is a lecture called Writing for Business, where our professor gives us tips on business correspondence and writing points-of-view in a company setting.

The tips include using headlines, subheads and bullet points to break off important information, writing brief emails and using subject lines to your advantage. This LinkedIn article that I found immediately after the lecture actually reflects a lot of the points we learn.

After running a Career Fair last week and reaching out to numerous recruiters at companies across the country, we developed the science of sending email to someone working in corporate America. Here are some of the tips I've learned in my correspondence with working professionals.

1. Be mindful of the time of day you send an email.
With the Career Fair, I informed liaisons that they were only allowed to send correspondence between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, or else the message would get lost in the receiver's inbox. A lot of office people receive daily wrap-up emails, so the message you thought of at midnight might sink to the bottom of the pile because of morning news. We always had luck catching people during business hours, sometimes even receiving a response in minutes as the person cleans out his or her email.

2. Send it at a good time of the week.
No one answers a work phone call or email you send them on a Friday. If you send something on a Monday, it might get answered by the end of the week but gets drowned into a to do list. I try sending all messages on Tuesdays when people are at their desk and on their game.

3. Tell the addressee how you got their email address if they don't know you.
With large companies making everyone's email address their first and last name, it's not difficult to figure out how to get in touch with someone at a company. But if you want to be on their urgent list and receive a response, you have to give them a connection as to why they should respond to you. I've made a point to always include what my relation is to the addressee to guarantee a response and not seem creepy. If you get their name from someone else, say that. If you found them on LinkedIn and have a mutual friend, say that. Establishing the connection is important!

Appreciate who you have

Do not be anxious to keep company or even appear in public and in the company of others for no reason. You should instead dedicate your precious time in the company of your wiser and more prudent relatives, priests, and seriously-minded people, young and old alike.

-St. Gregory the Theologian

I read this in the church bulletin recently, and this passage resonates with me as a student. It is written in the context of advice for Christian women from St. Gregory, especially to new brides. In college and over the weekends, a lot of people go out to bars and parties to do what we call face-time. Apparently, this term isn't so widely used outside of Mizzou, but face timing is going out so people see that you are out. Walking a lap around the bar to say your hellos, making an appearance or talking with a classmate over a quick drink at a party all constitute this definition. 

It's a temptation that's easy to fall into. Rarely do people keep eye contact in a conversation anymore, especially in a bar or party setting, because everyone seems to be waiting for more. Who's going to text you next? Who's walking in the door next? Who else do I need to establish myself with by saying a quick hello? People are missing out on spending time with their own, real friends because they're too busy paying attention to the 'could-be' friends that are in and out of the social setting. 

As a senior, I want to be spending my last semester at Mizzou with people I care about and want to see, not the faux notion that there is an obligation to "have to" see everyone else I've met in college. It's nice to see St. Gregory reinforce appreciating what and who you have, instead of dwelling on the 'coulds' of life.

Four-faced

This semester has gotten off to an interesting start, one reason being it is not my most intellectually rigorous semester. Two of my classes are assistantships, one is a staff journalism class, one is a thesis seminar and the last is a lecture with a group project. I continued to question why I am so stressed without the essays, readings and note-taking I have done in the past, and figured out why. I’m currently living the lives of four people. And it’s the most difficult thing I have done in college.

As you proceed through college, you have the opportunity to take on more and more roles. And if there’s anything I’m learning this semester, it’s important to limit those roles so you can focus on yourself, your academics and not only all the faces you play.

It's hard to develop your personal brand when you're constantly being defined by your organizations. This is my personal Twitter profile from the other day. 

Switching gears is not easy. Keeping track of things is not easy. It’s embarrassing to forget about a reading or busy-work assignment because of meetings and commitments for another obligation. 

In my first life, I continue to work with Mojo as the Career Fair & PR Manager. This job has grown to 25 hours a week and leveled off with the Career Fair on Feb. 14, where I’m happy to announce that 300+ students and 42 companies attended. It was the life of logistics—printing things, running five workshops & hosting receptions before the Career Fair itself. And as much as I am an event planner for my social ongoings, running a production like this was definitely a challenge since you can’t please everyone. Now that it was successful, it's time to write feedback for next year's team. It never ends! 

In my second life, I’m the teaching assistant for a class I took junior year—Management of Strategic Communication. This course is academically rigorous for the students, and a testament to how they research and work on a team.  Like I mentioned in my post about being a TA, these students don’t know what else I have going on, nor should they care. But from my standpoint, it requires full attention to their needs and prioritizing them between other jobs. I am coaching two of the teams so they complete the best brand project they have, and I’m learning to be a “coach” without being an instructor, giving away the direction they need to go. Rather, I’m emphasizing education and trying my best to teach them through this process and not just continually make corrections for them. A lot easier said than done, I have to coach myself through being their coach. Would my TA have given me this feedback? Are you giving them the answers? What can they figure out without you if you nudge them in the right direction?  

In my next life, I’m on the community outreach team at the Columbia Missourian. The outreach team works to serve the city of Columbia with community journalism, constantly asking how we can engage our audience and cater to their needs. Because of my interest in the branding of journalism, I registered for this class to see how journalists and publications view audience development, social media tactics, community events and branding themselves. I work 6 to 8 hours of shifts a week at the Missourian and am completing a long-term research project for the publication over the semester. 

In my last life, I’m a graduate student writing my thesis proposal. And I am absolutely petrified. I'm just getting started, but it's hard to focus on something when homework from two other classes is there to distract. 

What's the point here? Amongst all of your commitments and double-lives, don't forget who YOU are. Making time to hang out with my friends and roommates, go to church and get out has saved my semester. Don't let the worst of things get you! 

A Seattle adventure

Earlier this month, my Changing Media Business Models took a class trip to Seattle. Its purpose was to meet entrepreneurs and watch how large news organizations & corporations are innovating to the changing media consumption landscape. The northwest is full of innovators with expertise to share, and checking out what the city has to offer was an added bonus.  

Check out some of the highlights of the city from a tourist's perspective:

The view of the skyline from Bellevue, a beautiful, rising suburb where Microsoft has some HQ offices

The Space Needle by our hotel 

Walking down the coast by the Puget Sound

Some beautiful sunsets!

The Museum of Space & Flight, as Boeing has headquarters & a large presence in Seattle

Stopping by the theater where prom was held in 10 Things I Hate About You, my favorite movie (still). 

Pike's Place Market

Stopping by and walking around the University of Washington campus...

...and seeing how its bar scene compares to the one at Mizzou! And how the Capitol Hill area is.

The educational part 

For our media visits, we started off at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a Hearst-owned publication that went online only in 2009, laying off more than 150 employees. It was depressing to see its empty newsroom and hear that they only have 12 employees, and have cut the profession of copy editing. The Seattle Times turned around our hopelessness for the future of in-depth reporting and working journalists by explaining their online processes. They even have an internal research arm with an impressive portfolio.

Our class at The Seattle Times

Two individuals we met with were Tom, a hyper-local Seattle bike blogger, and Kris, a woman who our professor refers to as the Seattle tri-fecta. She’s held high-level positions at Starbucks, Microsoft and currently at Amazon on the Kindle team. Both gave us career advice, with Tom providing insights on how to monetize (or fail with) your entrepreneurial ideas, and Kris explaining how to establish yourself at a large company.

Meeting with Tom, a bike blogger, at Odd Fellows Coffee Lounge  

MSN News directors at Microsoft explained how they launched an online news site formatted like Windows 8, and explained the strategy that went behind their decisions. GeekWire founders told us about their business model and how they capitalized on their personal brands to grow an online audience. It was awesome to see both of these companies making use of niche interests and acknowledging people and how they use media today. 

A Microsoft cube upon entering the office

Our trip ended in an unfortunate way with a 14-hour travel day after a cancelled flight, but when your university is paying for your trip, you can't really complain about that. Our class really had the opportunity to bond at the airport and there is a unique class dynamic when we meet because we all know each other so well. Together, we convinced the airport to give us $10 dinner vouchers after our miserable experience.

My classmates at the Denver airport as we were stuck with a 6-hour layover and a cancelled flight, without our professor

Rating the city
Overall, Seattle was a beautiful city but I'm not sure if I could live there in my 20s. There were some awesome things about it, like the coast, greenery, phenomenal coffee and intelligent collection and caliber of people.

Every restaurant also had a trash, recycle and compost bucket, reflecting the environmental people there.

The cost of living was more expensive than I expected it to be, and although there is a monorail, the main, 'hopping' areas of the city are each about 3 miles apart from each other, making it difficult to go out without a car. Therefore, on my city-scale, it ranked as more of a place to raise a family and afford as a 30-something than somewhere to drop all of your things and move there now. I'm happy I had the opportunity to check it out from both a lifestyle and business perspective. I should start a city-ranking criteria after all my US-traveling the past two years!

The excitement of a retweet

Look what happens when you make your Twitter public and your tweet is shared by the Columbia Missourian! 10 retweets and some new followers can sure make my day. 

Google+ Hangouts show success

Lesson of the week: Google+ hangouts are a fun and efficient way to group chat. 

Earlier this week, my roommates and I practiced hosting a Google+ hangout so Laura could prepare for an interview. Amidst the 10 inches of snow in Columbia this afternoon, the Missourian outreach team emailed out a hangout invitation as well for a quick and effective way to hold a team meeting. Seven of us joined and had a productive conversation about how to cover the rest of the snowstorm in the social sphere. To see what has been produced, check out this RebelMouse, Google Map of road reports or Flickr gallery. 

Although Google+ seems to be a fail of a social platform, the hangout tool is incredibly useful. Here's a few reasons why:

• You don't have to purchase Skype credit
• Little downloads are required for your browser
• Nearly everyone has a Google account, making it quick and simple to log on.

Try one out sometime! 

My favorite Super Bowl ads so far #SB47

Note: this is not an in-depth advertising analysis of advertising strategies and goals, but rather- my personal opinion of which advertisements might succeed!

1. Best Buy - Infinite Answers
This commercial featured Amy Poehler asking "infinite questions" to the Best Buy associate. The questions we're hilarious (What is LTE? Can this read 50 Shades of Grey to me?) and didn't even need a celebrity to capture the point. Good purpose, good humor.

2. Audi - Bravery
Audi invested a lot of money in the Super Bowl, with a sponsorship and the 1:00 prom spot. I like this one because it seems very on strategy, showing the courageous teenage boy with its "Bravery defines us" tagline.

3. Toyota Rav4- Wish Granted 

Another pretty long spot, but I think it was very cohesive. Watching the tire blow up at the beginning caught my attention, and the follow-through on the wishes  with "Your wish is my command" was cool. There were some other things thrown in that made me stray away from thinking it was a Toyota ad, like camera time spent on the Satellite Radio, but the family along with the "Let's go places" tagline made it pretty enticing. 

4. Taco Bell - Viva Young

I could tell this spot was for Taco Bell when I heard the Spanish "We Are Young" playing and thought of the Live Más tagline. This commercial exceeded my expectations because it is directly aimed at its target. After it ran, the positive Twitter response was all from young men, meaning it accomplished its goal. The old people were funny, and the target thought they were funny too. The song was cool, the production seemed intense and I enjoyed it!

5. Wonderful Pistachios- Crackin' Style 

This commercial is just plain hilarious. Psy's Gangnam Style was HUGE this year, and I was surprised in the first half when no one had done a spin on it. This spot takes a lesser known brand and is making a name for it with a celebrity endorsement that drives a stronger connection with a food, since you can't get the picture of these pistachios out of your head. 

Other highlight:

Not a commercial, but HOW ABOUT THAT BEYONCE HALFTIME SHOW? Despite the conversation about her killing it, check out the following series of tweets in 30 seconds JUST when Destiny's Child came on!

Now, I'll head back to reading Twitter's reaction to the #SuperBowlBlackout and enjoy the rest of this 30 minute break!

Learning to cook: recipe 1

I know this isn't a cooking blog, but I have to show off my first homemade meal. For my birthday, Shaina bought me a Williams-Sonoma cookbook called Potato since potatoes are my favorite food. Also, once you have a cookbook sitting there taunting you, you feel like a horrible person when you don't cook something in it.

So in some free time yesterday, I decided to try my first recipe: potato gnocchi. I didn't have a potato masher, but still managed to make the dough and then cook it like pasta & fry it in butter. While it was difficult, took 2 1/2 hours to make and a lot of pans - it worked! It tastes amazing to eat something you know you made from scratch.

Check it out!

Potato gnocchi pasta with peas, carrots and alfredo sauce

Random Act of Kindness

Yesterday morning, Kathryn, Andrew and I went to Mizzou Arena for our last (ever!) basketball ticket pickup in college. Ticket pickups have been some of our most memorable college experiences, because you always learn a lot about others after spending four hours with them in freezing cold weather. They typically open up at 8 am, but Mizzou Athletics has been generous lately and opens the doors early so you can wait indoors instead of outside. After last month's four-hour wait for tickets, Kathryn and I came prepared with books to read.

There are plenty of ways to strategize ticket pickup. You can go early and leave early, go toward the end and hope the line has died down, budge with friends, give your ID to someone else (IF you're lucky, I can't say I've tone this often) or risk it and go in the middle. This morning, we decided we'd leave at 9 am and hope the line had died down. So it was shocking to us when we walked in and saw NOBODY in line.

Mizzou Arena even started handing out donuts, coffee and hot chocolate for everyone camping out for tickets, so when they had five extra trays of donuts leftover, the staff let us take a box on our way out.

Andrew and Kathryn in the empty Mizzou Arena

Kathryn was joking about what to do with the donuts, and when we dropped Andrew off we saw some girls we knew and offered them donuts. It sounded pretty sketchy at first when we rolled down the car window and screamed, HEY! WANT A DONUT? but kept us laughing. Then, Kathryn had the idea of going to Speaker's Circle, Mizzou's most popular location to deliver free things, and handing out free donuts. I named it our Random Act of Kindness and off we went.

Kathryn handing out donuts in Speaker's Circle

We parked the car with its hazard lights on and energetically hopped out, prepared to deliver donuts. And then it began; college students love free food. The first few people we offered donuts to in Speaker's Circle said no, but once one person grabbed one, it was collegiate peer pressure. We were standing outside for a duration of two minutes before getting rid of practically the entire donut box. So lesson learned- doing random acts of kindness is fun, and gives you a funny story!