Flickr Photo: rubyjThanks for leading a weekly Office Hours session!  We want you to have a good experience, so we've put together a list of some of the things we've learned about how to host a successful Office Hours session. If you have your own advice that you would like to add, drop us a line and I'll add it to this page.

When Should You Schedule Your Office Hours?

• Not before Noon Eastern, or after 6pm Eastern.  Really, you can schedule them whenever you want, but if you want to catch the most people possible, you'll follow that rule.
• You can schedule your office hours at the same time as someone else IF you are not both in the same topic area (i.e. Communications).  We only have one room for each topic area.
• You should schedule a regular set time for each week.  Consistency has definitely paid off for many hosts.
• Need to take a vacation?  No worries.  Just pull your office hour listing off the calendar for that week.

How Many People Will Show Up?

• Probably a couple.   It's an informal program, so no one has to sign up ahead of time to drop in and ask questions.  We haven't seen any sessions with more than a dozen people at one.  Most hosts talk with just one to three people per session.
• Promote your office hours to find a wider audience! Remember that ANYONE can join the chat (though only NTEN members can host).  So, you should feel free to invite folks to your chat through your own networks.  A few things you can do:
• Send an invite out at the start of each of your sessions via Twitter.
• Embed the chat into your blog, like this.
• Blog about your chats!  We discourage you from posting real names or real quotes, but you should definitely talk about the topics and themes that come up.  If you don't have a blog, we'd love for you to blog your experience on our blog. Just email me a title and 300-500 words and we'll get them posted for you.

What Are Some Best Practices for Moderating the Chats?

• Two kinds of folks will show up: folks with questions, and lurkers.  The folks who want to talk are easy.  Try to engage the lurkers by asking THEM questions. Ask them what they are working on, or who they work for. 
• The chat room will "ding" whenever someone new enters the room or types a message.  Use this feature to help you acknowledge new participants or messages.  It's very handy if you end up having to multi-task for a few minutes!
• You can also mute the "ding" if it annoys you.  Check out the volume icon in the lower left hand corner of the chat box.
• Use @username (twitter style!) to address an individual in your chat room in particular. This is very helpful if there are a few conversations going on.
• Folks who are new to meebo chat will need to be reminded that they can change their user name in the little box under the chat text window.
• Although we make you choose a generic topic area (like IT Staff), you should feel free to specify the particular conversations you want to have within that topic.  Publicize that you will talk about blogging or VOIP when you tell people about your chat, and intro those topics when you start your chat.
• Unfortunately, because our chat rooms are open to anyone, we sometimes get spammers/annoying people in the room.  If folks are not there for Office Hours, feel free to ban them by hovering your mouse over their user name and selecting the ban option.
• If you need more help with Meebo, our chat provider, check out their support site.

Have other questions or ideas?  Please feel free to share!