At twelve, Clare was diagnosed with Epilepsy. Years later after an accident at a gym, the diagnosis became traumatic brain injury which affected her ability to speak. She had to learn to speak again as well as learn the many new ways to live a successful life. She taught herself how to speak through a structured program she calls ColorWheeling™ – a program she now shares with others as a way to plan for success.
Clare learned how to turn her disabilities into abilities and a new career as a motivational speaker, TV Producer and host. Her show is called Colorful Journey of Success. Guests include authors, actors, designers, coaches, and key people in a variety of industries including science, medicine, and psychology. Her motivational speeches and writings share her own intriguing stories about her Colorful Journey of Success including her six step system of success using color codes.
Even with hidden disabilities, Clare has achieved successes. She raised a daughter alone, graduated from San Francisco School of Fashion, has an M.A. in psychology, earned the status of Distinguished Toastmaster, and manages her own home and rentals.
Clare states:
We never know what is around the next corner in life. Re-inventing my life was learning to speak and even think again. It was a huge challenge but I discovered we can re-train our brain and take control of our lives.
Pro-Track Profile
Clare enrolled in the 2011 NSA/NC Pro-Track speaker training program. To hear about her speaking work, her comments on the value of Toastmasters for professional speakers, and what attracted her to Pro-Track, click on the podcast icon below.
Laurie Brown has over two decades of experience as a trainer and speaker, helping her audience improve their customer service, sales and presentation skills. She started her career as a professional actor, performing in hundreds of training films, commercials and movies. This experience has provided her with the ability to engage and keep her audience’s attention. Laurie has written extensively on presentations skills. She is the author of The Teleprompter Manual and Brand-aid.
A tech primer in NetworkWorld, authored by Cisco Systems, presents startling evidence of the coming surge in business video:
Video traffic is expected to grow from 50% of all Internet traffic today to 90% by 2013. In volume that will be equal to transmitting the equivalent of 10 billion DVDs across the network every month.
Cisco, being the network engineering company they are, provide end-to-end solutions for important technological solutions that support the growth in video, from high-resolution TelePresence systems to media-ready network architectures that will support multimedia.
However, the missing piece of the puzzle is not the technology, it’s people’s comfort-level and effectiveness being on camera.
As video becomes pervasive, it challenges the abilities of executives, trainers and “virtual experts” to present themselves on camera with poise and authenticity.
Looking into the camera in a brightly lit studio is an environment which most of us must be trained to be effective in. As challenging as it is to emote with a fish-eye lens, it is something to get over. Practice makes perfect, so invest in a personal video device and practice until you are natural.
Here are some areas to focus on.
A bad hair day is not an option
Communication is about more than the words you use. On a phone call, tone of voice, emotional intensity and volume all “color” the way communication is received. In person, add in facial expression, stance, angle relative to the listener. How you look is as important as what you say. You cannot help but leave a visual impression. Studies have shown that people are influenced more by the non-verbal clues we present when we communicate than by content alone.
So pay attention to clothes and grooming. Invest in make-up or at least a powder to remove shine (yes, guys, you too) and avoid fabrics with busy patterns, narrow stripes or herringbone tweeds.
Body Language Best Practices
Body language is a crucial factor to consider when you are on camera. Your posture and body language are crucially important. In fact, good posture is even more important in virtual communications than in person. It is best to try and deliver video messages when standing, feet apart. When seated, you should sit on the first third of the chair with your legs at a 90 degree angle and your feet flat on the floor. Sitting this way, keeps your diaphragm free so that you can breathe properly and speak dynamically. It also gives you a firm base, thereby reducing any unnecessary movement.
Movement
Movement on camera can be very distracting. Watch newscasters or actors and you will see that for the most part their bodies and heads are very still. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use gestures — you should, but do so intentionally. Be careful to avoid movement that doesn’t have purpose.
All movement is exaggerated on camera. If you want to lean forward to show interest, make it a slight move. Avoid frequently moving toward and away from the screen.
Gestures
Gestures are a great way to add interest to your communication. Be aware of the range and framing of your position in the studio. Never move any part of your body that is not in the shot. It will seem like disconnected movement. Also, how much of your body that is visible on-screen will impact how much movement can be used. Remember that unlike with in-person communication, less of your body can be seen by the other person. The less of your body that is visible, the smaller your gestures need to be. It helps if you imagine your viewer seated no more than a foot away from you. In “real” life, you would naturally make your gestures smaller so you don’t overwhelm the person to whom you are speaking.
Eye Contact
When you speak to the camera, maintain eye contact. If you are on a panel and not speaking, make sure that you are looking at whoever is speaking.
So, how are you finding the move to video? Is it something you are involved with? How’s it working out for you? If you have any comments, suggestions or questions please share them below.
I take the opportunity of having this master craftsman in front of me to ask about writing. He commences by defining where others go wrong. “Anyone can write five people trapped in a snowstorm. The question is how you get them into the snowstorm. It’s hard to write a good play because it’s hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience. To think of a plot that is, as Aristotle says, surprising and yet inevitable, is a lot, lot, lot of work.”
So what is the basis of drama? Mamet gazes at me blankly as if the question is naive, then elucidates in one long sentence. “The basis of drama is … is the struggle of the hero towards a specific goal at the end of which he realises that what kept him from it was, in the lesser drama, civilisation and, in the great drama, the discovery of something that he did not set out to discover but which can be seen retrospectively as inevitable. The example Aristotle uses, of course, is Oedipus.”
Indeed, there are certain truths which speechwriters can heed to maximize the dramatic impact of a talk:
Good theater “shows” rather than “tells” an audience.
The audience can envisage themselves within the story.
A dramatic story is not just based on character and personality, but on plot. Aristotle defined this as the “arrangement of incidents” and the way these are presented to the audience is the structure of the play (or speech).
The speech must have a beginning, middle and end: an inciting moment, climax and resolution.
There’s a lot more about the importance of plot applied to corporate presentations in Nancy Duarte’s book Resonate.
Using the “single most powerful question anyone could ever ask”, Terry Barton helps individuals and businesses connect to what is preventing them from moving in the direction they want to go. Whether it is an operational issue, a performance issue or a problem with a team, Terry helps people and organizations get to the root of the problem, identify their role in it and connect to solutions that get them moving again.
An accomplished leader, facilitator and executive coach with more than 20 years of management and leadership development experience in the retail, container shipping and biotech industries; Terry founded The Barton Group to provide leadership development and performance coaching services to individuals and businesses. After seeing firsthand how organizations and individuals get in their own way, Terry now enjoys helping her clients come to the “Ah-ha” moment that inevitably gets them moving in the direction they want to go.
Terry is a contributing author of Savvy Leadership Strategies for Women and a sought after speaker. Her topics include; Get Unstuck and Get Moving, Get On with It – Managing through Change and Transition and So, that’s why you bug me – Understanding personality differences and preferences.
Terry holds a Master of Science in Management and Organizational Development from the University of San Francisco and a Bachelor of Arts in Speech Communications from the University of Maine. She is an adjunct faculty member at Chabot College and serves on the ASTD Golden Gate Board of Directors.
Pro-Track Profile
Terry enrolled in the NSA/NC Pro-Track program for 2011 after reading about NSA membership requirements on the national website and realizing it would be the perfect vehicle to help launch her career as a professional speaker. To hear what she told me click on the podcast icon below.
The Ragan Communications Social Media Best Practices for Communicators Conference, hosted by Cisco Systems, wrapped up on Friday. The 3-day event promised to share ways to “engage employees, build strong customer relationships and create brand buzz online” using social media. Workshop and presentation topics included:
How video is reshaping employee communications
Social media tools for PR
Social Media Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools
Crisis communications in the world of social media
How social feedback can result in product innovation and cost savings
The case for collaboration: mass adoption in corporations
Empowering social media intrapreneurs
A hallmark of the event was the very active Twitter stream resulting in over 6,000 tweets during the event, compared to 2,700 at the 2010 Ragan Social Media Conference held at Cisco. If you want the details on what the audience found relevant, and have the patience to wade through the re-tweets, check out tweet-stream. Incidentally, the Cisco team did a great job monitoring the Twitter back-channel – including a visibletweets posting of tweets on screens at the side of the conference room – Cliff Atkinson would have been proud!
Given that the raw data is available to all, rather than trying to summarize the event, I will offer some opinions (full disclosure, I work as an executive communications manager at Cisco on a contract basis).
Be a squeaky wheel
Marilyn Mersereau, an SVP of Corporate Marketing at Cisco, kicked off the event by drawing attention to the “Cisco Sucks” video posted on YouTube by dissatisfied customer Mike Soltis:
She gave a blow-by-blow account of how, as a senior executive in the organization being targeted by the video, she stepped in and contacted the “cute Canadian” who made the video and offered to resolve the issue for him by buying him a replacement Linksys router.
This became a case study on Guy Winch’s Squeaky Wheel blog. Guy wrote the book on the benefits of being a squeaky wheel. Winch compliments Cisco’s response:
And my hat is off to Cisco, whose executives (if not call-center employees) clearly do know how to go about doing service recoveries the right way! Let’s hope they implement the changes necessary to avoid/minimize such situations in the future.
This case study raised some interesting questions, which were addressed later in the conference:
Will it scale? Marilyn was able to resolve one customers problem by opening her checkbook. But why was the support organization out of the loop when it came to monitoring social media so they, not marketing, were the ones to respond? How can social media engagement extend to every corner of the organization? What are the necessary changes that need to be implemented?
What kind of social media listening programs and social CRM solutions can large enterprises employ to monitor the huge variety of social media conversations where issues like this might arise?
For consumers, social media clearly empowers the squeaky wheel. Companies are starting to listen. Hint: if you want a freebie, speak up online!
What keeps us up at night
The Ragan audience represented the savvy social media staff of corporate America. They are on the cutting edge of Twitter, Facebook, blogging, video and more. They struggle with questions such as:
What needs to happen for more investment to be made in social media by my company?
How can I control which departments engage in social media?
What’s the long-term maintenance strategy for social media – how can we avoid the “launch it & leave it” mentality?
How can I get my senior executive to buy-in to social media?
How can we understand the ways in which users interact with what we post?
How can we turn negative product reviews around?
How can we balance social media policy and discipline and avoid throwing the baby out with the bath water?
Hint: If you are a social media consultant, this is low hanging fruit for solutions to go peddle to corporate America.
Democracy meets autocracy
It seemed to me that the core conversation at the event (the elephant in the room?) was about the inevitable conflict between the radically democratizing impact of social media on essentially autocratic corporations. While individuals can easily and quickly embrace social media, corporations are often hamstrung. Why is this?
Despite the “warm fuzzy” veneer of corporate life (dressing down on casual Friday’s; managers matey use of first names) most corporations are essentially autocracies: the CEO and senior staff control the destiny of employees. This both inhibits the open conversations that occur in the social media environment and undermines the norms of social interaction in the hierarchy. In other words: people are running too scared to be fully engaged in social media.
Hardrinder Kang quoted Thomas Malone in The Future of Work who claims corporations evolve in the same way as societies: from hunter-gatherer “bands” to absolute monarchy (command and control) to democracy.
So how do yesterday’s organizational structures deal with the democratizing forces of tomorrow’s social media?
Answer: not well.
The genii is out of the bottle and the leveling forces of social media mean that you can no longer judge a person’s influence by their grade level. Yet, in the historical transition to democracy, how many monarchs willingly relinquish their crown? How many administrators whose tweets are followed by industry analysts (we heard of one at the conference) are given the financial reward their influence warrants?
I predict that the companies who still ban social media for employees; who think Twitter is a waste of time; who ignore consumer complaint videos on YouTube (or fail to monitor them in real time) – these companies will be superseded by more nimble, social media savvy, organizations. That’s how the Darwinian world works.
So is implementing social media in many corporations like teaching elephants to dance? What do you think? Let me know.
Conference Attendees Speak Out
This was a well organized and worthwhile conference. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s some impressions of the event from conference attendees:
At the end of the second day of the Ragan Social Media Conference I met Susan Gluss who is the Media Relations Director and spokeswoman for the UC Berkeley School of Law.
She is investigating the use of social media, specifically blogging, as as way of promoting both the activities of the Law School and her own OpEd’s in the San Francisco Chronicle.
If you have any suggestions for the ways Susan can specifically tailor social media to meet her needs, email her or send a tweet to @BerkeleyLawNews.
To hear her questions on the topic of social media, click on the podcast icon below.
The event kicks off on Wednesday when I plan to attend the Pre-Conference Workshop on Corporate Video given by Deanna Govoni and Alex Romano. This workshop will discuss how to think differently about marketing content and sharing information. We’ll learn:
How video is transforming communications
How to reach a wider audience through the power of social media and video
Web cams are a low-cost medium to train remote employees
How the Flip camera encourages employee creativity and engagement
How to effectively share and promote your video online
How to gather necessary production equipment on both limited and large budgets
The content was obviously planned well in advance of Cisco’s decision to end-of-life Flip cameras … Sic transit gloria mundi.
In the afternoon, Shel Holtz, who I’ve interviewed on this blog at previous Ragan events, will talk on The Smartphone Revolution, discussing:
The depth and breadth of the shift away from computers to mobile devices
The challenges of building and deploying an effective app
The questions you should ask yourself before starting down the mobile path
What the B2B early adopters are already doing
The advantages of going mobile
The following two days of the conference are an impressive list of Social Media experts from around Silicon Valley. The good news is that the conference already has the Twitter hashtag #ragancisco and I am sure live tweeting will be the order of the day.
The Financial Times marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible, in May 1611, with a review of a wide range of books on the topic.
This King James Bible is clearly, to date, the most read book in the English language. It was translated from prior Latin, Greek and Hebrew versions by a committee of scholars meeting in London.
What I find remarkable is the impact of language of this version of the Bible on common English. Phrases which originated in the King James translation include:
apple of his eye
clear as crystal
how are the mighty fallen
fat of the land
fell flat on his face
fly in the ointment
lick the dust
man after his own heart
rise and shine
rod of iron
signs of the times
sour grapes
sweat of his brow
wheels within wheels
Public speakers from the 17th to mid-20th Century drew on people’s intimate familiarity with the King James Bible and similar sources (Shakespeare’s plays, hymns) to create a bond through commonly accepted touchstones that matched their assumptions with those of their audience. Modern speechwriters, lacking audiences who would respond to overt Biblical references, nevertheless might find some of the phrases listed resonate unconsciously as they echo down the centuries.
Wendy Hanson helps startups and legacy companies act more aggressively, create more accountability and be more innovative. By shifting the culture, she helps teams communicate more clearly and work with focus.
As an entrepreneur, Wendy loves helping other women entrepreneurs. She co-authored The Sassy Ladies’ Toolkit for Start-up Businesses, which received the Writer’s Digest Award for Non-Fiction Self-Published Books. She also hosts a Blog Talk Radio show interviewing entrepreneurs and sharing their wisdom.
Wendy has over 12 years experience in corporate coaching and consulting. During Google’s formative years of 2002 to 2009, Wendy coached their teams and executives. Other client companies include AOL, MapQuest and Verizon.
She is a partner in Point Forward Ventures helping startups develop strategy, successful execution and leadership. She works as a partner with her clients for their success.
As a member of the National Speakers Association, Wendy is a sought after speaker for corporate and business events. She speaks and coaches on the entrepreneurial mindset. Her speaking engagements include topics such as “Intergenerational Differences in the Workforce,” “Five Keys to Successful Start-Ups,” and “Entrepreneurial Skills for Women.”
Wendy has a Masters in Organization and Management from Antioch New England Graduate School and is a certified Personal and Business Coach from the Coaches Training Institute in San Rafael, California.
Pro-Track Profile
Wendy recently moved from Rhode Island to Northern California and took the opportunity to enroll in the NSA/NC Pro-Track program. To hear what she told me about her coaching and professional speaking career, click on the podcast icon below.
I’ve just finished reading an astonishing well-written novel by the Irish writer Tana French. The Likeness is a police crime story set in modern Ireland. Published in 2008, it foreshadows the collapse of the Irish economy in an orgy of property speculation.
Tana French’s novels are set on the edges of Irish society. Her third novel Faithful Place, was located in The Liberties, a marginalized working-class area of Dublin. The Likeness is a murder mystery located in the Wicklow mountains, in the fictional village of Glenskehy “a scatter of houses getting old around a once-a-month church and a pub and a sell-everything shop, small and isolated enough to have been overlooked even by the desperate generation trawling the countryside for homes they can afford.”
Maeve Binchey meets The Big Chill
The tone of the book is part Celtic Deliverance – a insular rural community intent on giving urban sophisticates a hostile reception; part Maeve Binchey with an attitude; part college-friends extending adolescence over lost weekends in the style of The Big Chill, topped off with a dose of Law & Order.
The plot thickens
Before you pick up this book, be warned that it requires a superhuman act of suspending disbelief in the most unlikely of coincidences: a murder victim just happens to be a totally unrelated identical twin of the undercover cop, who assumed the false identity the police constructed for a failed sting operation that went nowhere years before. ‘Nuff said, buy into the premise, it’s worth it.
The Social Construction of Reality
Tana French trained as an actress and I enjoyed the many ways this novel is an extended riff on Method acting. What does others’ belief in our identity depend on? How do they know we are who we say we are? Actions? Memory? A shared set of social experiences? It’s the challenge faced by the salesperson looking to win a deal; the con artist riding the knife-edge of the lie as he bleeds a mark; the adulterer pulling a fast one on a trusting mate; the undercover cop. Friends and lovers place us close to the center of their social world because they believe our identity is what we claim it is. The closer those who betray us, the greater the hurt. French plays with these risks, up to and beyond the point of betrayal by a kiss. It makes the book a real page turner.
Indeed, her premise is that the social construction of reality can be faked, giving the lie to the claim that “…the individual can live in society with some assurance that he really is what he considers himself to be as he plays his routine social roles, in broad daylight and under the eyes of significant others.” (Berger and Luckmann, p.101)
A terrible beauty
Tana French writes lyrical prose that will haunt your dreams. She captures the mood of intimacy among friends who share evenings of poker and Jazz; communal meals and dangling conversations. Her words conjure up relics of ould dacency; college life; boreens; office politics; waifs and strays; angst and anger.
Quote:
I wished I knew more about Australia. I thought of red earth and sun that hit you like a shout, twisted plants stubborn enough to pull life out of nothing, spaces that could dizzy you, swallow you whole.
Quote:
…if I had any sense I’d be scared, but all I could feel was every muscle loosening like I was eight years old and cartwheeling myself dizzy on some green hillside, like I could dive a thousand miles through cool blue water without once needing to breathe. I had been right: freedom smelled like ozone and thunderstorms and gunpowder all at once, like snow and bonfires and cut grass, it tasted like seawater and oranges.
Purely by accident, I’m reading Tana French’s novels in reverse order. Next up, her first novel, In the Woods.
At twelve, Clare was diagnosed with Epilepsy. Years later after an accident at a gym, the diagnosis became traumatic brain injury which affected her ability to speak. She had to learn to speak again as well as learn the many new ways to live a successful life. She taught herself how to speak through a structured program she calls ColorWheeling™ – a program she now shares with others as a way to plan for success.
Looking into the camera in a brightly lit studio is an environment which most of us must be trained to be effective in. As challenging as it is to emote with a fish-eye lens, it is something to get over. Practice makes perfect, so invest in a personal video device and practice until you are natural.
Using the “single most powerful question anyone could ever ask”, 
I’ve just finished reading an astonishing well-written novel by the Irish writer Tana French. 