Roberta Guise, MBA, advises small business owners, consultants and non-profits on how to make best use of their marketing dollars and resources.

She shows them how to build a profitable stable of customers, and through precision planning, promotions, branding, and placements in the media, be visible and get known.

Roberta also advises and develops deeply knowledgeable, ambitious experts, especially women, who want be known as a go-to thought leader or authority in their field of expertise.

She swims in the frigid waters of San Francisco Bay, which she says is an apt metaphor for how she helps clients navigate extreme business issues and cross currents that can swirl around them at any time.

An award-winning marketer and PR consultant, Roberta writes and speaks on how to get a distinctive marketing edge and be extraordinarily visible. Her consulting practice, Guise Marketing & PR, is headquartered in San Francisco.

Get a piece of Roberta’s mind at her website and blog. Check out her podcast profiles of influential women.

Connect with her on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

To hear what she shared with me about her services, and to hear what she’s enjoying about the National Speakers Association Pro-Track class, click on the podcast icon below.

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Next month I’m giving two presentations at the 2010 Ragan Corporate Communicators Conference in Detroit, MI. It’ll be my first ever visit to Motown and my first time at this conference. The event is hosted by General Motors.

I’ll be podcasting interviews with attendees and presenters and grabbing some video with my Flip video camera to post to YouTube. It all fits with the theme of my own workshop, scheduled for 3:30 – 5:00 p.m. on Wednesday May 5:

Speechwriting in the age of social media: Magnifying the impact of a speech to increase your reach

Social media add exciting new options to the traditional speechwriting toolkit. From researching audience interests to developing speech content, tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and blogs can save you time and make your speeches more compelling—if you know how to use them.

Speechwriters can now leverage social media to greatly improve the value of their services in the planning, preparation and scripting of a speech. Then, once the speech is written, social media can magnify its impact beyond the confines of the auditorium.

After attending this session, you will know:

• How to identify trending topics that will grab an audience’s interest
• Where to find facts, opinions and stories to include in the speech
• How to create buzz in advance of a speaking event using blogs, Facebook and Twitter
• The risks and rewards of engaging an audience in an online conversation—while the presenter is on-stage
• How to leverage the viral power of podcasts and video to reach a global audience

A full preview is available at this Presentation Home Page.

On the second day of the event I’m giving a presentation from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

What can go wrong in executive communications: Common mistakes and how to avoid them

It’s sometimes the logistical minutiae that cause irreparable damage to executive speeches. From scheduling conflicts to malfunctioning equipment, a presentation can bomb for any number of reasons. You’ll hear about a number of improbable and unexpected (even hilarious) ways in which things have gone wrong for hapless executives and threatened the careers of their communications staff. You’ll then learn ways to avoid these embarrassments, including:

• Why it’s your responsibility to sweat the details
• A range of best practices to avoid an onstage melt-down
• Safeguards that help prevent product demos from crashing
• The value of checklists and standard operating procedures
• Ways to recover from the inevitable mistakes

Again, a full preview is available at this Presentation Home Page.

Feedback and Ideas Needed

I’m eager to hear from anyone with comments on how to focus these two presentations. Go to the presentation home pages and leave me your suggestions; things you’d like to hear me cover (especially if you happen to be going to the event); war stories I can include and even witty items for my Top 10 List on “Things a client does not want to hear from a Speechwriter the night before a presentation”. (Things like “Boy, you should have been here for Obama’s talk last night, now HE was good.” – you get the idea…)

Follow the conference on Twitter at #ragangm

Thanks to Ray Strackbein for posting to SpeakerNet News details of a fascinating free visual online dictionary.

SnappyWords.com might well replace your dictionary and Thesaurus in ways you could never imagine. It packs a lot of information on one easy-to-navigate page.

Look up any word and SnappyWords presents a visual dynamic network of all related words and their definitions.

Here’s what you see when you enter “Speech” as a search word:

Explore the meaning of words and gather suggestions for alternate words with a few simple mouse clicks.

1. Place the mouse cursor over a word to view the meaning.
2. Double click a node from the branch to view other related words.
3. Scroll the mouse wheel over words to zoom in or out. This helps you see more associations or view words and meanings more clearly.
4. Click and drag a word or branch to move it around and explore other branches.

It’s fun to experiment with place names. Here’s the results for London:

Thanks to Scott for sharing this link to 50 great examples of data visualization and tools for creating your own visualizations, covering everything from Digg activity to network connectivity to what’s currently happening on Twitter. Another source that I blogged about back in 2006 is Gapminder. As I said at the time “A picture sometimes really is worth a thousand words.”

These 50 examples contain some great pictures.

Here’s just one example:

One Week of The Guardian is a visualization of the stories from The Guardian newspaper. It focuses on the relationships between headlines, authors, pages, and categories.

Vickie Sullivan is internationally recognized as a top market strategist for experts. Specializing in branding for high-fee professional speaker markets, she has launched thousands of thought leaders since 1987. Vickie’s groundbreaking work has earned her an appointment on the Women’s Leadership Board for the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. In that capacity, she presented three times to the Harvard student body on personal branding and prominence.

On Saturday she presented to a somewhat less august institution than Harvard. She rocked the house at the meeting of the Northern California Chapter of the National Speakers Association. Her presentation, Brand It And They Will Come: Build a High-Fee Brand When You Are Not Famous, was short on fluff and long on street-wise detail to help the average $1,000 – $5,000 speaker in the audience stand out from the crowd.

An era of practicality

With meeting expenditure down, even as the number of meetings are trending higher, clients are doing more with less. Unlike the go-go days of the boom period, we are now living in an era of practicality. Executives are micromanaging meetings down to the level of choosing the theme and seating arrangements. They are sending interns to do first-round interviews with prospective speakers. Many speakers are not only competing with each other for gigs, they are competing with the authors, bloggers and social media mavens who will speak for free in order to pimp their books and consulting programs.

So what’s a novice speaker to do?

First, lose the obsession with presentation skills. Being able to present well is table stakes. Next, realize meeting organizers divide the world into speakers who are nice to have and those they gotta have. In order to fall into the latter camp the information you offer has to overlap with the buyers perceived needs and beat out the other options being considered for the meeting agenda. You have to stand out from the crowd by uniquely branding yourself. Getting hired requires you create a vivid picture in the client’s mind of what they will get when you speak at their event. Craft your brand in a way that appeals to the buyers emotions and creates an image of you in a category of one. Vicki goes into more detail on the importance of differentiation in this Special Report on her website:

If branding is the promise you make to the market, then differentiation is the stage you use to deliver on your promise.

The Three Keys to a High-Fee Brand

One: A Successful Story

Your compelling story is only useful to the extent it teaches others. Sports hero’s have a problem on the speaking circuit if their motivational stories don’t connect with the couch potatoes in the audience. We can connect with the audience by telling stories that break with the expected and bring opposites into play, compare unexpected things or roles or reveal a Eureka moment. Vickie’s website has an article on writing Stories That Create The Emotional Drive To Buy.

Two: A Point of View

Build a point of view around hot issues. Focus on a Big Idea. Make the invisible visible. Tell people things they’ve not heard before. Three options that help build a unique point of view:

1. Predict the Future – what can we expect that will impact the audience’s world in unexpected ways? In my world, I’m seeing a growing backchannel of communication using PDA’s and social media to converse about the speaker while they are still onstage.
2. Sound the Alarm – what does the audience need to know that will save their skins? Again, in my own world, too much information is being crammed into presentations by subject matter experts. Someone else in the audience today shared how middle managers in Silicon Valley technology companies are addicted to the corporate crack of repeatedly launching projects to boost their career without realizing they are burning everyone out with their 7×24 demands. She realized she could develop a compelling point of view by sounding the alarm about this destructive behavior.
3. Call The Game – what are people doing that’s having an impact they don’t understand? In the corporate world it’s often the belief that 33 PowerPoint slides are needed where three would be more effective at getting the message across. I can call the game by showing presenters how they can speak less and say more.

Three: Compelling Content

Vickie writes that compelling content creates constant curiosity:

Curiosity is our radar system. It gives us early warning to change and opens the door for innovation. All of us use this emotion to be inventive and fulfilled. The media and the marketplace use curiosity to search for the latest thinking, a fresh perspective that jumpstarts conversations and originality. Help your market get what they don’t have, and watch buyers run to you to learn more.

Softly Softly

As dynamic and challenging as we need to be to brand ourselves, Vickie warns against alienating clients. Before you hit them upside the head with frightening predictions or ring the alarm bells, she advises that you start by stating something everyone can agree with. Then focus in and add a unique twist before explaining why you are proposing a credible alternative to the status quo.

Vickie Unplugged

After the event ended, I wanted to hear more from Vickie, so I asked her to explain how the era of practicality impacts speakers and why she believes it’s important that we keep an air of mystery about what we do. To hear what she told me, click on the podcast icon below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:31 — 2.0MB)

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Nancy Duarte (whose company designed the slides in “An Inconvenient Truth”) did a riveting analysis of Steve Ballmer’s Windows 7 launch speech transcript.

She color-coded Apple campaign references; unnecessary filler words or phrases; confusing words, phrases or statistics; Ballmer’s references to himself; upgrade fixes problems, and bold statements with no supporting information.

Nancy’s analysis is a useful technique for all professional speakers to critique their own presentations and see where there is room for improvement.

(Thanks to Rebecca Morgan of SpeakerNetNews for flagging this!)

I’m off this week to the 2010 Ragan Speechwriters Conference in Washington DC. It’ll be my fourth conference and the second one at which I’ve presented. As in 2009, I’ll be podcasting interviews with attendees and presenters and grabbing some video with my Flip video camera to post to YouTube. It all fits with the theme of my own presentation, scheduled for 8:30amFriday:

Using social media tools to magnify the impact of your speech

Do you want to augment the power of your client’s speech before, during and after the presentation? Social media tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and blogs offer exciting and effective ways to boost mindshare–if you leverage them correctly. The online audience for a talk can be many times the size of, and as important as, the audience in the room. Ignore social media at your peril.

• Ways to create “buzz” in advance of a speaking event using blogs, Facebook and Twitter
• How to easily record the audio and video of a speech using low-cost, portable equipment
• The risks and rewards of engaging an audience in an online conversation— while the presenter is on-stage
• How to leverage the viral power of podcasts and video to reach a global audience
• The power of integrating Social Media tools to wow your Internet audience

A full preview is available at this Presentation Home Page.

Follow the conference on Twitter at #ragandc

How to augment your live presentation using social media

Effective public speaking is a challenge for many executives. They must prepare interesting content, overcome stage fright and deliver a speech that will hold the audience’s attention. As if that wasn’t difficult enough, they are increasingly likely to find themselves looking out at a sea of faces illuminated by the glow of laptops and PDAs. Social media is invading the auditorium, and rather than tuning out while a speech is delivered, people are turning on laptops and cell phones to send out text messages, broadcasting to the world their opinions of a presentation.

Changing presentations forever

In his new book, The Backchannel: How Audiences are Using Twitter and Social Media and Changing Presentations Forever, Cliff Atkinson explains how these new forms of online communication are shifting the rules of engagement between audiences and presenters. Instead of sitting politely until it’s time for Q & A, people are going online during the address to swap comments and opinions via an electronic backchannel.

At the very least, Atkinson claims, speakers and their communications support staff need to be aware that there is likely to be a backchannel in the room and learn how to monitor it or be left out of the conversation. Beyond this basic awareness, he encourages communicators to take the initiative and employ social media as an integral part of any executive’s presentation.

Practical advice

Atkinson’s book covers a lot of ground, from how to open a Twitter account to advice on expanding the conversation with the audience. He details how social media can transform a presentation from a one-off information dump into a longer-term relationship—one that starts before you step onto the podium. His advice includes:

• Breaking a speech into “Twitter-sized chunks” to make it easier for people to post 140-character sound bites. One measure of success then becomes how many of these summary statements are posted and reposted online.
• Using Twitter as a vehicle to extend your ideas to people outside the room, giving them a “virtual stage pass” to the event.
• Creating instant polls using tools, such as Twtpoll and Poll Everywhere, to involve the audience.
• Publishing a Presentation Home Page using wiki software. For example, I was inspired by Atkinson’s book to create http://execcomms.wikispaces.com/ listing my past and future talks. A Presentation Home Page is a convenient archive for reference material; blog postings; a Twitter feed; bio and contact information and more. This shifts the burden from overly busy PowerPoint slides as the sole way to communicate information. Also, by implementing a page like this prior to an event you initiate a backchannel that involves the audience, letting you gather comments and suggestions before you deliver the talk. After the event, the page becomes a repository for evaluation responses, blog postings, reference material and a transcript.

Double-edged sword

Atkinson acknowledges there are both risks and rewards involved in the backchannel. It enables people to connect online and become part of a shared community, but at the risk of leaving out those who are unaware of what is happening. It gives the speaker a way to reach a wider audience, but at the risk of distracting the smooth delivery of material. It provides an archive for comments and opinions, but a series of 140-character notes can lack context. And there’s the very real risk that the comments people make on Twitter might lack civility and shock presenters with their sometimes brutal honesty.

A two-way conversation

Though this approach is not for everyone, Atkinson describes a potent way in which social media allows a (frightening?) new level of transparency that speakers can use to transform a one-way stream of communication into a dialogue with the audience—before, during and after the speech.

The Backchannel might not bring welcome news to presenters who are wedded to the old school ways of controlling audience response and involvement, but is clearly shows how you can magnify the impact of a speech using social media.

So, in the spirit of the book, what do you think are the risks and rewards of a social media backchannel? Leave your comments below or tweet them with the hashtag #backchannelbook.

This review was originally published in ragan.com.

“We must always remember that the act of speaking professionally is only a part of our individual journeys. It is not a destination.”
– Phillip Van Hooser

The Evolution of a Professional Speaking Career

Since 1988, NSA President Phillip Van Hooser, CSP, CPAE, has spoken, written, coached and consulted on leadership and service professionalism issues with groups and organizations around the globe.

On Saturday January 9, 2009, he presented at the NSA Northern California Chapter meeting. His talk, Uncommon Business Practices That Will Help You Re-Think, Re-Position and Re-Tool Your Way to Speaking Success, reviewed the evolution of his own speaking career and the lessons this holds for other professional speakers.

Van Hooser stated that there are five distinct stages in a typical speaking career:

1. The dream is born

Some fall into a speaking career by chance. But Phil has dreamed of being a professional speaker since he was very young. His grandmother was an early influence who told the eight-year-old he would become a Baptist preacher. That didn’t happen, but he did became enamored with natural orators: the preachers, teachers and politicians of his Kentucky childhood.

2. The journey begins

By age 15 he had started keeping a notebook on public speaking. He recorded what the speakers he heard said, then progressed to noticing how they said what they said — the ways in which they delivered their material.

3. A business materializes

Every speaker must choose a moment to declare themselves a professional. For Van Hooser, that moment was the afternoon of April 7, 1988 when he quit his corporate job. With the “confidence born of ignorance” he started his business with no prospects or speaking material. He did, however, enjoy the support of his wife Susan who has been his business partner for the past 20 years. Now — 2,800 paid presentations later — Phil’s advice to others considering a career as a speaker is not to quit the day job until you have material developed and clients lined up.

4. The work expands

Speakers need to stay current. Changes in technology and the economy mean that what worked at the start of our careers will not continue to work. We need to evolve personally and professionally. The secret, Phil says, is to listen to the audience. As speakers we might think we know what people like, but the audience will let us know what they actually benefit from.

5. Reflection is inevitable

Many older people, looking back at their lives, wish they had taken more risks. They also wish they had taken time out to reflect, slowing down the weeks and months that otherwise pass by in a blur. Many wish they had contributed something to the world that would outlast their own lifespan.

As speakers, we must take the risk of stepping outside our safety zone and learn from our mistakes. We must invest ourselves in the people in our audience, and reflect on the unique opportunity we have to make a difference to thousands of people. Finally, when we speak with passion and conviction, we’ll see the light bulb go off in people’s eyes and know that we have connected with them. We never know when something we say in a presentation will change someone’s life. It’s this possibility, Van Hooser says, that makes the hard work of being a professional speaker worthwhile.

Grandmother Van Hooser clearly saw something in young Phillip that has now benefited tens of thousands of people.

Podcast Interview

To hear what Phil told me about his role as President of the National Speakers Association, how American speakers are perceived internationally and why professional speaking is the hardest job he’s ever had, click on the podcast icon below.

Phil can be contacted at phil@vanhooser.com.

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Confessions of a Public Speaker

There’s no shortage of books on how to write speeches and speak with confidence. But there are precious few on what it’s like to stand on the podium and deliver a talk, let alone what it takes to make a living as a speaker.

Scott Berkun’s new book, Confessions of a Public Speaker, tells the inside story of one man’s experiences speaking on innovation to audiences around the world. Outside of a good late-night discussion at the bar at a National Speakers Association convention, you’re not likely to hear such an honest assessment of what life as a professional speaker is actually like.

First-person account

Berkun tells his back story, as well as what it takes to become a compelling public speaker. His first-person account is mostly a series of stories about life on the road, and he shares it all—from the daily fees and annual income to the embarrassment of being late for important talks. If you identify with him, you’ll find these stories entertaining, interesting and instructive; if you don’t, well, you probably won’t like the book. Personally, I liked the book.

Berkun’s stories hit home. They are instructive in the same way that speakers who take a risk and include personal stories in their speech can use their own material to inform and connect with an audience.

Valuable lessons

We hear about Berkun’s early-morning experiences traveling from the airport Starbucks to the backstage green room, where presenters gobble doughnuts and take to the stage on a sugar high. We sympathize with him over equipment problems and the challenge of delivering to non-English-speaking audiences. And we learn:

• What to do when 45 people show up in a 2,000-seat auditorium. (Ask them to cluster in the front rows.)
• How to deal with persistent hecklers. (Address them and move on.)
• How to overcome a fear of speaking. (Find a way to enjoy yourself onstage.)
• How to prevent a wardrobe malfunction. (“Remove all nipple piercings.”)

As that last example shows, Berkun has his own style of humor. Love him or hate him, you’ll discover aspects of what it is like to be a public speaker that are well worth knowing before you next step onto the podium.

Sound advice

Altogether, Berkun’s basic advice is sound, and it centers on a handful of principles:

• Practice makes perfect.
• Place the audience’s needs before your own.
• Show up early, and end your talk early.
• Learn from your mistakes.
• Don’t be seduced by style over substance. “It is possible to become an eloquent speaker, who makes beautiful slides and has a great vocabulary and perfect diction, without having much to say.”

The reason Berkun’s advice resonates is that his heart is in the right place. He champions the audience and doesn’t settle for the mediocre standard of so many corporate speeches.

Authentic and compelling

Berkun wants speakers to be authentic. He’s offended by executives who won’t invest a few hours preparing a speech and who then waste hundreds of cumulative hours of an audience’s time. He challenges us to aim higher: Instead of providing bad slides and mind-numbing detail, he suggests spending time on content, and he encourages rehearsing the delivery until the speaker is able to present his message with interest and confidence.

He notes that speakers today can easily videotape themselves rehearsing but laments that few do, because “it’s just too scary for them to watch.” To that, Berkun says, “If you’re too scared to watch yourself speak, how can you expect your audience to watch you?”

Berkun wants speakers to tell compelling stories that arouse the audience’s curiosity. He reminds us how powerful it is to involve the audience—to risk interacting, even with something as simple as a show of hands asking if the pace of the talk is too slow or too fast. Speakers should offer simple insights, he says, rather than hide behind the smokescreen of arid facts and abstract knowledge that many subject experts use to pad their talks.

Confessions of a Public Speaker offers presenters—and those of us who support executives who give presentations—a great source of ideas to improve both the content and delivery of future talks.

This review was originally published in ragan.com.