How To: Prepare For a Meeting About Twitter
I went to SXSW and fully anticipated having a ton to tell my supervisors at Moffitt. I came back and had so much to say, that we scheduled a meeting for yesterday to go over everything I learned, namely how Moffitt could use Twitter as a part of their communication strategy.
Here are some things you should consider before actually giving a presentation on Twitter to a staff that is unfamiliar.
1. Make sure you’re in a room that is technologically sound to support your presentation. We were so caught up in just getting the meeting scheduled that my preferred conference room was in use. So we went to the boss’s spacious office and had a round table with one computer monitor. Not ideal.
2. Make sure IT hasn’t blocked Twitter.com. Seems pretty commonsense, right? You’d think so. As of Wednesday last week, we had no problem accessing Twitter.com or search.twitter.com or any other Twitter-affiliated site. Come meeting time? It wouldn’t load. It was like cooking with no utensils, or ingredients for that matter. I wasn’t able to demonstrate all of the wonderful things I had rehearsed, and was forced to explain it with no visual aids.
3. Bring backup. I brought Joel Comm’s Twitter Power, a book about dominating your market “one tweet at a time”. We went over some key points briefly, but I wasn’t able to fully show the points laid out in Joel’s book since I couldn’t log on to Twitter.
4. Open it up for questions. When I realized that I wouldn’t be able to access anything, I simply opened up the floor to questions. What is the benefit? What are some demographics for users on Twitter? Are other hospitals using this? I was able to answer most of the questions, though, of course it would have been easier with a visual aid.
Do your homework. Then you’ll be successful.
