Two Important Speaking Tips
Here are two really fast and important speaking tips for you to learn and understand. Start with answering your audience’s most pressing question: “what’s in this for me?” And then finish by giving your audience actionable takeaways. Making these two speaking tips top of mind becomes vital in delivering a presentation that matters. Too often, we have a tendency to clear our autobiographical throats before we dig into educating an audience. Then, we end with no real sense of what comes next. This means we leave people excited, but with nothing to do.
What’s In It For Me? (WIIFM?)
Here’s one way to help your audience understand what’s in it for them: start by asking them a question that sounds like it came from right out of their head. If you’re giving a session on how the communications industry will be changed by audio podcasting, ask something like, “Do you think people REALLY believe that podcasting will change the world?”
This is actually two tips in one. It relates to the “what’s in it for me” (WIIFM) issue, but it also does something I love to do in presenting: take away their sword. This means, start by making sure your audience (especially if they’re skeptics) knows that you’re on their side.
So, ask a question that might come from your audience’s head, such that it sets them in the right frame of mind to absorb the brilliance you’re about to bestow upon them.
Takeaways
This is something I learned to do better after working with Stephen Saber at CrossTech Media. He stresses that every presentation I do for the company have five takeaway points: things people can do with the information I’ve given them during the presentation. That’s the whole “next steps” stuff that people seem to crave at events.
Since I started adding “takeaways” to my presentations, in one form or another, I’ve found that people have started to rate my speeches much more useful. I score high on entertainment, but now, with making sure people know what comes next, they also get scored pretty high on usefulness.
Takeaways should be very actionable. If you’ve finished up your speech on how podcasting changes communication, give people an assignment to find five podcasts on iTunes and subscribe for a month. Take notes on the ways each show introduces information, etc. Review your current corporate communications documents. Do any lend themselves to a potential audio format as well?
Things like that.
How These Help
People love structure. In my recent post on Cirque Du Soleil, I failed to note just how structured the experience was from start to finish. From buying tickets to being seated, from the opening curtain to the final bow, everything in the experience was crafted such that we, the audience, didn’t have to think much about the mechanics of the experience. We could just watch the event and absorb the experience.
By starting with WIIFM and ending with 5 takeaways - even if you do it in a creative way that breaks the mold a bit, people will feel like they better understand and appreciate your efforts to educate and entertain them.
Does that make sense? Have you done something like this? How do you improve what I have here?
Photo credit, Brian Solis
From Cowpaths to Mastodons- The Presentation
The presentation I gave at the Inbound Marketing Summit is here. It won’t make as much sense without my voiceover, but if you’ve seen the video, you’ll recognize parts of it. I blended this one for the Summit, because I wasn’t ready to go all the way into my new stuff. This is some new, some old. Kind of like the premise itself, really.
Here’s the slide deck:
Essentially, I’m saying that there are some new opportunities, but that traditionalists (the T-Rex) will think themselves too superior to try. Meanwhile, the explorers of new ideas (the mastodons) will blaze new trails (cowpaths) that will become systems of constraint (paved roads, a la Boston) for those who come next.
And then I blurt out some strategy advice.
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For the rest of my friends, what do you think?
When Your Blog is a Grand Stage
I believe you have a very wonderful speech inside you. It is the kind of speech that inspires and equips people like me. Blogging is more powerful than we normally consider it. It’s an opportunity to try out our voice, to share our perspective, to present a point of view. In many ways, this is your chance to speak on a grand stage to an audience who is interested in what you have to say. You have our attention. What will you say?
Do you think of blogging that way? Why wouldn’t you? This is truly an opportunity that we sometimes trivialize. And yet, you are at once a publisher, a speaker, and a potential thought leader in your space. The same tools that allow others to post simple links or tweets is your platform for sharing the best of all possible human thought. How will you use your time on this stage? Why not build a beautiful speech?
Inspiration for the Speech
Your audience reads. They get around. They’ve seen some of the same things you’ve seen on the web. Give them something new. One way to do this is to look far outside the realm of where your audience normally reads. Look for materials or ideas that come from other areas. If you’re a web designer, look at cooking blogs. If you’re a marketer, read about painting.
From there, ask yourself this simple question: How can I inspire and equip others to do great things?
Okay, it’s technically a simple question, but a fairly tall order. And yet, I think it’s the most important question, and a great way to build your speech (or blog post, in this case). How does one inspire? By telling stories of triumph. By sharing the path one takes from simple beginnings to the highest highs. By sharing the dangers that came along that path, and then explaining what you did to move past them.
Inspire and equip in equal parts, if you can.
Mechanics of the Speech
There is nothing worse than an overly long speech. Unless maybe it’s a rambling, poorly conceived, cliche-filled, slideshow-heavy, self-inflating overly long speech. There are ways to make your blog post beautiful, inspiring, and well-shaped.
First, hang your promise as the North Star above the dark sky of your speech. Let’s decode that. If your speech is about how to turn a depressed downtown city block into an urban garden and gathering space, start with that. Say, “I am here to show you how you can make magic, and transform neglect into hope. With enough hands, and a vision, we can turn 144 Dalton Street into a place our grandchildren will talk about.”
Think of a decent speech (or a blog post) as if you are building a house. Your main points are the solid frame of the speech. Starting with that promise hung in the sky, you sketch out the big points, like putting up the corners of a house. You apply lumber (your supporting points), and you clothe it all stories, which help us understand the meaning of what you’re telling us.
You might think that the end of a speech is presenting us with the finished house. Oh no. You made that house as a model for us to examine. The end of a good speech is when you give us tools, and send us, inspired, on our way to build our own houses based on what you showed us.
Obligations of a Speaker
If you are here to inspire and equip me, and you’ve built a house to rest beneath the promising North Star you hung in our sky, you must be responsible for a few things.
- Do not deceive me, unless you tell me early in your speech that you intend to do so. You have my trust. Respect that.
- Do not make the house for yourself. I admire that you have stature to stand on your stage and speak to me. But I have not come to hear how great you are. Be humble.
- Equip me. Inspiration is not enough. If you give me only hope, I cannot eat hope.
- Encourage me. Be willing to see me build my house from your speech and your example. And praise me for the house I build from your instruction.
- Give the stage to me. In the end, we all want to hang stars before others. Even if they are small stars, on a small stage, or a blog somewhere out in the darkness. When you are done with your speech, your star, your house, invite me to the stage.
And with that, I invite you to create a beautiful speech of your own.
Share links to your new speeches in the comments at [chrisbrogan.com].
Photo credit Jared
Zoho Show 2.0 Launches Today
Zoho, everybody’s favorite cloud software developer, released a new 2.0 version of Zoho Show today. It’s presentation software that includes slide making features as well as chatting, remote sharing, and desktop sharing, making it a little more powerful than your typical Powerpoint or Keynote, insofar as features goes. That’s one of the tricks with Zoho. They’ve built such a suite of apps that they can mix and match.
Some of the changes in 2.0 target ease of use, and this is probably where I’ve complained a bit about certain Zoho apps in the past. I’ll tell you that I used it while on a conference call to doodle out what you see below, and it worked super easy and intuitively.
Zoho also allows you to embed the presentation on another site after you publish it (like SlideShare), and has about a dozen features that I didn’t cover here. If you’re in the world of presentations, this might be worth considering as a free, flexible offering. The closest similar product online is Google Docs and their presentation software, but I tell you, Zoho’s product works, looks, and feels better.
Good job, Zoho.
See a bigger picture here:
Making Money Isnt Evil
This is the “jolt” presentation I gave at PAB2008 this year. WARNING: LOTS OF SWEARING and I apologize for that, because I had just listened to Neil Gorman’s presentation and he swore a lot, and well, I took it into my ranting exploration of the fact it’s not evil to make money. It’s just under 10 minutes, captured on Ustream.tv via Christopher S. Penn.
Basically, pay attention to this one thing: it’s not evil to want to make money, but be very wary how you try to do this off your community.
Whats In It For Me
The next time you go to write a blog, give a presentation, record a podcast, or shoot video, I want you to think about this first: your audience consumes everything from the mindset of “what’s in it for me?” Not because they’re rude or selfish, but because that’s how we’re wired to think as humans. We’re forever taking in new information and applying it to what we already know. The way we do this is by asking, “How can I apply this to my own life?”
To that end, make your blogs/presentations/podcasts/whatevers such that it starts out pretty early showing the answer to that question. Look back at a bunch of my posts and you’ll see that I try to answer that as early as possible. I start with a personal line or two, and then I let you know quickly what you’re going to be able to do with my information.
Does this make sense? How are you doing this with your writing/presenting/etc?
