Liz Bowen is passionate about helping kids with one of the biggest problems of their young lives, bullying. Born with a severe birth defect, Liz experienced bullying at an early age. As a Christian practitioner and self-esteem coach, Liz brings answers from a Christian perspective. Speaking exclusively to Christian schools, she has developed knowledge-based tactics to decrease this problem. She inspires students to follow the Golden Rule:

“Do everything to others as you would have them do to you. This is the law and the prophets.” Matthew 7:12

Advocate for the Bullied

Liz is aware that bullying has reached epidemic proportions in our nation’s schools.The frightening statistics is that one in four kids are bulled. Bullying behavior begins in preschool. Every day, 160,000 students miss school for fear of being bullied.

Topics

Liz speaks on Bully Busting Behavior, Promoting a Healthy Self-image and Character issues. She speaks in schools because she loves helping kids. It does not matter whether they are the bully or the bullied. As a Christian practitioner she holds no judgement. Both groups are suffering. Her heartfelt desire is to help everyone.

Liz can be contacted via email at bowenspeaks@gmail.com.

Pro-Track Profile

I recently talked with Liz about her background. To hear what she told me, and her passion for speaking out against bullying in schools, as well as her impressions of the National Speakers Association Pro-Track class that she is part of, click on the podcast icon below.

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Marianne Gobeil is the CEO and founder of Leading Communicators. A recognized expert in the area of strategic leadership communications, Marianne is a trusted adviser to executive leaders — so devoted to helping them advance their leadership goals and objectives that she formed a company around it.

I was watching the film “The King’s Speech” again the other day, and it struck me that executive leaders today have a lot in common with King George VI. Not because they both stutter – although some certainly do, at least strategically. But because each faced a cosmic shift when it comes to communication. And in both cases, the disruptor was technology.

For King George, it was the “wireless” that fundamentally changed how he engaged with the British people. Have a listen to the counsel his father gives him:

Suddenly, centuries of tradition were disrupted. The old ways of ruling – from a distance, seen and heard by few – had been supplanted by a device that forged an immediate, close connection between the King and his people. The radio meant he was now present in their homes, and created the perception that he was speaking to them personally. What he said, and how he said it, now mattered, as there was a direct and immediate connection to them.

And now the same is true of executive leaders. We’ve all been customized for many decades at having people speak to us in our homes through radio and television. It had already started to surface in a different level of expectation outside the home as well; people wanted to feel that same sense of connectedness whenever someone spoke to them, even across a podium.

But now it’s different. People not only expect a speaker to connect with them; they expect to be able to connect right back. Social media is the great disruptor of our age. It’s opened the channels, and made one-way communication insufficient and perhaps ultimately obsolete.

The impact on executive leaders is huge. The two-way nature of social media has changed the rules of engagement. Like old kings ruling from a far, executive leaders can no longer lead from on high; they need to engage. They must be seen and heard by their employees and other stakeholders. What they say, when they say it, and how they say it matters because it carries far and fast.

So here’s the new reality for executive leaders: Speak up. Engage well and often. And when you speak, whether at a podium or across a meeting room, be sure you speak to the actual people in the room. Show them that you are aware of their specific interests and concerns, use the language and level of detail that they understand, and give them an opportunity to respond. The old days of one-way communication are gone, and clinging to them will reflect badly on your leadership.

This post originally appeared in Marianne’s blog. It is re-posted here with her express permission.

This article marks the start of a new series in Professionally Speaking. For the past three years I’ve published a monthly Pro-Track Profile interview featuring members of the Pro-Track class of the Northern California Chapter of the National Speakers Association. I’ve decided to start a similar series featuring freelance creatives who make their living as communications consultants, writers, editors, and more. This Freelance Focus series kicks off with an interview with the founder of the Agency which has provided me with the majority of my own freelance work for the past three years.

René Shimada Siegel is a reluctant entrepreneur who founded High Tech Connect in 1997 at the persistent request of her Silicon Valley colleagues. They were frustrated by the challenge of finding qualified marketing consultants with no time to train them on a specific product or technology. So René leveraged her PR and marcom management experience—as well as a jam-packed Rolodex, caffeine-fueled lifestyle and talented friends—to create a specialized marketing services agency called High Tech Connect.

Over the past 15 years, more than 500 clients have called on the High Tech Connect team for critical projects or to fill in for maternity and medical leaves. With a carefully selected nationwide network of more than 1000 freelance consultant specialists, they provide on-demand, project-based expertise in areas such as Copywriting and Editing, Corporate Communications, Event & Trade Show Management, Executive Speechwriting, Public Relations and Social Media Marketing.

René has grown High Tech Connect to a leading provider of expert marketing and communications, and one of the largest women-owned businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area. She’s extremely proud of the team she’s built: like-minded professionals who are equally passionate about helping clients and inspiring consultants.

René is a regular contributor to Inc.com, dispensing advice and perspective for small business owners and entrepreneurs. Her innovative business model and inspiration for home-based consultants has also been documented in several books and publications like Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek Japan and Daniel Pink’s Free Agent Nation.

Freelance consultants

High Tech Connect employ carefully selected experts to work on complex projects for more than 500 clients, including Cisco Systems, IBM, NetApp, Intel, Kaiser Permanente, Brocade, Intuit, CA Technologies, McAfee, Xilinx, VeriSign, Seagate, Silicon Valley Leadership Group and more.

The freelance consultants placed through High Tech Connect average 10-20 years of professional marketing or communications experience. Consultants are paid either on a 1099 or W-2 basis, depending on the client company’s requirements.

Freelance Focus

I’ve worked as a consultant through High Tech Connect for the past three years. I visited René in her Pleasanton, California office and asked her share her insights into the world of freelance consulting, what companies are looking for today, and what issues do employees who are considering switching to freelance work need to consider. To hear what she told me, click on the podcast icon below.

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News today that the most successful supermarket chain in the UK is considering pulling out of the US. Tesco invested $1.6B in opening 200 “Fresh & Easy” stores in the western US.

You say tomato

The Financial Times reports that this has proved an “overseas misadventure” for the British grocer. Sales have disappointed. Tesco’s American dream is in tatters. The FT article highlights the cultural differences between the way consumers shop on either side of the Atlantic.

However, none of these supposed differences ring true for me. Let’s take a close look at each of the claims:

US consumers like to pick up and touch their fruit and veg, something that proved difficult with Fresh & Easy’s shrink wrapped produce.

Wrong! UK consumers are the one’s with touchy-feely habits. In my parents home town of Nantwich, Cheshire, the greengrocers display piles of potatoes, cabbage and seasonal apples in open bins on the pavement. With the exception of the minority of Americans who visit Farmer’s Markets, or who can afford Whole Foods, most supermarkets in the States are far more likely to shrink wrap “fresh” fruit and veg. That’s if you can even tell the difference between the gargantuan waxed apples and plastic-wrap in the first place.

US consumers like brands, but Tesco focused on developing its own-label range.

Not so! US consumers have driven the sale of private label foods to a respectable 18% of the overall packaged food market, according to recent reports on the $5B purchase of Ralcorp by ConAgra.

US consumers are not used to self-service checkouts in grocery chains.

Oh? While it is noticeable that UK supermarkets provide chairs for cashiers while the US makes the clerks stand (the better to look ’em in the eye?), my local Safeway store has self-service counters as an option. In Minnesota it’s even quite normal to see shoppers bag their own groceries, instead of holding up the line staring vacantly into space waiting for the clerk to perform the highly skilled bagging operation. Any store that speeds the checkout with a self-service option has my vote. Undoubtedly, my grandmother mourned the passing of the old fashioned general store where the clerk fetched everything off the shelf for you. That was then, this is now. Americans change with the times.

The US is made up of a collection of local markets; tastes differ as much from state to state as across national borders.

Triple Oh?

England has: Lancashire hot-pot, Cheshire cheese, Eccles cakes, Cornish pasties, Devon cream teas, Yorkshire pudding … all from the country the size of Oregon.

The States has: Southern fried chicken, Rocky Mountain Oysters, Wisconsin Cheddar, Boston baked beans … in a Continent the size of the whole of Western Europe.

The winner for regional cuisine is clearly America. That’s why McDonalds, TGI Friday’s, Starbucks, Wendy’s and KFC have had such a hard time serving consumers in the vast collection of intensely local markets with their distinctive tastes.

Or not.

At the end of the day, any grocery chain from a country where the consumers expect to purchase Marmite and mushy peas in aisle five are going to have a difficult time selling their wares in the land of the red, white and blue.

A report in today’s Financial Times notes that the newly appointed governor of the Bank of England, Canadian Mark Carney, was chosen for his communication skills:

As Jennifer Jeffs, president of the Canadian International Council, a think-tank, puts it: “He doesn’t speak like an economist; he speaks like a human being.”

Evan Solomon, the Canadian writer and broadcaster, suggests those communication skills may be the greatest asset that George Osborne, the chancellor, saw in him, to restore confidence not just in monetary policy, which will be Mr Carney’s direct responsibility, but in the UK economic strategy as a whole. “The administration needs someone who can speak to the people,” Mr Solomon says. “People will not just trust him, but feel he’s a human being.”

Given the turgid prose employed by many central bankers, the bar is not set too high for a plain-spoken Canadian to win the hearts and minds of the British. Of course, when you’ve got them by their mortgage rates, their hearts and minds will follow.

Today’s US Election can be seen as the culmination of the most expensive transmedia storytelling campaign in history. Unlike the year-long Why So Serious? campaign that Warner Bros. funded to promote the Dark Knight Batman movie, and was reported to involve 10 million players, the United States Democratic and Republican Political Parties funded a multi-year “election campaign” that has involved hundreds of millions of players.

Multiplatform Storytelling

Unlike political campaigning in the era before ubiquitous digital content, when politicians would appear in person or on radio and television to promote their views, the 2012 US Election was a true transmedia experience.

Candidate messages were re-purposed in political ads, often funded by PAC’s that pretended to have no connection to the politicians themselves, but in fact were staffed by people who, as they say, were most likely in bed with the candidates.

There were extensive, you might say endless, discussions about the candidates and their ads on television, on Twitter and other forms of social media and, in a hang-over from an earlier era, even in bar rooms and coffee shops across the country.

Alternate Reality Game

The political parties encouraged players to display bumper stickers on their cars and signs on their lawns with the goal of stimulating interest in an election game that came to a climax in today’s visit to polling stations, where the ritual of voting was enacted. This whole alternate reality game (ARG) was conducted in terms of a backdrop of “messages” that candidates, their wives, supporters and surrogates communicated to players who then repeated the messages they liked to friends and neighbors.

Lack of participation

Despite the billions of dollars spent on the story, it’s worth noting that participation in the actual voting is minimal among the younger age groups. Many of them exhausted their interest in these games after marching in the street to promote The Dark Knight.

After all, when you’ve got Gotham City to save, who has time to select the leader of the free world?

Transmedia storytelling is a hot topic. It’s a form of storytelling where multiple platforms tie together to tell a common story. It has been heralded as “a new storytelling form that is native to networked digital content and communication channels.”

UCS professor Henry Jenkins coined the term transmedia storytelling, and defines it as representing:

“…a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience…”

There’s many examples of transmedia, with projects around novels, TV shows, videogames, music and movies as well as a few examples in the corporate and executive communications space.

The more elaborate of these can involve the expense of year-long “teaser” campaigns for movies, or mass-participation alternate reality games.

However, transmedia storytelling can be a low-cost re-purposing existing video and audio digital content for multiple distribution channels. This might put your video used at trade show presentation on a massive screen into a format suitable for a laptop or smart phone. But it’s not just changing the aspect ratio and being done. It’s thinking of savvy ways to fracture a coherent story into pieces while keeping a core theme alive in different media. It’s weaving the storytellers magic in the digital age.

I’m just starting to learn about transmedia storytelling, but the impression I’ve got is that it is evolving rapidly and, if it delivers on even a part of the promise, will be a VERY BIG DEAL.

Paul M. Wood: Transmedia Storyteller

I recently met with one of the more savvy transmedia storytellers in Silicon Valley. Paul M. Wood is a principal in the boutique communications firm AE35 Media.

Paul is a commercial and independent film director who grew up in a creative family. His father was an artist and his mother a musician. He studied at NYU Film School and has knocked around the tech industry.

After a decade making niche-busting films for Fortune 500 companies such as Cisco Systems, Paul is now calling upon his diverse background as both visual artist and technologist to bring storytelling into the twenty-first century by producing tales which cross not only genres but platforms and delivery systems as well.

AE35 Media believe that the days of executive communications managers creating a message and pushing out to the world as a scripted speech for a corporate big-wig to deliver once with the hope that it was clever or engaging enough to be noticed are over.

Things have changed.

We’ve gone from being a world where information is pushed out to the masses, to become one where the information is now pulled in by individuals. The tech industry knows this applies to their products, not too many yet realize it might equally apply to their corporate spokespeople. While information itself is shared, the act of acquiring it is now solitary and intimate.

Appealing to ONE large mass of people is one thing. It’s an auditorium filled will people listening to your CEO deliver a keynote. It’s an event, managed by the event production team. However, appealing to MILLIONS of individuals and having them own your brand or message as much as you do? Well that’s no longer a mere event. That’s a universe and within it the possibilities are limitless — this is the promise of transmedia storytelling.

To hear Paul discuss the potential of transmedia storytelling and how he sees it as a natural extension of his video production skills, click on the podcast icon below.

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Professional speakers, freelance speechwriters and entrepreneurs must learn the sales strategies and techniques that will secure appointments in today’s volatile economy.

That means getting past gatekeepers and getting to decision makers.

Armies of executive assistants and the sub-second attention span of crazy-busy executives are barriers to overcome.

Attendees at Saturdays’ meeting of the Northern California Chapter of the National Speakers Association were given insights on how to crack new accounts, speed up sales and win more business.

The Secrets of Silicon Valley Admins

Four crack EA’s took time off from their busy schedules to spend time on a panel and share the secrets of the C-Suite:

• Cindy Beauchamp, SAP
• Dyan Dalton, HP
• Viviana Gray, Phoenix Technologies
• Elisabeth Hamon, SAP

This self-described “she-wolf pack of Silicon Valley” are fierce guardians of their executives time and the “gatekeepers” who can approve or deny your access. They emphasized that they are not the enemy. But if you treat them in an unfriendly or arrogant way, not only will you never get past them to their executive, but they’ll share information around the company and you will be persona non grata on all future calls.

The secret to success is really quite simple:

“Be friendly, be likable, be real. Use the word please. Be honest. Don’t pretend you know someone when you don’t. We’ll check you out on LinkedIn in a heartbeat.”

These women (and 99% of all EA’s are women) are open to being wooed. Starbucks and candy, handwritten thank you notes and other small acts of kindness work wonders. Just don’t be “creepy” or overly persistent. The best time to call is mid-afternoon.

Take the time to research the company and if you can give a legit name as a reference you will probably be put through.

Cement the phone call with an email. Following-up once a week is OK.

Don’t be too obsessed with reaching the senior executive. Calling high is not always the best strategy. You might get more face-time and a better result talking to someone lower down the organization the EA refers you to. It is even worthwhile to ask if the top guy’s EA can refer you to a more appropriate administrator. Ask “Could some of your colleagues help?” Another proven technique is to hire your own virtual assistant and have them make a “sister admin” call into the large company.

Whoever does the calling, be sure to make it real. Avoid sounding scripted. Get to the point. Don’t sound like a recruiter (who have THE WORST reputation of all). EA’s love to help so use the magic words “I need your help…”.

A professional website and LinkedIn profile enables the busy EA to check your bona fides. Consider if the web content looks good when it is printed and handed to the executive to read while they are in a meeting or on a flight. If not, add a PDF print option.

The killer suggestion of the morning was to leverage LinkedIn and review the membership roster of The Executive Assistants of Silicon Valley group. There are 2,967 members. Of course, to join you really should (ahem) be an EA, or maybe hire a virtual assistant who is (hint! hint!). These are the real decision makers of the Valley, executives just work for them.

Jill Konrath: Fresh Sales Strategies

The afternoon session kicked off with Minnesota native Jill Konrath, author of Selling to Big Companies and SNAP Selling. She faults the typical salesperson, or speaker selling their services, for combining a mind-numbing depth of expertise about their service with a ridiculously limited understand of the prospect’s world. Rather than spend more time exhaustively detailing product features, we need to focus our attention on customers and develop an in-depth understanding of their business environment, objectives, issues, challenges and, yes, their administrators’ preferences!

Jill reviewed key stages of a sales call:

Who Do I Contact?

Realize that big companies have business units and divisions. Break it down into component parts that you can get your arms around. Use LinkedIn for targeted searches. Other resources are Hoovers, Zoominfo, Data.com and Netprospex. It’s worth paying for the right prospect list vs. wasting valuable time being bounced between assistants.

What Do I Say?

Look for ways to jolt the prospect out of their complacency. Find out what they care about. Your goal is not to close the sale on the first call, but to have them say “Ooh, that’s interesting. I want to know more.”

Start by establishing your credibility as an expert. Use a referral name. Mention any homework you’ve done “In last week’s press release I noticed your company…” or “I’ve seen your senior executives presentations on YouTube…”

Then pique their curiosity by sharing relevant ideas and information: “I have some ideas…” “I thought you might be interested…”

The final step is a gracious close with an invitation to connect.

Kurt Shaver: The LinkedIn King

Chapter member and Pro-Track class of 2011 graduate Kurt Shaver showcased his social networking chops when he shook the audience out of their mid-afternoon lethargy with a dynamic review of the many ways to use LinkedIn to supercharge sales and prospecting campaigns. His material came straight from his well-respected SalesFoundary classes which offers LinkedIn training to sales teams and individuals.

LinkedIn Profile Tips

Success on LinkedIn starts with a professional Profile.

Kurt’s tips include:

• Make sure you profile has a full face and white background. Lose the photo of you with your spouse, kids and pets. Save those for Facebook.
• Write a headline that is keyword rich, not just a boring job title. NSA/NC Past-President Jim Carrillo nails it:

Stop banging your head with the mouse; I can help with business technology. Customized video training for your needs.

• Use each of the three website links allocated and make their titles something other than the default “My Website”.
• Load up on applications such as Slideshare and a link to your blog posting. Professional speakers should take the time to display a video, even though it means jumping through these hoops.

LinkedIn Prospecting Tips

Once you have your Profile in order the next step is to add connections. The mother-lode in your network are the all-important “friends of friends” — the rather weird Scientologically-named “Level 2’s” in LinkedIn terminology. If you have, say, 1,000 immediate connections you can expect over 300,000 “Level 2” connections – the people your immediate contacts can introduce you to, or whose names you can drop when you are calling their EA!

Here’s an example from my own network. I know 126 people with the job title “CEO”. But there are 35,475 CEO’s known to my network as a whole. Far too many to call on, no matter how cooperative their administrators might be. However, within a 50 mile radius of my home there are 5,461 CEO’s in the technology industry who are “friends of my friends”. If I closed 1% of them that would be 54 keynote speeches a year to write – one speech a week would keep me busy…

Run customer reports in the “Advanced Search” under Contacts to find your own prospecting list.

Kurt’s killer suggestion was to then click on the green “+Saved Search” in the upper right of the screen and ask LinkedIn to email you a list of everyone who has met your criteria in the past week. This is the ultimate “Bluebird list” for your sales calls. A surefire prospecting tip. It’s a natural to call and congratulate them on their promotion and ask “How may I help…?:

Publish or Perish

Why create when you can curate?

Share thoughts, articles and nuggets of wisdom from content-rich websites with your LinkedIn network to boost your reputation as expert. Use the Share on LinkedIn bookmark widget to quickly and easily publish relevant content to your Profile, Groups you belong to, or specific individuals. Take the time to customize a comment for each posting and seed your remarks with a question or three to start the debate. There could be tens of thousands of eyeballs with an opportunity to see what you send out, so use this technique with care, and be sure you are adding value.

Next up: January 2013 NSA meeting

As good a meeting as this was, NSA/NC has an even better one scheduled for January 12 when National President and humor-meister Ron Culberson will help us add humor to our talks and the former CEO of Southwest Airlines Howard Putnam will fly in to share his tips on thriving in turbulent times. See you there!

Toastmaster Time is a long-running San Francisco Bay Area monthly television program, produced by members of Toastmasters International clubs in District 57.

Shows are broadcast on local television community access channels and a complete archive of the past eight years are available for viewing on the Toastmaster Time website. The show presents talks by Toastmasters, from Icebreakers to Advanced talks and features evaluations and interviews with speakers.

The purpose behind the show is to give Toastmaster members the opportunity to learn new skills and present educational and entertaining stories and speeches. For Toastmasters, it offers a unique opportunity to give a speech in front of cameras in a professional television studio. For most of us, this is a challenge quite different from speaking in front of a room of friendly faces at the local club meetings.

Toastmaster Time shows are recorded at the Media Center in Palo Alto.

Hosting a TV Show

Back in October 2011, I had the opportunity to present a talk on my youthful adventures in London and Paris. Earlier this year I evaluated other speakers. Then, just last month, I spent an evening in the studio as the host of an entire TV show.

It was a humbling experience to understand first-hand what sales leaders and company executives must accomplish these days when they host virtual meetings in the workplace. These are an increasingly common alternative to expensive in-person meetings. Toastmaster Time, and shows like it elsewhere, give anyone who aspires to a leadership role in a Fortune 500 company a great sandbox to hone your on-camera presentation skills.

Click photo to watch entire show

Monique Martineau’s mission is to share profound insights learned during her own pursuit of health and happiness. She’s had several painful “wake up calls” ranging from childhood crisis to having a baby at 19, giving him up for adoption, and meeting him as an adult. At 26, she lived the dark-year-of-the-soul, when doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her. One time, sitting in ER again, she was so overcome with anxiety, she thought “I don’t care if I die, but I must find peace-of-mind!”

After coaching hundreds of corporate techies and their managers on wellness, Monique found most obstacles point back to stress. People essentially know how to improve nutrition and exercise. The problem is prioritizing and motivation. People are overloaded and exhausted at the end of a day. They want fast food and TV or a fancy dinner and a drink…too frequently, in which case, it’s neither a healthy nor a truly fulfilling life.

Whether speaking or consulting, one of Monique’s favorite questions is, “What’s the most important thing?” Many people have to stop and think for a while. Our culture is so caught up in achievement, progress and power; we forget why we’re doing it. We must keep what’s important to us in the forefront of our minds to guide decisions, such as, “It’s time to shut down the computer, go home, take a walk, and enjoy a healthy meal with loved ones.”

Easier said than done? Not when you learn what’s at the root of it all. Monique’s most profound insights have come from ancient wisdom traditions. When we shine the light on ego and its antics, it can’t run our lives anymore. The ego innocently tries to help, but mucks things up. Cultivating wisdom, on the other hand, allows us to embody our true nature. With wisdom, we enjoy mental clarity, physical vitality and emotional equanimity. The impact is as close to home as our relationships and as far reaching as world peace.

To find out more about Monique and her work as a speaker, consultant and coach, visit her website.

Pro-Track Profile

I recently talked with Monique about her background. To hear what she told me, and the ways she adds “juice” to the topic of stress plus her focus on meditation, as well as her impressions of the National Speakers Association Pro-Track class that she is part of, click on the podcast icon below.

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