An amusing quote in the wonderful historical novel on the life of Cicero by author Robert Harris – Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome

“He had never written a speech for anyone else before, and it was a peculiar experience. Nowadays, of course, most senators employ a slave or two to turn out their speeches; I have even heard of some who have no idea of what they are going to say until the text is placed in front of them; how those fellows call themselves statesmen defeats me.”

Ut in preteritus sic hodie.

Nearly 300 members and guests of NSA/NC spent Saturday May 1 at the Achieve! The Professional Edge showcase of professional speakers from across Northern California.

I took to the podium with Jim Carrillo to demonstrate how easy it is to create a video on YouTube in under 10 minutes.

I then asked people to share their impressions of the day. See what they had to say in this YouTube video:

If you’ve wondered about those rare beings called “speechwriters”, David Murray offers some provocative insights on what makes us tick:

A speechwriter is well-educated, and usually better educated both formally and informally than her workaday PR colleagues.

A speechwriter is well-read on current events. If not the Financial Times, at least The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

A speechwriter has a deep interest in some self-fascinating niche …

Read the rest and see if you agree with David’s observations…

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:46 — 1.3MB)

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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

David Mariant is an author, speaker, life coach, and founder of The Bipolar Coach and Surviving Bipolar. David reaches thousands by radio in over 30 countries worldwide. He is a sought after speaker who is recognized by mental health professionals and bipolar sufferers alike as a top expert on overcoming Bipolar Disorder. Having overcome his own struggle with bipolar, he fully understands, with great compassion, the struggles of others.

David is available for motivational and informative speaking engagements, keynotes, workshops and bipolar life coaching for individuals with bipolar and their families. He is a member of the Santa Clara County Mental Health Board of California, working to insure quality mental health care for people who suffer with mental illnesses of all types.

David’s Story

“Since first being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and after my own brush with death, I have become a passionate student of bipolar disorder. If you are interested in the truth about bipolar disorder and how to live with its hidden dangers, then I am your guy. I am a certified life coach for anyone, but specializing in coaching individuals with bipolar disorder.

I equip bipolar sufferers and their families with awareness by teaching them mental and physical strategies that they will need in order to help them survive, overcome the illness, and thrive. Medicine alone is rarely enough. My Surviving Bipolar Disorder Made S.I.M.P.L.E. Seminar and Workshop, has changed many people’s lives, giving them a new and successful way to live with this challenging illness.”

Pro-Track Profile

David is a member of the Northern California Chapter of the National Speakers Association Pro-Track class of 2010. He shared with me the story of his life and work and how he came to find out about the Pro-Track opportunity – with the help of NSA/NC founding member Patricia Fripp. To hear what he told me, click on the podcast icon below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:59 — 943.6KB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

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:

Mental Floss

You don’t have to be conventionally religious to be curious about the afterlife. Anyone reading this blog must know they will wake up dead one day. Then what? All religions have their stories about what believers should expect. And many people are comforted by such beliefs.

But for others, open to conjecture, the possibilities of the afterlife are limited only by our imagination.

David Eagleman has written a wonderfully imaginative and quirky collection of vignettes describing possible afterlives. Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives is a whirlwind tour of possibilities for all kinds of life after death which I found to be a wonderfully stimulating read.

There’s an afterlife where you find yourself in a world exclusively populated by people you’d known while alive:

“The missing crowds make you lonely. You begin to complain about all the people you could be meeting. But no one listens or sympathizes with you, because this is precisely what you chose while you were alive.”

There’s a free-market afterlife of “fast cars and charisma and drinking and lovemaking” which stands in contrast to the Heaven where “the harp music is maddeningly slow”. There’s a wide range of Sci-Fi afterlives where human beings are data gathering machines created by a race of subterranean beings to roam freely and map the world; or one where a race of dumb creatures who engineered us as smart machines to discover the answer to ultimate questions de-brief us by repetitively asking “Do you have answer?”.

Each chapter teases, provokes and, implicitly, pokes gentle fun at the binary options often presented by the fundamentalist afterlives of mainstream religions.

I read it, entranced, in one sitting. The one caution is that you should be prepared for acute mental whiplash as each of the 40 chapters challenges us to imagine an alternative future.

If you’d like to think outside of the box and come up with alternatives to commonly held beliefs, read a chapter or two of Sum. Then apply the same creativity to the topic of a business presentation or Toastmasters speech.

Sociological Images reports that, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data rating the best jobs in America, an I.T. industry Systems Engineer (SE) comes out in first place!

(Click to enlarge)

Who woulda thunk.

I spent six years as an SE with Sun Microsystems from 1992 – 1998 working in Pleasanton, CA and Minneapolis, MN. While the work was varied and a great apprenticeship in the technology industry I was unaware at the time of my good fortune in having the best job in America.

In fact, compared to the account managers I supported I always felt underpaid and overworked. But that was in the dot-com boom years. Things must have changed since then. Pity the poor securities traders, sales directors and physician’s who work in less highly ranked jobs.

Speechwriters are nowhere on the list. Too insignificant to measure.

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.