You’ve been there before.  You’re speaking at a conference and you scan the audience.  You see the flood of laptops, iPhones, and Blackberries in the audience furiously Tweeting away or using some conference IRC back channel to chat about YOUR presentation.  Instead of ignoring it or asking your audience to turn off their electronics, this week’s guest blogger Olivia Mitchell has some great advice on how use Twitter and your Tweeting audience to your advantage. In this post, Olivia gives us seven compelling ways to use Twitter to engage your audience. Thanks Olivia.

GUEST POST FROM OLIVIA MITCHELL:  Read the rest of this post

Twitter is cool. Wikis are neat. SharePoint is, hmmm, good? And email is email. These tools are all useful in helping us communicate with each other when we’re separated by great distances. They help us bridge the gap by providing fast, efficient means of communication. It doesn’t get more efficient than Twitter’s 140 character limit. But take a close look at these tools. They all share a common characteristic. They’re all based on written communication. While the written word may be very efficient for transferring information, it is not very effective at persuading people or making a real impact. And there is a tremendous difference between being efficient and being effective.  Read the rest of this post

These days, it’s not unusual for development or product teams to be geographically dispersed. It could be that your team members work on different floors, in different buildings, in different states, or even in different countries. Although I believe that collocation provides the greatest advantage in terms of high performing teams, it’s a reality that we have to find ways for distributed teams to become just as productive as collocated teams.  Read the rest of this post