Watch a video; tweet your comments; learn how to present!

I am always looking for ways to improve my public speaking skills. Back during my Toastmasters days there was a core group of us — it was a really small group — who would get together at lunch to watch and discuss presentations. We found many videos on the Web so we never were lacking in fodder for our meetings.

Each and every one of us commented that we got more out of these meetings than we did the "official" meetings. Over the course of time each of us made the decision to depart from the club and so ended our video review sessions. It always hit me as peculiar that we quit doing something that we found extremely valuable.

I think that the reason that we stopped having the meetings is convenience. It is difficult to physically show up for a meeting. It is a hassle. There has got to be a better way…

I think that Twitter is the better way. Twitter is a web service that allows anyone with an account (free) to post very brief statements to the site. These statements are called tweets by those in the know. Brief has a specific definition here: it means 140 characters. One of the nice things about Twitter is that you can group tweets using a hashtag.

A hashtag is a short text string that begins with the hash character '#.' Here is an example: Let's say we are going to discuss how bad this blog is. You could use the hashtag #Mosttoast to allow lots of people to see the conversation. Twitter has a search feature that makes finding hashtags easy.

Back to THE idea… It would be very easy to tweet and say "Let's view this video and discuss it #vidreview." You could even ask everyone to start watching the video at a specific time and send the tweets in realtime.

Here is what I want you to do: Check out Michael Hyatt's (@MichealHyatt) great beginners guide. Go to Twitter and signup for an account. Send a Tweet to me (@sasxjb) and I will follow you. Once we have a few folks ready to go we will try the video review.

Hidden, subliminal, idea: do you think that you can find honest feedback on your speaking using this idea and say… YouTube. Wink! Wink!

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