I was having lunch yesterday with some friends, when the subject turned to questions and answers.  My friend had attended a conference panel, and complained that the panelists all failed to adequately answer her question.

(In defense of those panelists, the question was a difficult one without a clear right answer.)

I proceeded to answer the question, much to her satisfaction, and she asked me afterwards, “How do you give good answers to tough questions?”  I thought you marketers out there might be interested in my response.

1) Make sure you understand the question.  When someone asks me a question, I listen carefully, both to the words, and to the unspoken assumptions.  Two people might ask the exact same question in exactly the same words, but my answers to them would differ depending on tone, body language, and my history with that person.

2) Start your thinking broad, and narrow it down.  As I listen to questions, my brain is constantly jumping ahead, thinking about the various possible paths the question (and my answer) might take.  It’s a bit like watching a search box autocomplete, gradually narrowing down potential answers as I type.  That way, rather than searching for a single right answer and not knowing where to start, I simply winnow my down to the truth.

3) Always directly answer the question, even if the answer is “I don’t know” or “I can’t tell you that.”  I always give a direct response.  Unless you’re really slick, it’s unlikely the questioner will forget what they actually asked, and your attempts at evasion will simply madden them and reduce their estimation of you.

4) Make your answer interactive.  Just as I’m constantly making mental adjustments as I listen to the question, it’s wise to follow the same approach when answering.  Give one part of your answer, and check for agreement.  There’s no sense in erecting a massive rhetorical edifice if the listener disagrees with your basic assumptions.

5) Check afterwards to see if the questioner feels satisfied.  You’re answering the question, so you don’t have to stop until you feel like it.  Don’t let the desire to finish override the real goal, which is to convey understanding.  If it takes a little more time, better a longer response than an unconvincing one.

Want to see my answering techniques in action?  Attend our upcoming webinars:

That’s geek code for “PBwiki loves South by Southwest!” One of the advantages of a tool that’s simple to get set up and running with like PBwiki is that you can use it to make quick, ad-hoc workgroups at conferences like South by Southwest. If you’re looking to post your own itinerary or put together a spontaneous birds-of-a-feather session, come set up a new wiki with us and email david+sxsw@pbwiki.com with the address and I’ll add it to the official PBwiki SXSW page.

Cheers,
David Weekly
Founder & CEO

Fortune Small Business just wrote a nice article about how Lee Rosen of Rosen Law used his creativity to drive adoption of his PBwiki.

Rosen offered a $1,000 cash prize to his 32 employees–for every page they created on the wiki, they earned a possible combination to the company safe (which contained the aforementioned $1,000).  At the end of three months, the prize went to Ben Sutton (pictured below).

But Lee had the last laugh–by switching his people over to PBwiki, he saved $25,000 per year that he had been spending on running a Lotus Notes server.  And money wasn’t the only benefit:

“The biggest reason that we’re switching is that the wiki is easier to use,” says Rosen. “If employees see a better way to organize or present information, they can just go ahead and do it with a wiki. With Lotus Notes, it required a programmer.”

Maybe you don’t have $1,000 to spare to drive adoption of your wiki, but maybe you can modify Rosen’s technique to fit your organization.  How about giving your top user tickets to the game, or a night out on the town?

If you get your entire company using PBwiki, the benefits will far outweigh the cost.

Click here to read the Fortune Small Business article.

Whether its a small team meeting or a huge 1,000 person conference, it’s important to have a specific roadmap to guide your discussion. Having an agenda lets participants know where they’re headed, and keeps everyone on track.

PBwiki is an awesome way to engage all of your attendees and shape the message that both you AND your participants want to discuss.

Here’s how:
1) Create a provisional agenda on a wiki page - posting the the call-in number and meeting time
2) Invite your participants to post their meeting materials and edit agenda items
3) Keep an eye on the edits and make changes when necessary

The Leadership Learning Community is a great example of how a national meeting was developed using PBwiki. Check out there results here.

As you can see the wiki agenda quickly becomes a dynamic, self organizing space where attendees can introduce discussion topics, decide how much time each topic receives and easily edit information as the meeting approaches.

During the meeting the online agenda can serve as a note-taking template, and when the meeting is completed, the notes are instantly available online. Everyone can review the agenda / meeting notes and provide feedback.

Why this saves time:

1) Don’t waste time emailing meeting minutes to people, or answering repetitive questions about discussion points, or dial-in numbers.

2) No need to collect meeting material - they’re on the wiki!

3) Wikis increase buy-in and participation in the meeting by involving the entire team in the planning stages.

When I was a student, I was a copious note taker. Where are those notes now? After moving from dorm to apartment to graduate school to San Francisco, those notes are nowhere to be found. Two hours of searching my parent’s attic I located my college photos, my old rice cooker, and several textbooks books. No notes.

Dustin at www.lifehack.org has a great idea - use your wiki for class notes. Here’s how:

Instead of taking notes in class like this:

Transcribe your notes into your wiki (or, for those cutting edge individuals, take notes directly in your wiki).

Why this is an awesome idea that saves you time:

1) Fully legible - not only can you actually read your notes, but formatting with bullet points, bold lettering and headings helps to organize ideas.

2) Share - Easily share you notes with other classmates. Why bother heading to library to photocopy your notes or risk losing them when you lend them to someone? Simply direct people to your wiki page.

3) Link - Add links to relevant articles and websites to create a comprehensive study guide. Don’t try to compile information right before the exam, that’s when you should be chugging coffee and cramming.

3) Search - Locate all your information with the click of a search button. Can your Mead notepad do that? Not yet!

Check out the many other cool reasons you should use a wiki to take your notes on www.Lifehack.org

I agree with you! It’s a huge pain to keep track of shared office documents. I am forced to figure out - does this document reflect the most recent changes? Was this version approved by the board? Has the team signed off on this document? Grr!

A wiki is a great way to cut down on that frustration. Here’s how I used my wiki to collaborate on my recent proposal for a city grant:

I started by posting the most recent revision of my grant on the wiki. To do this I just cut and pasted my original word document.

I invited others to collaborate on my project. It took my team a few weeks to get used to the idea that the document was always updated and always on the wiki. After a few weeks of responding to request for the documents with, “Check the Wiki!� everyone caught on.

It’s easy to keep track of revisions. By checking the document history, I can see who made changes and when they were made.

Rather than editing the document and emailing it to the team, I simply edit our shared wiki. Everyone receives notification that the wiki was updated and knows where to find the most recent copy. In the end my document was revised by three different departments, and I wasn’t wasting my time trying to keep track of every iteration. Fantastic!

How this saved me time:

1) I no longer have to search through email to find the most recent document, or figure out what I named the most recent copy on my desktop – my most up to date work is always on the wiki.

2) Finding old copies of the same document is simple, they’re always saved in the revision history. Again no more searching through past email or copies saved on my desktop.

3) Instead of receiving tons emails with revised documents, I’m notified when a change takes place. It’s easy to track what was changed and who made the changes (Less email noise!)

Ramit Sethi (PBwiki marketing guru) and I spoke recently about doing something a little different before I continue with your regularly scheduled Tip programming, so this is what we’ve decided: PBwiki has a lot of information spread out all over the place, and it’d be nice to pick a few of these things and consolidate them all in one place for users to reference. If this is helpful, I may do it once or twice more in the future. Let me know your thoughts by commenting below or e-mailing me at jason.nguyen@pbwiki.com

Now, I’m not saying that you won’t know all 10 of the things on the list, but for the average PBwiki citizen, a lot of these things might be new. If none of them are new to you, then you’re probably as much of a PBwiki geek as me and you need to get some air *wink*. Anyway, on with the list:

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Eventually, every PBwiki user wants to have a little extra graphical pizzazz in his/her wiki. The current skins are nice of course (especially that new Bamboo skin…I wonder who made it…), but everybody is using them, so it lacks a little individuality. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to change some colors, or add some backgrounds, or design a whole new theme from the ground up?

CSS is the way to do that, with minimum hassle. Rather than trying to define the styles of every individual block of code or text like people can currently do in the Point-and-Click Editor, CSS defines classes and how to present different types of information. Read on to find out how it can work for you.

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So last time, we went over everything that went into creating a table of contents for your page quickly and effectively using the Point-and-Click Editor. Today, we follow in the same vein, but advanced users can skip down to the bottom and read about some of the ways to style your tables using CSS, in case you would like to do something like get rid of the borders, change the colors, etc.

Before we get into all that however, we first need to make the table itself. Read on ahead to find out how to make a table using the Point-and-Click Editor and other options to modify an existing table, such as adding rows and columns, removing rows and columns, merging cells, etc.

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There are a few questions I keep seeing in the forums over and over concerning the Point-and-Click editor, and I thought I’d use this space to clear up one of them today: How do I do a Table of Contents (ToC)?

I admit that the answer is not immediately clear like it is on the old Classic editor, where entering the statement “<toc>” on the page would create a table of contents linking to every header on that page created with a “!”, “!!”, or “!!!”.

The idea of the Point-and-Click editor concerning the ToC is exactly the same. Insert a Table of Contents plugin and it will create links from every first, second, and third level header you create. But sometimes you need a little illustration, so here’s everything step by step…

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