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.

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience

Steve Jobs is the exception to the rule – a corporate executive whose product introductions captivate audiences as powerfully as the best motivational speakers. He’s a college drop-out whose eloquent 2005 Stanford University Commencement address has been watched by more than 4 million people on YouTube. What’s the source of his eloquence and what are the presentation secrets of Steve Jobs? Carmine Gallo answers these questions in his impressive new book.

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs is a book that a speechwriter can love. Gallo quotes from sources such as Nancy Duarte’s Slide:ology and Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen. He even has a sidebar on JFK speechwriter Ted Sorensen’s influence on Barack Obama titled “What the World’s Greatest Speechwriters Know.”

The message of this book is that Jobs’ extraordinary impact is based on his authenticity and his passion for his company’s people and products. Most presenters can’t claim to be the CEO of an archetypically cool Silicon Valley company. Neither can they get away with wearing faded jeans, sneakers and a turtleneck onstage. But simply everyone with a product or service that improves people’s lives has a story to tell. Gallo’s book explains in detail how Jobs presents his story so that his passion shines though and ignites the audience. It’s Gallo’s claim that anyone can learn how to deliver an “insanely great” presentation.

The “secrets” that make Jobs so effective onstage include the usual stage tips taught by presentation coaches: Make eye contact with the audience, use vocal variety and know the power of a well-timed pause. But the majority of the book analyzes the structure, rather than the delivery techniques, of major keynotes Jobs has given at Macworld and elsewhere over the years. This makes the book of inestimable value for anyone who needs to understand the nuts and bolts of writing a speech.

Performance Piece

When Steve Jobs takes to the stage he often tells dramatic stories, so it’s appropriate that the book itself is structured as a three-act play. Act 1 tells how to create the story, Act 2 tells how to deliver it, and Act 3 stresses the importance of rehearsal. Gallo adds “Director’s Notes” that summarize each chapter (or scene), and he introduces a cast of supporting characters. Organizing the book in this way also reinforces the importance of telling a story in three parts; of delivering a speech with three messages. In fact, Gallo concedes, the chapter on the effectiveness of breaking a speech into three “could easily have become the longest in the book”.

Speechwriters’ playbook

The book is a playbook for writing a great speech. Jobs and his team start scripting a speech long before firing up PowerPoint or, in their case, Keynote software. They settle on an attention-grabbing headline (“The world’s thinnest notebook”); then they decide on the three key messages; develop analogies and metaphors; and scope out demonstrations, videos clips and cameo guest appearances. Next they develop the “plot” of the speech, setting up an antagonist (Microsoft or IBM in the early days), dressing up numbers and including plenty of “amazingly zippy” words. Finally, they script a memorable “holy smokes” moment that people will talk about long after the event ends. The slides they eventually create are heavy on images and light on text and bullet points.

Live Action Video

But a book alone will only go so far. If you’ve never actually seen Steve present in person, then you haven’t experienced the “reality-distortion field” his charisma and eloquence creates in the auditorium. Gallo has this covered. The book’s end notes provide URLs for some of the 47,000 YouTube and Apple.com video clips showcasing Jobs and clearly demonstrating the techniques discussed. These links are also available on Gallo’s Web site. Viewing the videos compensates for the rather poor-quality monochrome photos of Jobs onstage — the one disappointment in the book.

Learning from his mistakes

To counteract any feelings of inadequacy you might have after watching Jobs deliver a flawless keynote, do a quick search on YouTube for Apple Bloopers and you’ll see that, even for Steve Jobs, things don’t always go well onstage. Demos fail, screens freeze, and he stumbles over words. But as with any masterful presenter, Jobs remains calm. Even if the speeches you write or deliver are not destined for “insane” greatness, they’ll be much, much, better for having read Carmine Gallo’s insanely great book.

This review was originally published in ragan.com.

Back in August 2008 I wrote a long review of the Magcloud print-on-demand publishing solution from HP Labs.

Since then I’ve helped produce a number of editions of Professionally Speaking for our local National Speakers Association (NSA) chapter as well as a magazine for my wife’s College Admissions Counseling business.

I was recently invited by Dick Bruso of the Writers and Publishers Professional Expert Group (PEG) of NSA to deliver a one-hour teleseminar on Magcloud. The teleseminar was given on May 21, 2009.

The teleseminar covered three areas:

1. A background on printing on demand for magazine publishers
2. The mechanics of producing your own magazine for free
3. Some examples and my own experience of the time and effort involved.

Websites referenced in my talk

Magcloud
Professionally Speaking
Georgia Speaker
Step Into College
Two Words
Issuu

To hear the teleseminar click on the podcast icon below. Since this is a 55 minute recording you may prefer to Download and listen at your convenience.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:00 — 1.2MB)

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SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate

Postman tells it like it is when it comes to the bind in which social media has placed many corporate communications managers. He addresses the challenge that “Inside companies, people are clearly confused about social media” (p. 160)

This book goes a long way to dispel any confusion. It’s chock-full of checklists, questions to consider, case studies and options to review. The guidance he gives is grounded in what is clearly first-hand experience of the corporate world. For example, this advice on selecting who should represent a company on an officially sanctioned blog is right on the money:

“Choose your bloggers well, counsel them, monitor them, and if need be, shut down their blogs if they are not posting in a way that helps you meet your communications objectives. But try not to censor them ahead of time.” (p. 65)

If you work inside a corporation and need to encourage co-workers or the suits in management to consider the options presented by social media, this is the book to leave lying around the office to stimulate discussion.

From the politics to the technical details and the straightforward PR and communications counsel the book covers a lot of ground. It also manages to be a complete inventory of social media, circa January 2009.

One inevitable problem any book on a subject as fast-moving as this will face is a limited shelf-life. In a few years it might seem impossibly quaint. But for now, there’s no better guide to new territory. As Postman says on the last page “Start Now!”.

NSA/NC Meeting Report: Saturday February 28, 2009

Marketing expert and larger-than-life character Ford Saeks flew in from Wichita, Kansas to share his ideas on how to use Social Media to make money.

Ford is best known for positioning people and their products and services for profit through proven marketing and innovative publicity campaigns.

The sold-out crowd at the National Speakers Association Northern California Chapter meeting were treated to four hours of Ford’s high-intensity ideas on how to start making money on the internet and leverage Social Media Marketing to build influence, reputation and brand within communities of potential customers. Some core principles:

“What problem do I solve that people will pay to make go away?”
“The purpose of business is to generate a customer. The purpose of a customer is to generate a profit.”

‘Nuff said. Here’s some of what Ford shared.

Creating an online cash machine

Speaking and training + Digital and physical products + consulting and coaching = a fully-rounded revenue model. Web 2.0 places a dialog with customers and prospects at the center of business today. Sharing opinions, comments, and other content in the form of audio podcasts, video, links, bookmarks, articles and slides makes a site successful.

Research the top keywords for your niche and use them relentlessly to help the search engines find your site when a customer is looking for your solution to the pain they are feeling. Learn the all-important modifiers that people use to focus search results.

Know the answers to three core questions about your business:

• Why should someone pay attention to you – what is your message?
• Who are you trying to market to?
• How are you getting the word out – what is the method?

It’s a FEATURE if it’s about you, your products or services or your company. Ask “Which means…” and you get the BENEFIT that describes an emotional or intangible result the customer gets.

Social Media Marketing

• Helps you expand your internet footprint
• Makes it easier for prospects to find you
• Improves your search engine ranking
• Establishes you as an expert
• Improves communications and feedback
• Builds relationships and networks
• Drives a steady stream of prospects to your online business

There’s a gazillion (or so) Social Media sites listed at go2web20.net. Ford recommends you start by:

1. Building a blog with WordPress.org – hosted on your own website to optimize SEO
2. Establishing your Channel on YouTube – peppered with relevant keywords
3. Building a profile on Facebook and LinkedIn – with posts from your blog and YouTube videos
4. Experiment with Twitter. Start by reading Randy Gage’s recent assessment of the uses of abuses of Twitter.

If you’d like to see the slides he used, Ford has kindly made them available. What you won’t get from the slides, or this report, is any of his incredible energy and specific insight into the ways these tools can work for you today to make money on the Internet.

For that, you had to have been there.

And thinks he that the chirping of a wren,
By crying comfort from a hollow breast,
Can chase away the first-conceived sound?
– Henry VI, Part ii, Act 3, Scene 2

Speaking while people Tweet

Olivia Mitchell has a useful article on Pistachio’s Touchbase Blog about the growing phenomena of members of your audience using Twitter to comment on a presentation in real-time on laptops, Blackberries and iPhones.

She advises audience members on the best way to engage in the conversation. She also advises speakers on how to deal with this new ‘back-channel’ of information.

Presenting while people are twittering is challenging. But isn’t it better to get that feedback in real-time when you can do something to retrieve the situation – than wait till you read the evaluation sheets a few days after the conference – and find that you bombed?

The 92 comments (to date) highlight the many implications, including this from Morriss on the way Twittering instantly repurposes a speech beyond the confines of the room:

You left out a huge bonus to the presenter: key highlights of your presentation are being sent out to an audience much bigger than those in the room. If you have something truly insightful or newsworthy to say, your message may be retweeted far and wide.

Twitter is just one aspect of modern technology that is changing public speaking.

Representing data in a unique and compelling way

This brief presentation by Hans Rosling revolutionized the way I understand statistical data. He gave this presentation at the TED Conference in February 2006. The TED Website explains:

Rosling is professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, his current work focuses on dispelling common myths about the so-called developing world, which (he points out) is no longer worlds away from the west. In fact, most of the third world is on the same trajectory toward health and prosperity, and many countries are moving twice as fast as the west did.

What sets Rosling apart isn’t just his apt observations of broad social and economic trends, but the stunning way he presents them. Guaranteed: You’ve never seen data presented like this. By any logic, a presentation that tracks global health and poverty trends should be, in a word: boring. But in Rosling’s hands, data sings. Trends come to life. And the big picture — usually hazy at best — snaps into sharp focus.

Rosling’s presentations are grounded in solid statistics (often drawn from United Nations data), illustrated by the visualization software he developed. The animations transform development statistics into moving bubbles and flowing curves that make global trends clear, intuitive and even playful. During his legendary presentations, Rosling takes this one step farther, narrating the animations with a sportscaster’s flair.

The good news is that since Google bought the rights to Professor Rosling’s Gapminder software, anyone can create these animated demonstrations of their own statistical data and use them in presentations. What’s not to like about that?

It’s worth downloading the Hi-Res version to get the impact of the charts on a full screen, or click on the icon below to watch the low-res version.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (268.3MB)

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Fifteen members and guests of the National Speakers Association Northern California Chapter paid a visit to the Cisco TelePresence Suites in Santa Clara yesterday.

Cisco has publicly available suites available for hire by the hour at two locations in the US (Santa Clara and Boston) and seven in India. “Hundreds more” will come online in 2009. They’re not cheap – rates start at $299/hr a room (and you need to rent at least two) up to $899/hr for a room that seats 18 people. Compared to the price to flying 18 people to, say, India, this is of course a huge bargain, not to mention way more environmentally friendly.

We are, needless to say, in the ‘early adopter’ phase of the product life-cycle. Remember what you paid for digital cameras when they first came out? Expect the price to drop as Cisco roll out more locations and competitors like the HP Halo rooms open up to the public.

Right now, these rooms are corporate jet replacement options (how timely!) HP, Cisco and other multinationals like P&G, Pepsi and Dreamworks are the main users as a cost- and time-effective option for CEOs and senior managers to hold meetings from their own office instead of flying across the country or around the world. Cisco CEO John Chambers mentioned in the speech I profiled recently, that his company is a heavy user of these studios for internal and customer meetings.

So what did the NSA/NC visitors think of this?

“Awesome experience”; “Wow!”; “Much more impressive than I expected”; “Totally immersive”; “Can you, like, teach karate in here?”

While many public speakers and individual entrepreneurs teaching a class (probably not karate, perhaps Ikebana) or presenting a seminar might still be priced out of this market, NSA/NC are now ahead of the curve – knowing what is possible and, like Wayne Gretzky, skating toward where the puck is going. As well as a lower price-point, we’d benefit if (when?) Telepresence is available in auditorium-sized theaters, not just small conference rooms. Expect the technology to become more attractive over the next 12-18 months.

Meanwhile, Cisco are willing to host groups and individuals for a free demonstration hour at their Santa Clara facility. Contact Bret Chesman bchesman@cisco.com – tell him Ian sent you.

“Everything we do is around Social Networking.”
– John Chambers, CEO, Cisco

Building the Next Generation Company: Innovation, Talent, Excellence

MIT World Lecture, Oct 15, 2008

Cisco CEO John Chambers gets Social Networking.

MIT reports:

In the 1990s, he predicted that networks would transform the way the world works, becoming platforms for communications and other IT, and Chambers placed Cisco at the center of that transformation. Today, he envisions a Web 2.0 premised on collaboration and social networking that will similarly transfigure all business life. Since 2001, he’s been positioning Cisco to catch this massive market transition, and indeed, is “betting the company’s future on it.”

In “phase two of the Internet,” says Chambers, “Content will find me; I will not search for it.” Any device, anywhere, will be able to receive any kind of content. We will be dealing with licenses for things like music, rather than worrying about compatibility issues between our digital tools and what’s streaming through them. Web 2.0 will also bring “effective collaboration,” by which Chambers means network-enabled visual tools, which will make “working together for a common goal truly possible.” Expect much faster business processes and revved up productivity, says Chambers.

Based on Cisco’s own experience in the past several years, organizations will completely restructure around these new capabilities. Indeed, he offers up his company as a paradigm of this vision. Once a hierarchical, command and control-based organization, Cisco is now much flatter, a company running “off of social networking groups.” Councils with cross-functional responsibilities suggest and take on many more projects (from emerging markets, to video, and smart grid boards); from one to two major ventures per year, to this year’s 26 launches. The next generation company is “built around the visual.” Cisco employees do non-stop teleconferencing with collaborators around the world. The company hosts 2500 such virtual meetings per week. It also employs Webex, Wikis and blogging to move work along.

With this kind of communication and carefully managed process to match, “operations can be turned on a head,” says Chambers. It’s the recipe for market-dominating speed and scale. Chambers is “loading the pipeline” with projects that assume other companies will want what Cisco has and makes. “If we’re right, we’re developing a huge wave of revenue opportunity.” Perhaps this is one reason why he’s “an optimist on global productivity, global economy and our ability to handle the challenges.”

This video supports the December 2008 Fast Company profile painting Cisco as a Revolutionary San Jose company – a socialist enterprise at the level of a democratized style of decision making; probably less so with compensation packages or an iron rice bowl.

Highlights of the video are when Chambers describes upper- and mid-level management resistance to the new culture of collaboration (17:40) and reveals that 20% of upper management left because they could not let go of the command and control mindset they learned in B-School (43:00).

Chambers reveals how the company used to be run by the top 10 executives who reported to him. Now it is the top 500 who make the decisions, soon to be the top 2,500 (24:00).

His evaluation of the effect of the radical introduction of Social(ized) Networking is that after a period of initial resistance, a balance has been achieved between command and control and self-managed boards and councils using collaborative technology (54:23).

The question, as Fast Company asked, is if Cisco-style collaboration really works elsewhere? They used to ask that about web pages and email when Web 1.0 was taking off in Silicon Valley. Would it play in Peoria? I’m not betting against Web 2.0. It’ll just take a little longer to catch on.

See Chambers in action and decide if these innovations are right for you.

Twitter is the 140-character messaging service which takes some getting used to. It’s confusing for new users and hard to understand much of the usefulness and appeal until you have been using it for awhile. It’s growing into a useful social networking, community building and marketing tool.

To find out about Twitter check out this newbie’s guide and also read this more complete guide.

If you’d like to connect me on Twitter with I’m @cheshirelad.