Six of the Best

The California Chapter has now produced six editions of Professionally Speaking magazine. That’s 180 pages containing over 40 articles by chapter members and guest speakers.

Contents of the Fall 2009 issue

The latest issue contains

• Jane Atkinson – Are Bureaus Not Digging You?
• Ed Brodow – How to Win an Oscar on the Platform
• Patricia Fripp, CSP, CPAE – The Unconscious Goof That Can Hurt Your Credibility
• Jill Lublin – You Can’t Do it Alone: Success in Business Takes Teamwork
• Ian Griffin – Practical Social Networking: Researching Your Market
• Linda Lenore ASID – Blending Modern Science and Ancient Wisdom for Speaking Success
• Trevor Levine – How to Generate More Bookings from Your Ads, Web Pages, and One-Sheets
• Scott “Q” Marcus – Striving for Imperfection

View a preview and order your copy of the magazine here.

And now, for your reading pleasure, here’s my article.

Practical Social Networking: Researching Your Market

By now you’ve heard that social media is the latest trend in networking, and you’ve read platitudes such as “social media connects you with a whole new world of interesting people” and “You can extend your network online.” The real questions, of course, are “What, specifically, can I do with social media?” and “How can it help my business?”

Beyond the hype and the very real danger that social media—like all shiny, new things—can become a time-sink and little more, there is real business value in using sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and more. For one thing, you can use all of these popular social media sites to get closer to your audience and understand what they need by performing valuable, up-to-date market research online.

Market Research on a Gigantic Scale

There are many ways you can use social media sites to perform your own research, and what’s truly astounding is the scale of the networks you can tap into. LinkedIn has more than 47 million members in more than 200 countries around the world, and at the start of 2009, 150 million people around the world were actively using Facebook. In fact, if Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan and behind Bangladesh. Are all these people potential audience members for you as a speaker? Of course not. But social media allows you to select those who might be, and research what interests them.

Facebook and LinkedIn

On Facebook and LinkedIn, the best way to perform research is to sign up for a free account and then join any of the thousands of special interest groups that might fit your interests. Once you become part of a group, you can follow—and even start—specific group discussions to learn more about what people in that industry, profession or niche are talking about.

On LinkedIn, I’m part of a speechwriters group with more than 300 members. I use the group as a regular source of information for my blog articles on rhetoric, either by learning from the conversations others have started or by posing questions to my fellow professionals. By joining the groups that focus on your niche, you can start monitoring what your clients find interesting or ask a few questions of your own.

You can also use LinkedIn, specifically, to search for people you might want to contact in your professional life. In my own case, I have built a large network of more than 500 people who have accepted my invitation to directly connect. These people, in turn, are connected to 186,000 more—friends of my friends who are only two degrees away from me. “So what?” you might ask. So, I can search for people I need to contact by location, job title, company name and many other criteria, and if I find someone I want to talk to who isn’t connected to me but is connected to someone I know, I can ask my own acquaintance for an introduction. Speaking in a certain town? Find a friend—or a friend-of-a-friend—who lives there, and ask for a first-hand update.

Twitter

Twitter is growing at a rate of more than 40% a month. And contrary to popular opinion, it’s not simply populated with people announcing what flavor of Venti latte they drank that morning. Twitter can be a rich source of real-time updates that’s completely open for searching—even if you don’t have your own Twitter account. Speaking at a specific company next month? Log in to search.twitter.com and enter the business name. You can follow what company employees are saying, and you can even follow what others are saying about them. It’s a bit like hacking into their e-mail, only it’s completely legitimate.

Do you speak for a specific industry? Check out twellow.com. This site automatically categorizes Twitter users into specific industries based on information in their bios and their “tweets.” Search for “Dentistry,” for example, and you’ll get people in this industry as well as those who specialize in working with it. Looking for a localized company? Search “Dentistry San Francisco.” Bingo!

YouTube

YouTube visitors now view more than 1 Billion videos a day. Seeing what’s hot on YouTube can give you incredible insight into a broad cross section of popular culture, or into the specific niche you speak about. Again, the search function is your friend. Out of the billions of videos posted, there are 1,650 about “Dental Schools.” More specifically, there are 114 titled “How to Get into Dental School.” These might be worth viewing if you speak to the education market.

Social Networking for the 21st century

What’s even more impressive than the user volume, traffic and growth, is that all these social networks are still in their infancy. According to a popular video called “Did You Know? Technology,” which you can view—where else?—on YouTube, it took radio 38 years to reach an audience of 50 million; it took TV 13 years; and it took Facebook just 2 years. Today’s online forums contain rich veins of hard facts and crucial conversations that you can tap into. As speakers we can use them to expand our expertise in practical ways.

The afternoon session of Saturday’s Northern California Chapter of the National Speakers Association (NSA/NC) meeting featured a conversation between Craig Harrison and journalist and author Jason Kersten. An author and journalist since 1998, Jason has written features for numerous national magazines, including Rolling Stone, Men’s Journal, and Maxim. His first book, Journal of the Dead: A Story of Friendship and Murder in the New Mexico Desert, was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of 2003. He has appeared as a guest and commentator on CNN, Fox News, TruTv, NPR, and numerous regional TV and radio shows. His works have been optioned for both film and television.

A native Californian, Kersten was raised in Marin County and the Santa Ynez Valley. In 1996, he earned a masters of science from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. He lives in New York City.

In his conversation with Craig, Jason shared a number of his interviewing tips and read from his latest book, The Art of Making Money: The Story of a Master Counterfeiter.

The Smell of a Bank

After the event ended I asked Jason to share his insider’s perspective on the ways professional journalists approach an interview and why he would even think of asking a subject to describe “the smell of a bank.” To hear what he told me, click on the podcast icon below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:18 — 1.2MB)

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The left-of-center British newspaper The Guardian has broken the news that beleaguered British Prime Minister Gordon Brown paid Washington, DC based West Wing Writers fees totaling $40,000 for speechwriting services. The most recent fee of $7,045 was paid for editing his March 4th address to the Joint Session of Congress. Speculation is that Brown felt the need for American assistance with his rhetoric on a number of occasions, both as Chancellor and Prime Minister.

The relatively small fees would indicate that the American speechwriters tweaked the talk for cultural nuance, rather than deciding wholesale the content of a speech given by a foreign head of state. Nevertheless, reports The Guardian, because the work was done for a foreigner:

Details of the payments have emerged from documents West Wing Writers filed with the US justice department, required because the company was working on behalf of an agent of a foreign government – Brown.

It could be argued that by preventing the potential misunderstanding of British phrases such as “batting on a sticky wicket” or “horses for courses” the speechwriters more than earned their fees. On a more serious note, the need – in a world facing global challenges – for culturally appropriate language in important speeches must involve not just accurate translation into different languages by trained linguists, but the advice of speechwriters who understand the audience in the country where the speech is to be delivered.

Consider the alternative. Brown makes reference to the disparaging “Old Europe” phrase coined by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in the era of the Bush White House. Better a second pair of eyes on a speech attuned to local sensitivities than leaving a clanger like that in a text.

Judge for yourself if the dour Scot received value for money:

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.

What do the experts know about Social Media? How can entrepreneurs make money online? What are large corporations doing? Find out as Jim Carrillo and I continue to explore these topics with two top authors.

Free Webinar Series Continues

Join Patrick Schwerdtfeger and Joel Postman in conversation with Jim and me on Wednesday October 21st, from 5:00p.m. to 6:00p.m. Pacific time.

Patrick Schwerdtfeger, the author of the best-selling book Webify Your Business, Internet Marketing Secrets for the Self-Employed, will discuss how entrepreneurs can use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and the rest of the tools to grow your business online.

Joel Postman, the author SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate, the comprehensive book analyzing how large corporations use Social Media, will discuss how those of you who are corporate employees can engage online.

More information is available on the Social Networking 101 web site, or you can register at no charge.

Susan Thaxton has learned the meaning of resiliency and the power of transformation.

Susan has had two full careers and is moving into a third. After completing an internship at UCSF, she worked as a Registered Dietitian in long term care and as a Clinical Nutrition Manager in acute care hospitals. In the mid-nineties she took advantage of a massive layoff, changing careers to become a successful sales representative in commercial printing.

Combining her sales background and her experience as a consulting dietitian, Susan is embarking on a new career as a consultant in the world of senior housing. As a speaker, Susan plans to spread the message to Baby Boomers and beyond that where you live tomorrow depends on what you plan for today.

Her new book on “Living where I want to live: A guide to helping aging parents” is in the works.

Pro-Track Profile

Susan has been a cyclist for almost 30 years. She joined the National Speakers Association Northern California Chapter’s Pro-Track program with the intention of speaking about fitness and nutrition for women over 40. After a series of personal challenges this year, including supporting her husband through cancer and learning that her mother is in the early stages of dementia, Susan changed her focus to address the question, “What will happen to me?”

Susan credits Pro-Track for keeping her “sane” during an otherwise tumultuous year and for giving her the courage to transform her personal experience into a meaningful message.

She can be reached at sdthaxton@comcast.net

To hear what Susan told me about her future plans, click on the podcast icon below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:00 — 1.4MB)

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Here’s an edited audio track from the final one of the five webinars on Practical Social Networking that Jim Carrillo and I hosted in September. This webinar was first broadcast on Wednesday, September 30, 2009.

Audio will not give the full webinar experience – we often refer to information shown onscreen, such as website pages from LinkedIn, Facebook and so on. However, the recorded audio contains useful information.

A full set of webinar recordings which include all the information shown onscreen is available from the Practical Social Networking website.

You can hear the audio by clicking on the podcast icon below, or, since the recording takes over 50 minutes, choose the download option and store it on your PC or sync to your iPod.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:19 — 25.8MB)

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A small group of UK speechwriters held their first conference in Bournemouth last month and recorded a fascinating video highlighting the similarities and differences between speech writing in the USA and UK. It’s an extremely eloquent statement of the value of speechwriters.

Here’s an edited audio track from the fourth of the five webinars on Practical Social Networking that Jim Carrillo and I hosted in September. This webinar was first broadcast on Wednesday, September 23, 2009.

Audio will not give the full webinar experience – we often refer to information shown onscreen, such as website pages from LinkedIn, Facebook and so on. However, the recorded audio contains useful information.

A full set of webinar recordings which include all the information shown onscreen is available from the Practical Social Networking website.

You can hear the audio by clicking on the podcast icon below, or, since the recording takes over 50 minutes, choose the download option and store it on your PC or sync to your iPod.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:49 — 24.6MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

Here’s an edited audio track from the third of the five webinars on Practical Social Networking that Jim Carrillo and I hosted in September. This webinar was first broadcast on Wednesday, September 16, 2009.

Audio will not give the full webinar experience – we often refer to information shown onscreen, such as website pages from LinkedIn, Facebook and so on. However, the recorded audio contains useful information.

A full set of webinar recordings which include all the information shown onscreen is available from the Practical Social Networking website.

You can hear the audio by clicking on the podcast icon below, or, since the recording takes over 50 minutes, choose the download option and store it on your PC or sync to your iPod.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 54:16 — 24.8MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS