I’m going to start with a great quote from Bob Stein, from the O’Reilly Tools of Change event. He defined a book as such: “A book is a user-driven media where readers and sometimes authors congregate.” Do you love that? Is that crazy? I love it.

I extended myself into a platform. People try to ask about this at events, but because they don’t exactly know or see the edges, they can’t ask the question the way I’m framing it for you now. What do I mean? What’s it mean to be a platform.

I am me. I make media. I push the media onto this blog (at the time of this writing), 30,000 or so folks get this via a subscription, and over a month, I’ll have 250,000 unique visitors). I have this linked to my Facebook, so another 4750 people get this. If I tweet the link, just short of 100,000 more people get this. I speak at dozens of events a year (Will I hit a few hundred? I haven’t counted).

That means my ideas spread pretty darned far. Not TV show far, but not bad, eh?

You can do the same thing. That’s really what I’m going to say to people. I’m going to talk about HOW I set it up, how I built the network, what I did to nurture it, and how I use it to help other people, and finally, what that does to help me.

Do you know how? You’ve been here a while now, right?

I started by connecting with people in one place, and making relationships. I invited those people to my other platforms. I explored their interests. I learned what mattered to them and tried to fuel it. I moved into new platforms. I went everywhere that information could spread easily. I went nowhere that information was penned in. I connected with as many connectors as I could. I put my ideas in forms that other people could take them and run. I reinforced and encouraged others. I thanked others. I asked for very little in return for everything that I gave.

I co-wrote an entire book on how to make information and value move through systems, that most people buy because they think it’ll teach them the secrets of social media. The secret is that these tools let us build better relationships. That’s it.

The platform, friends. You’re great alone, but you’re everything once you figure out platform thinking and how to equip and empower value transactions.

Make sense? What am I missing in my descriptions? What do you want to ask, given what you see above? What would you add, my brilliant friends?

Presentations are important. They are a gifted opportunity, given to you by someone who hopes that you will educate and equip (and entertain!) the people who have gathered to participate. As such, I treat them as important opportunities, and I invite you to do the same, should you find yourself invited to speak in some form or another with people.

I want you to succeed. It’s my hope that some of what I share with you is useful, that you can pick it up, that you can take some of what I come up with here and run with it yourselves. I call this “giving your ideas handles.”

We’ll do three things with this post: talk about the audience, share with you my most concise advice about presenting, and give you some further resources. Let me know if you need more when I’m done.

Speaking and Presenting

Respect Your Audience

Legendary advertiser David Ogilvy said, “The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife.” He wanted us to treat the recipients of advertisements as important people, and I implore you to do the same to your audience. Here’s what I mean when I say that:

• Your audience knows more than you’re giving them credit for. Every time.
• They have come to learn something from you that they can use themselves. Give takeaways.
• They have sacrificed time. Value their every minute as best you can. Trim your presentation.
• Your audience wants something new. Stay fresh. They might have seen you last month or on the web.
• Give them something to DO. Give actionable next steps, such that your presentation leaves them wanting to rush out of the room and do what you recommended. If you can, make it as specific to the audience as possible.
• Never ever ever ever feel like you have to read your slides to me.

You ARE an Entertainer

If you’re going to command the stage (or a room, or whatever format your presentation takes), own the stage. Be as polished, as precise, as eloquent, as helpful as you can be. Here are some tips that I’ve tried to boil down tightly:

• Think visually. Slides are not Word documents.
• Make sure your slides aren’t more interesting than you.
• Speak louder and slower than you think you should.
• Dress for attention. If you’re going to own that stage, be vibrant (but tasteful).
• Speak WITH not TO your audience. Get them “in on it.”
• More than 7 key points is wasted.
• Be as passionate as you can be about the topic. If you’re not, why will they care?

Some more advice

Own the Crowd With Better Speaking

Make Better Presentations- The Anatomy of a Good Speech

How to Start Speaking at Events

What else can I help you with?

Photo credit Geoff Livingston

Use Adam’s great work as an example:

I just gave the morning keynote at the Stamats Higher Education Marketing conference in St Petersburg, Florida, and I decided to go totally away from slides, and just speak from passion. To do that, I kept a single sheet of paper with some notes so that I didn’t forget what I wanted to say. (I did the same thing in my making money isn’t evil presentation – remember, that one had lots of cursing.) I wanted to capture some of what I said as part of my presentation: Turning ROI into Return On Influence. I’m sure I’m missing a lot of what I said, but here are the main points.

I led with a quote.

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.- Ralph Waldo Emerson US essayist & poet (1803 – 1882)

I went on to tell everyone in the room (marketers) that they are salespeople. They might not think they are (more than 50% raised their hand when I asked them about it). I say this because marketing is about moving a behavior forward from one state to another, and especially in 2009, it’s even more important that marketers feel and believe just how tied they are to the sales cycle, and for that matter, to the PR and customer service cycle.

I mentioned that marketers have to think like media makers, like CEOs, like salespeople. they have to OWN the process, the experience, the business of moving people from a to b. (Yes, this is a mix of Seth Godin and Tom Peters stuff.)

I talked about the five steps of media as an influence tool, but I think I forgot to tell them all five in detail. Here’s the five phases of it, at least.

1. Awareness. – People become aware that you’re out there.
2. Attention. – People actually open their eyes to what you’re saying.
3. Influence. – People start thinking about what you’re saying and map it to themselves.
4. Reputation. – You become known for having good information/ideas/whatever.
5. Authority. – People consider you the top voice on the matter.

Where do YOU want to be on that continuum. I know.

Beyond that, it’s all a blur. If someone recorded it, I’m sure it won’t sound nearly as good as it felt coming out.

Mostly I shared that folks must atomize their marketing. Break media into bites and throw it all over the place. Don’t focus on a newspaper. Focus on getting two way conversations started everywhere. Get things out to the places where people are. That kind of thing.

What would YOU have told them?

Photo credit, FoundPhotosLJ

What I love the most is that the presentation is simple enough for you to pick up the style stuff, but exemplary of how to deliver impactful information.

I’ve been noodling with how I deliver graphics. This started because Guy Kawasaki shared a makeover experience with Nancy Duarte. I change up my stuff all the time, so getting examples from various places is always useful.

Besides Garr (with love and respect), who else is really powering up their presentations lately? What’s really shaken your socks? What are your new power moves?

So, with that as a backdrop, I give you Dean Hunt:

Learning To Become a Great Public Speaker by “Picking Up” Women

Flashback a few months and I was dreadfully afraid of public speaking. And being a buzz marketing “guru” meant people weren’t expecting show and tell about my goldfish in front of 5 year olds. They wanted me speaking in front of hundreds of people who had paid thousands of dollars to be there.

Well it’s hard to be a “guru” when your knees are knocking together and sweat is dripping off every part of your body. Obviously, something had to be done– and fast. The problem was that public speaking is BORING. Most people run off to Toastmasters (which I tried), read a bunch of books (which I did), and even throw some hypnosis or NLP in there for good measure (I did this as well)

Luckily for me, I’m NOT most people. I decided to do what I do best, turn this into something exciting and fun, so I am learning public speaking by “picking up” women. Why? Because meeting women can be just as terrifying as public speaking, and it basically involves a lot of the same skills. Let’s take a look at a few:

Self Confidence – No one will listen to a speaker who isn’t confident in their own abilities. Pick up artists require the same self confidence or a woman will smell their fear and send them home with their tail between their legs.

Body Language – Public speakers need to display confident body language, understand what messages their body is sending, and read the body language of the audience. Well, pick up artists do exactly the same thing.

Vocal Tone – Public speakers tend to slow down their speech and lower their vocal tone to display confidence. Pick up artists… you guessed it.

Charisma – Boring people have a very hard time making a living as public speakers. But everyone one loves the charming, interesting, and funny person at the party, bar, or on stage.

Performance – You don’t have to be on a stage to put on a performance either. Pick up artists actually use routines that can range from magic tricks to conversations with seductive hidden undertones.

At the end of the day, public speaking and meeting people are intertwined with the same skill sets. While “picking up” women may sound sleazy… what it really means is making yourself more attractive to the opposite sex. I.e. Making yourself a more interesting and appealing person.

So, whether you’re in front of thousands of people or in a more intimate setting, you should be practising the skills mentioned above. It just so happened that meeting women was more fun for me than trying to conquer stage fright.

And that’s the most important lesson here: the more fun you’re having, the more you’ll learn. So try to find ways to learn skills that motivate you, not terrify you.

Have you ever found a way to “cheat” your learning system like this? Have an amazing pick-up or disastrous public speaking story? I’d love to hear from others that feel my pain. Or just challenge me to make your own goals more fun.

I will do an update post on here in a few months, with the specific things I have learnt, techniques I have developed etc.

Dean provides a bio:

Dean Hunt is the net’s leading buzz marketer. He is also a high-end business consultant, and is famed for his killer bunnies, entertaining insights, oh… and getting over 260,000 unique visitors to his blog in an 11 day period…. for FREE.

You can read his rants and tips at www.DeanHunt.com,receive over 7 free buzz reports at www.BuzzProfits.com and find out more about his services by emailing dean@buzzprofits.com

You can find out more about Gopal Shenoy , and I think you’ll like him. Smart product manager type, and very engaging, too!

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

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?