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How To Keep Your Audience Awake

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12 Most Engaging Presenter Behaviors…0n How to Keep Your Audience Awake

Do you want to engage your audience. First, many people in your audience are tired—probably at least a third of them just don’t get enough sleep. They’re sitting there hoping they won’t embarrass themselves by nodding off. Part of your job is to help them stay awake, to actually pay attention and consider what you are saying. Next time you practice a presentation, note how many of the following strategies you actually use. Then add a couple more. You don’t want your audience to look like this.

 

  1. Start by telling your audience what they will take away from your talk. What are three things worth paying attention to and remembering? One of my talks starts with: “When you leave after two hour workshop, you will know how to (1) organize a talk and save hours of time; (2) use my professionally designed slides to categorize information on your slides and keep your audience engaged; and (3) feel more confident and excited about giving a presentation.
  2. Speak less than the time allotted. When you begin, say, “I know I have 30 minutes. I will only talk for 15, and then let’s discuss what I’ve said.” Your audience will think to themselves, “OK, I can listen for 15 minutes.” Plus, they will be happy not to have to listen as long as they expected.
  3. Use silence effectively. When you are playing catch and you throw the ball to someone, you find yourself waiting—will the other player catch it, and how? You don’t throw ball after ball without looking to see if the person caught one of them. When you make a statement, it’s like playing ball—you have to wait in silence to see how people receive it. Don’t keep throwing more and more words without giving your audience the chance to catch each sentence.
  4. Pause periodically. Silence not only gives your audience a chance to digest your information—it also gives them permission to participate. When you pause, you non-verbally tell your audience that they can interrupt you. Your pause makes people feel comfortable—that you are encouraging them to jump in and speak. If you talk nonstop, you will never engage your audience.
  5. Emphasize key words. If you speak in the same voice tone throughout the entire presentation, no one knows what is really important. Make it obvious to your audience what they really need to pay attention to.
  6. Use numbers, and emphasize them. A person can pay attention better when you say, “There are three strategies to solve this situation. Number 1 is… Number 2 is… Number 3 is…” Every time you say a number, it reengages your audience’s attention and helps their brains to listen.
  7. Remind your audience of the benefits of what you just told them. I frequently say something like, “By using these professionally designed slides you will feel more confident when speaking, and you’ll be able to make eye contact with your audience because you won’t be reading the slides.”
  8. Add some emotion or humor to your talk. People can only sit and listen to someone spouting facts at them for so long. You have to engage the “child” part of your audience by using emotional words. “I’m excited today to be here to tell you some good news.” Or “The TEAM did some hard grueling work and came up with this amazing new way to visualize the product.”
  9. Tell a story that interests your audience. We all love stories—especially ones that have some emotion connected to them. Tell a story within 5 to 8 minutes of starting your talk.
  10. Say these words: “You, Your”. When starting say, “I am delighted to see all of you here.” Later on say, “As you know, we have this situation. First, you will hear some ideas and then please give your opinions about how we can change this situation.”
  11. Do something unexpected. One of my clients stopped talking in the middle of his presentation, blanked out the screen and said, “OK, you’ve heard enough of the possibilities of using this new program, let’s discuss your views so far.” The energy changed in the room. People started talking and came to some understandings before he went on. Another presenter passed out several products and asked people to talk about them.
  12. Give people “brain food”. Literally, give them food, and I don’t mean donuts. Here are some ideas: almonds, walnuts, cashews, small cups of bananas and blueberries, dark chocolate, small turkey sandwiches, yogurt (without the sugar), green tea. These foods will help them concentrate, which means they will be more engaged with you.

One last word:

If you yourself aren’t engaged, then you might as well forget it. Find some way to motivate yourself to be excited about your talk—you can’t expect your audience to carry you or motivate you. You are the one in front of the group, so it’s up to you to bring the interest and curiosity into the room. You don’t have to be an over-the-top enthused presenter. By using these strategies, you can exude quiet engagement.
Which ones will you start with?

PS: You may think you do these things already, but until you record yourself and watch, or ask someone else to critique you, you may just be fooling yourself.

The Educators Road Map For The Next Generation of Work

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This road map for the next generation of work is for the up and coming generation to make sure they start on the right foot.

What happens when the tools & technologies we use every day become mainstream parts of the business world?
What happens when we stop leading separate “consumer” & “professional” lives when it comes to technology stacks?

The result is a dramatic change in the products we use at work and as a result an upending of the canon of management practices that define how work is done.

New tools are appearing that radically alter the traditional definitions of productivity and work. Businesses failing to embrace these changes will find their employees simply working around IT at levels we have not seen even during the earliest days of the PC. Too many enterprises are either flat-out resisting these shifts or hoping for a “transition”—disruption is taking place, not only to every business, but within every business.

The Educators Work Culture

Continuous productivity is an era that fosters a seamless integration between consumer and business platforms. Continuous productivity manifests itself as an environment where the evolving tools and culture make it possible to innovate more and faster than ever, with significantly improved execution. Together our industry is shaping a new way to learn, work, and live with the power of software and mobile computing—an era of continuous productivity.

Continuous productivity is possible

Continuous productivity shifts our efforts from the start/stop world of episodic work and work products to one that builds on the technologies that start to answer what happens when:

  • A generation of new employees has access to the collective knowledge of an entire profession, experts, or enterprise.
  • Collaboration takes place across organisation and company boundaries with everyone connected by a social fibre rather than the organisations hierarchy.
  • Data, knowledge, analysis, and opinion are equally available to every member of a team in formats that are digital, sharable, and structured.
  • People have the ability to time slice, context switch, and proactively deal with situations as they arise, shifting from a start/stop environment to one that is continuous.

Join The Educators Pioneering projects

The vast majority of organisations are struggling right now with how to face these challenges. Beside the ones who try to ignore this shift, majority of the organisations are trying to use this new technology to run their old system. You are welcome to join The Eductors as an individual and develop your teaching environment or join any of our current and futur group projects.

How Different is the way we work:

The availability of the information and communications tools has allowed us to move from a hierarchical access model of the past to a much more collaborative and sharing-first approach. Every member have access to the raw “feeds” that could be material to their role. Teams become the focus of collaborative work, empowered by the data to inform their decisions. The increasing use of “crowds” and product usage telemetry able to guide improved our services, based not on sampling and forecasting but on what amounts to a census of real-world usage.

The following table contrasts the way we work (continuous productivity) and the current norms.

Traditional way
 Continuous Productivity
Process Exploration
Hierarchy, top down or middle out Network, bottom up
Internal committees Internal and external teams, crowds
Strategy-centric Execution-centric
Presenting packaged and produced ideas, documents Sharing ideas and perspectives continuously, service
Data based on snapshots at intervals, viewed statically Data always real-time, viewed dynamically
Process-centric Rhythm-centric
Exact answers Approximation and iteration
More users More usage

The cultural changes encouraged and enabled by continuous productivity include:

  • Innovate more and faster. The bottom line is that by compressing the time between meaningful interactions between members of a team, we will go from problem to solution faster. Whether solving a problem with an existing product or service or thinking up a new one, the continuous nature of communication speeds up the velocity and quality of work.
  • Flatten hierarchy. Equal access to tools and information, a continuous multi-way dialog, and the ease and bringing together relevant parties regardless of place in the organisation flattens the hierarchy, this is the key.
  • Improve execution. Execution improves because members of teams have access to the interactions and data in real-time. Gone are the days of “game of telephone” where information needed to “cascade” through an organization only to be reinterpreted or even filtered by each level of an organization.
  • Respond to changes using telemetry / data. With the advent of continuous real-world usage telemetry, the debate and dialog move from the problems to the solution. You don’t spend energy arguing over the problem, but debating the merits of various solutions.
  • Strengthen organization and partnerships. Organisations that communicate openly and transparently leave much less room for politics and hidden agendas. The transparency afforded by tools might introduce some rough and tumble in the early days as new “norms” are created but over time the ability to collaborate will only improve given the shared context and information base everyone works from.
  • Focus on the destination, not the journey. The real-time sharing of information forces organizations to operate in real-time. Problems are in the here and now and demand solutions in the present. The benefit of this “pressure” is that a focus on the internal systems, the steps along the way, or intermediate results is, out of necessity, de-emphasised.

Follow the following article for further reading.

 

  1. Road Map For The Next Generation of Work – Paradigm shift (1)
  2. Road Map For The Next Generation of Work – Theory & Technology (2)
  3. Road Map For The Next Generation of Work – Examples and Checklist (3)

 

 

Real learning

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We are constantly learning, regardless of how old we are. Or, let’s at least say we are trying hard to learn. The ways we are learning, though, seem not quite right when we consider what we are trying to achieve.

If you can’t apply it, you haven’t learned

In most cases, you are interested in using the new knowledge to accomplish something. Yet, you choose to learn in ways that don’t bring you anywhere close to applying what you learn. Maybe it is trigonometry for the SATs, or web design for the job interview on the horizon. Even the book you are reading on how humans form habits is probably tied to a change you wish to make happen in your life. So, you do learn for a reason: You are hoping to apply what you learn. And you want that to happen sooner than later.

Doing the wrong things more doesn’t make things right

Given this very clear goal, what do we do? We listen, watch videos, take notes, read… When we realize that we retained very little, we find out we haven’t learned; we have already forgotten most of it. Then we try harder. Read harder, listen harder, write harder. You know it.

Try testing

What we don’t include in our learning effort is testing. That’s the secret missing piece in the routines of billions of people as they strive to learn. At worst, the act of testing yourself to see if you learned is completely absent. At best, it is an afterthought; a 10-question quiz at the end of a 4-week long study plan. Think about it. When was the last time you tested yourself on what you learned?

The disconnect between what we respect and what we do

This is completely against what we know and value in life about practice and experience. We have utmost respect for people who practice a lot; if they have been tested extensively and repeatedly, they must be great at what they do. We prefer lawyers with a strong track record in court. We feel more confident with surgeons who have more experience operating on others. Professional athletes dry-run over, and over, and over long before they get their first glimpse of the competition. Countless more examples underline one fact: We believe extensive testing is the right way for others, and we respect the ones who do more. But when it comes to us, we stay in our comfort zones, never looking back to evaluate whether we actually learned.

This comfort zone of ours makes us give in to the false sense of completion when we finish a book. It makes us move to the next blog post as soon as we are done with one. It justifies the illusion of finishing a TED talk and assuming we now know how we will use the snippet of wisdom in that video. Once we think we “got” the information, we don’t look back, we don’t check whether we internalized it, we don’t see if we can apply that learning to a problem of our own.

In the US culture, testing in schools is sometimes perceived as evil; though a necessary one. Ask someone what testing means, and you will hear all the critics about labeling, grading, force-ranking people. But guess what. That is testing at its worst, and I believe that is what makes us miss the real learning opportunity today.

Testing shows the way

Tests, when done right, put us in the driver’s seat. They force us to make a judgment, give us deep awareness about what we are missing to make the right call in the future, when the right call will be of great importance. Tests reveal to us what we are strong at, and what we are weak at. Tests show us the path, so that we know what we know and what we don’t. Testing is the due diligence on our learning performance. When used as a learning method, there is almost no better way to learn something, anything, deeply.

I know what you just thought. When you heard the word test, you visualized the endless stream of multiple choice questions you once tackled to prove to others that you deserve whatever you were shooting for. While that is indeed a test, that is not the only one. Testing is a much broader concept. Practically, you are testing yourself whenever you force yourself to produce an answer, before you see the answer. And that moment is not about grading, not about labeling you. Plain and simple: that moment is all about confronting yourself to see whether you actually know stuff. That simple.

One thing I learned

Not convinced? Here’s my advice. Test this theory yourself, on your own terms. Make this post the first experiment and challenge yourself. Don’t just move to the next article. First, see if you acquired something from this post. I know you want to read a lot, and read fast, but just for once, do your reading differently, and embrace the thrill of cold calling.

Article by:

 

Empower Yourself

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You can, and should, empower yourself.

We tend to think of empowerment as a gift granted to us by others. Your supervisor empowers you to make decisions; your government empowers you to vote; a business empowers you to customize a product. These are all examples of empowerment, to be sure, but they are not the only ways we can experience it.

Empowering yourself means deciding your own path and doing what you need to do to acquire the skills and opportunities necessary to follow that path.

Steps to Self-Empowerment

Step 1: Expand Your Mind. Before you act in an empowered manner, you must be able to think in an empowered manner. Often, this means learning to let your mind roam beyond the parameters of what you have learned in school or been trained to do on the job.

Opening your mind to the possibilities is a skill that must be constantly practiced. Study, read, engage with others who can teach you something new.

Step 2: Expand Your Territory. If you are in extend your field of studies, start teaching part times, study abroad. If you are in the workplace, seek opportunities to travel, take assignments in another city or country, expand your expertise, get involved with new technology. Your exposure to new visions of success will radically change your thinking.

Next Step - The Educators Starter Pack

The starter pack is designed to empower you to manage your students community from different sources in one place. In most cases The Educators provide related test and content online to assist your teaching. The starter pack is offered free of charge (subject to approval) and is made of two stages:

Stage 1- You are given an online training/inductions programme. This online programme is designed to give you an understanding or how a virtual room works. Here you will be using the system as a student, this gives us the opportunity to not only to train you but also you will gain the learner experience which is crucial for the next stage.

Stage 2- On a successful completion of the first stage you will be given a class room to manage (content in the class is subject to your expertise). You will be expected to enrol few students (5 min. to 10 max.) on your course and manage them through their tasks. Next step is to run your class subject to contract. (Click here for Standard Service Rates)

TheEducators.com aims to create a wider spectrum of possibilities for its members. We create the opportunities, and you empower yourself.

Click me to join

You can carry on with further training programmes (Instructional Design, Moodle Course Design, Teaching with Moodle, Test and Assessment Design, Moodle Administrator, VLE Architecture)

Socmed_-_Flickr_-_USDAgov

How To Build a Powerful Online Presence

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The Big Picture

The key is to focus on the areas that matter the most and ignore the lower-priority areas. Make some smart decisions about which Internet marketing tools you’re going to use and which you can afford to ignore.

 

How To Build a Powerful Online Presence: The key is to be consistent. Your online presence is based on small, consistent, high-quality contributions rather than a few sporadic marketing campaigns.

 

You can group these tools into four broad categories based on how you use them to deliver high-quality content:

Web presenceCreate

This will typically be your website itself. You create it once and then adjust it as required. You do need to be able to update it yourself, but most of the updates are promotional (for example: adding testimonials, promoting new events, adding new products and services).

When you start doing specific marketing campaigns, you’ll be updating this much more regularly – for example, fine-tuning the keywords on pages, creating landing pages for search engine marketing campaigns and so on. However, you don’t need to do this immediately, and you can first focus on the other activities below.

Generate

These are the tools you use for generating and distributing your content regularly. The two main tools are your blog and email newsletter, and these are supplemented by other regular content distribution tools such as YouTube videos, SlideShare presentations, a podcast (an audio newsletter) and article directories.

You don’t have to create brand-new content for each platform. Later in this report, you’ll see how easy it is to adapt one piece of material into different formats.

Automate

If you don’t have the time to get fully involved in social media, at least get a simple presence by automating the process. Every time you publish a blog post, let your followers know on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. (The free TwitterFeed.com service will do this for you.) You can also manually post links to Google+ and Pinterest.

This gives you a minimal – but useful – social media presence. Like anything else, social media will work better when you put some serious time, effort and focus into it. However, you still need to earn the right to use it as a marketing platform, and this is a way of creating a presence slowly until you’re ready to do more with it.

Participate

Finally, you can participate in online conversations. This can happen on the big social media platforms like Twitter, Google+, Facebook and LinkedIn; or they can be niche on-line communities of your customers, clients and colleagues.

This is important, and eventually it will probably give you the greatest return. It’s also what many social media consultants will advise you to do. However, it does take time, so make sure you choose the right communities and engage in the right conversations.

Summary

Here’s a summary of the four stages, written as a marketing plan:

  • Website

    Build a high-quality website that promotes you.

  • Publish Articles Regularly

    Publish them to your newsletter and blog; and optionally leverage them in other forms.

  • Update Your Social Media

    Automatically notify your social media followers of new blog posts.

  • Participate in Discussions

    Take part in conversations and discussions with peers and clients.

This report focus on the middle two layers of the plan above: generating high-quality content and automating your exposure on social media.

I highly recommend you to read the full report.

Get The Full Article

More Articles:

Using LinkedIn Effectively

Effective social media strategy

Tips And Advice For Great Article Marketing

How To Use Google+ For Content Marketing

This post is based on the extracts from an article by Gihan Perera, he is a consultant, speaker and author, who helps thought leaders and business professionals leverage their expertise. He is the author of the book Webinar Smarts and Fast, Flat and Free, among others.

learning style

learning strategies

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What’s the key to effective learning? One intriguing body of research suggests a rather riddle-like answer:

It’s not just what you know. It’s what you know about what you know.

To put it in more straight forward terms, anytime a student learns, he or she has to bring in two kinds of prior knowledge: knowledge about the subject at hand (say, mathematics or history) and knowledge about how learning works. Educators are pretty good at imparting the first kind of knowledge. We’re comfortable talking about concrete information: names, dates, numbers, facts. But the guidance we offer on the act of learning itself—the “metacognitive” aspects of learning—is more hit-or-miss, and it shows.

“Metacognition” is often simply defined as “thinking about thinking.”

Metacognition refers to higher order thinking which involves active control over the cognitive processes engaged in learning. Activities such as planning how to approach a given learning task, monitoring comprehension, and evaluating progress toward the completion of a task are metacognitive in nature. Because metacognition plays a critical role in successful learning, it is important to study metacognitive activity and development to determine how students can be taught to better apply their cognitive resources through metacognitive control.

In most of the teaching institutions, “the emphasis is on what students need to learn, whereas little emphasis—if any—is placed on training students how they should go about learning the content and what skills will promote efficient studying to support robust learning,”John Dunlosky, professor of psychology at Kent State University in Ohio”

Teaching students how to learn is as important as teaching them content, because acquiring both the right learning strategies and background knowledge is important—if not essential—for promoting lifelong learning.”

Research has found that students vary widely in what they know about how to learn, according to a team of educational researchers from Australia writing last year in the journal Instructional Science. Most striking, low-achieving students show “substantial deficits” in their awareness of the cognitive and metacognitive strategies that lead to effective learning—suggesting that these students’ struggles may be due in part to a gap in their knowledge about how learning works.

Teaching students good learning strategies would ensure that they know how to acquire new knowledge, which leads to improved learning outcomes. Students who use appropriate strategies to understand and remember what they read, such as underlining important parts of the texts or discussing what they read with other people, perform mush better (equivalent to one full school year) in their assessments.

A Free Guide on How to Take Your Course online from The Educators

It is incredibly focused, with a refreshingly simple approach. And it covers, course design, elearning technology, marketing your course online and so much more!

Read It Now

Students can assess their own awareness by asking themselves which of the following learning strategies they regularly use (the response to each item is ideally “yes”):
• I draw pictures or diagrams to help me understand this subject.
• I make up questions that I try to answer about this subject.
• When I am learning something new in this subject, I think back to what I already know about it.
• I discuss what I am doing in this subject with others.
• I practice things over and over until I know them well in this subject.
• I think about my thinking, to check if I understand the ideas in this subject.
• When I don’t understand something in this subject I go back over it again.
• I make a note of things that I don’t understand very well in this subject, so that I can follow them up.
• When I have finished an activity in this subject I look back to see how well I did.
• I organize my time to manage my learning in this subject.
• I make plans for how to do the activities in this subject.

Research shows that those students who used fewer of these strategies reported more difficulty coping with their schoolwork. Educators can use a series of proactive questions which they can drop into the lesson on a “just-in-time” basis—at the moments when students could use the prompting most. These questions, too, can be adopted by any educator to make sure that learners know not just what is to be learned, but how.

• What is the topic for today’s lesson?
• What will be important ideas in today’s lesson?
• What do you already know about this topic?
• What can you relate this to?
• What will you do to remember the key ideas?
• Is there anything about this topic you don’t understand, or are not clear about?

 

What Is Your Learning Style?

This quiz asks 24 questions and will take less than five minutes to complete. Try not to think too hard — just go with your first thought when describing your daily activities and interests. By the end, you may have some new insights into your learning preferences.

This article has been based on an article by Annie Murphy Paul.

You can email her at annie@anniemurphypaul.com.

You can also visit her website, follow her on Twitter, and join the conversation on Facebook. Be brilliant!

Developing an Influencer Plan

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Developing an Influencer Plan

In today’s marketplace, the biggest challenge you have is standing out in the crowd, becoming recognized as an authority, and obtaining your dream job. Tested, proven marketing strategies can help you solve these challenges, whether you think you of yourself as a marketer or not.

Build Your Digital Footprint

Getting started

First you have to identify your target audience (those how may be interested in your product or service). Next study the competitive landscape and your target audience needs, those who may be interested to receive your instructional posts or blogs.

To keep the cost down you need to your own writing, proofreading, uploading into WordPress, and finding copyright free images for individual posts.

Start Building your LinkedIn network, Facebook Fan page (not a personal page), Google+ and get your Twitter going (subject to your audience you may use other social networks)

The influencer list

Influencer can be defined as a blogger, competitor, or media organization that is creating content of interest to our target audience. Initially, can develop this list by tracking keywords (like “content marketing”) in Google Alerts, authors in industry trade publications, those who were talking about the topic on Twitter, LinkedIn and other bloggers that you just find interesting.

  • LinkedIn- Join the relevant groups and discussion.
  • Article Submission Sites - Join the relevant article posting sites.
  • FaceBook Fan page - Start building your face books fan page.

Getting the attention of influencers

As influencers, these people are fairly important. They generally have real jobs, and are extremely active on social networks, spending their time sharing content and blogging. Getting on their radar is not easy. So, to get their attention, you can give away content gifts.

Ways to achieve this:

Social media 4-1-1

Originally coined by Andrew Davis, author of Brandscaping, Social Media 4-1-1 is a sharing system that enables a company to get greater visibility with social influencers.

Here’s how it works.

For every six pieces of content shared via social media (think Twitter for example):

  • Four are pieces of content from your influencer target that are also relevant to your audience. This means that 67% of the time you are sharing content that is not yours, and calling attention to content from your influencer group.
  • One piece can be your original, educational piece of content.
  • One piece can be your sales piece, like a coupon, product notice, press release or some other piece of content that no one will pay attention to.

While the numbers don’t have to be exact, it’s the philosophy that makes this work. When you share influencer content, they notice. And you share, without asking for anything in return … so that when you do need something someday, the influencers are more likely to say yes.

Big content gifts

From your “top content marketing blogs” list, you can decide which one can get a better visibility with influencers by actually ranking the influencers and sharing it out with the masses.

You can rank the top bloggers, websites, books, etc…looking at areas like consistency, style, helpfulness, originality, and social sharing. Then each quarter, you can publicise the list, showcase the top 10, send out a press release, and try to make a big deal out of it. You will find that most of this influencer group share the list with their audiences, and may place your widget (with their personal rank) on their home page, linking back to our site. So not only are we building long-term relationships with these influencers, you are getting credible links and traffic as well.

The importance of a community blog

As you may not have the resources (time and money) to develop large body of content you can find others to join you. To attract these social influencers you should put a compelling case forward (you can be promoting their blogs or book, etc). Most of these influencers (if approached properly) will be more than happy to help you out.

Click here For The Educators Open Invitation

to take your course online on a commercial or non-commercial basis.

Click Here

Influencer program results

You will see positive traffic patterns almost immediately simply because of the amount of social sharing from the network.

That, in turn, leads to more social sharing and some amazing SEO results.

While you may or may not launch a blog that has outside contribution, committing to maintaining a social influencer list is a critical component to your social sharing program.

Next step is to add webinars and video marketing to your content.

This report was written based on an Article by: Joe Pulizzi is founder of Content Marketing Institute

Mobile Age

Time To Go Mobile

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Think mobile, the younger generation are using their smartphone more and more to conduct business. As all of us increasingly use our mobile phones for business, mobile applications become not only helpful, but essential, to get work done fast and well. IF you want to stay a head then is time to go mobile. Just listen to these guys:

1. Contactually

Contactually is my favorite business app. My business is all about relationships, and Contactually makes it dead simple for me to follow up with leads and make introductions between my clients. There have also been many upgrades to the app recently, which makes it best in sales in the CRM class.
- Lawrence Watkins, Founder & CEO, Great Black Speakers

 

 

2. Asana

Asana has transformed our business. It connects the technical team with the marketing team. It helps everyone understand the value they are contributing. It’s a soft approach to holding everyone accountable to both others and themselves. In startups, there is always more to do. Asana helps us prioritize and organize everything we do. Both the website and mobile app are quite useful.
- Mitch Gordon, CEO/ Co-Founder, Go Overseas

 

 

3. Basecamp

If you use Basecamp to manage your team’s projects, then the mobile app is a MUST. On the road, you can check in on the status of projects, tasks of key team members, and even review clients’ input/approvals.
- Torrey Tayenaka, CEO / Co-Founder, Sparkhouse

 

 

 

4. MobileDay

MobileDay is an essential productivity app I use daily. MobileDay dials in and enters your access code automatically. By pulling meetings from my calendar, MobileDay reminds me when I have conference calls and enters them for me. What a time saver!
- Adam Lieb, Founder & CEO, Duxter

 

 

5. SignNow

SignNow is such a simple concept and has become my most-used third-party app. It gives me the ability to sign documents on the go. The team can work quickly and efficiently no matter where I am located around the world.
- Adam Cunningham , 87AM

 

 

6. Square

We do a full 80 percent of our sales on the road. We do this with theSquare app. It is fast and reliable, and our deposits are done daily with no monthly fees or transaction fees. It is just a set percentage of the sale price, which works out to be much less expensive for us than what we were paying with a merchant credit service.
- Jay Wu, Creator, Best Drug Rehabilitation

 

 

7. WorkFlowy

Entrepreneurs tend to be highly creative and, even when focused on a core business, they tend to have lots of ideas and tasks in their minds! The key for me to staying organized is WorkFlowy. It is like exporting your brain to a highly scalable, well-structured app. I keep WorkFlowy open on my computer all day as my to-do list organizer and idea repository. The iOS apps are phenomenal, too!
- Doreen Bloch, CEO / Founder, Poshly Inc.

 

 

8. Skype

I do a lot of business internationally and with TONS of freelancers.Skype is a lifesaver. If anybody ever has questions, they just ping me. I can answer it from my iPhone whenever I need to and from wherever.
- Travis Steffen, Founder, WorkoutBOX

 

 

 

9. Yammer
Our team members used to email each other small tasks, but at some point the flow of conversations became overwhelming. We moved to Google Chat, but interruptions from friends take a toll during the day as a little pop-up can disrupt your flow. Yammer allows our team to get the benefits of quick chatting through our phones without the to-do of opening an email or the distraction of a random conversation.
- Aaron Schwartz, Founder and CEO, Modify Watches

 

10. TripIt
Based in Seattle, life outside of the Valley and Madison Avenue is hardly recognized, so it’s pertinent I make an effort to be present with peers, mentors and investors — putting my company on the map … literally. With Tripit, I handle all of my travel details including booking, hotels and meetings. In the spirit of a lean startup, sans human administration, this app is an employee requirement. - Matt Ehrlichman, CEO, Porch

 

 

 

11. Genius Scan
No one could figure out how to use the “all-in-one” printer/scanner in our office, but when we discovered Genius Scan, that all changed. From saving notes to signing legal documents, it’s simply the easiest way to scan anything. I paid $2.99 for the upgrade and can sync directly with Dropbox.
- Ryan Buckley, COO & Co-founder, Scripted, Inc.

 

 

12. Shoeboxed

I’m terrible — I mean really terrible — with receipts. With Shoeboxed, I’m able to take a photo after every business meal or purchase, add a note and then never worry about the paper again. It’s a huge advantage, and It has also made compliance and tax time much less stressful.
- Sean Ogle, Founder, Location 180, LLC

 

 

 

13. HipChat

We live in a virtual world today, and our team of eight is spread across four different time zones, with one traveling in the mountains of Canada. To make sure everyone feels close to each other and is on top of things, we’ve brought in HipChat as our virtual mobile water cooler and private team rooms. Everything from chitchat to strategic discussions has its own place once we’ve “stepped into the office.”
- W. Michael Hsu, Founder & CEO, DeepSky

 

 

Embrace The Digital Communication Age

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The Digital Communication Age is here, and it’s time you harness it. When you send your employees, customers, or other stakeholders a copy of a new policy, a new training manual, a new brochure, or even an email, Don’t’ you want to know:

  • Did they read it?
  • Did they act on it?
  • Did they embrace it?

Yes you can.

Communicating is a two-way and dynamic affair. It’s a dialogue, a conversation, a meaningful connection that prompts action. Communicating allows you to move ahead in a positive direction faster.

Although there still is a need to simply inform but think of it this way: Every age that has ever existed still exists today. There are places on the planet where people are still hunters and gatherers, and in other places there are people living in an early form of the industrial age. The same is true when it comes to our tools. We don’t get rid of the past. Rather, as new things come along, we integrate the old into the new. For example, when we talk about e-learning, many in the teaching community reject it out right. Assuming that e-learning means no teachers, no human interaction, complex technology, etc.

So the old doesn’t go away; we just use it in a new way. For example, use of social media to extend the class discussion, content sharing software to distribute our class note, using video conferencing to reach our audience, …… That’s why we don’t want to get rid of good practices, but rather we want to embrace the power of the Communication Age.

 

What are some Communication Age tools we all need to take notice of? Two in particular are visual communications and unified communication.

1- Visual communications are different from video conferencing. Video conferencing requires a large room filled with expensive equipment, and the room is always booked by the executives. Visual communication is something like Skype—something you can use not just on a laptop, but also on a desktop, tablet, or smart phone today.

Visual communications are powerful. I can see what you are thinking while I communicate with you because I can hear and see you. Based on your reactions, movements, mannerisms, and expressions, I can get a better feel for what you’re thinking and can adjust my communications with you. I can see whether you’re bored, focused, or confused. Because of this, I can keep myself more relevant and get a higher level of communication with you.

It’s also important to realize that we don’t all learn best in the same way. For example, some of us are auditory learners, meaning we learn best when we listen to a book than read it. In this case you would most likely be better at dictation and voice mail than writing and email.

2- Unified communications is a tool that can help us communicate in the style we are best at and therefore communicate better. For example, with unified communication I can send you a document in writing, and you can choose whether you want to read it or listen to it based on how you learn and process information best. And chances are that you’ll respond more quickly in the way you prefer to respond, whether in writing or via voice.

Even though unified communications has been around for a while, it has not been widely used. But thanks to increasing processing power, storage, and bandwidth, it has had some major breakthroughs recently, and this will increase its use. For example, some of us are using our new smart phones to have our text messages read to us, and we are responding by voice. Even though this is just one simple example, it is still very powerful.

Visual communication tools and unified communications represent only a few of the many new tools we have to foster better communications because we’re giving people options of how to communicate with us. By allowing people to choose the medium they want to send their communication in, the medium of choice to receive it in, and the addition of the visual element, you can create better real-time communication as you would have in a phone call, or you can create a time-shifted dialogue that is far more effective than the traditional means that we’ve been using for years.

So if you’re one of the 95% of companies firmly rooted in the Information Age, it’s time to start the shift to being a Communication Age organisation. Don’t wait. Do it now.

 

Abstract from an article by: Daniel Burrus