The ghost of Camelot visited the Ragan Speechwriters Conference on Friday morning. JFK speechwriter, Special Counselor and man who lived a life at the edge of history – Ted Sorensen – delivered the closing keynote. The audience of 300 speechwriters was privileged to see and hear the world’s most famous speechwriter share his insights into Kennedy and the craft of speechwriting.

I sat in front and filmed the entire 30-minute keynote. These four YouTube videos comprise 99% of what Sorensen said.

In this first segment, he applauds the return of eloquence to political life in the USA and recognizes the importance of “just words” as the tools leaders use.

Following his prepared remarks, Schlesinger took questions from the audience. He was specifically asked about the effect of YouTube on Presidential communications. You’ll see in the video that he acknowledges that I’m sitting in the front row taping him on my Flip Mino video camera for YouTube. He notes that YouTube means speechwriters are more, not less important:

“There are no private venues any more, no place where you can just get up and talk. Someone is probably watching and if you make a mistake or say something that is wrong they’ll probably put it on the Internet.”

It was a thrill to meet Robert Schlesinger, author of White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters. He’s currently deputy assistant managing editor, opinion, at U.S. News and World Report, and blogs on Thomas Jefferson Street and the Huffington Post. As I wrote in my October 2008 review, his book is a fascinating detailing of the role of speechwriters in the White House. Many of the challenges and rewards they face hold true in lesser arenas.

Robert, son of famed JFK confident Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., delivered a keynote which drew heavily on the book. The Ragan Communications Speechwriters Conference audience loved it. His talk was informative and wide-ranging. He commented on the rise of mass communications, opening new channels for speeches. FDR’s ‘fireside chats’ used radio to talk directly with the nation. Obama uses YouTube. Speechwriters affect policy. He gave thumbnail portraits of each President since FDR and their use and misuse of writers.

“I would argue that you cannot be an effective President without understanding the importance of communications, without understanding the importance of giving a good speech.”

Watch this 10-minute extract of the keynote.

Attendees at the 2009 Speechwriters Conference comment on the effect of the economic hard times on speeches by CEOs and politicians. In today’s tough economic environment, is executive communications more or less important?

Mike Long delivered an impassioned plea for the importance of structure and style in the speechwriting craft.

Mike works as a freelance writer with the White House Writers Group and teaches speechwriting at Georgetown University.

Structure is the key to a good speech. It is key for the audiences’ understanding. A speech “washes over us, like wading into the ocean” and cannot be re-played or re-read like the printed word. It must be presented in a way that is clear and can be retained by the audience, reinforcing the things you want them to take home. If a speech is just a series of facts, you are not going to make an impact. It is also key for the speaker – structure allows them to focus on the delivery. It’s a map which prevents the speaker going off at a tangent.

Mike pissed some of the audience off when he claimed that speechwriters need to understand that, fundamentally, no-one really cares what you write. Most of the audience are not there voluntarily. While they may be moved emotionally by Obama-esque oratory, most business speeches are units of information that should be delivered, like a shot in arm at the doctor’s office, as quickly and painlessly as possible.

While the speech structure are the tracks on which you lay the information, the style is the rhetorical tools of persuasion. One structure can support many styles.

Mike’s best advice was to use a well-organized process with speechwriting. This begins with the spec sheet – the logistics of the event that the speechwriter is often the owner of.

To see Mike in action, take a look at edited highlights in the 8 minute video below.

Today sees the kick-off of the 2009 Ragan Speechwriters Conference in Washington DC. It’ll be my third conference and the first one I’ve presented at. I wrote lengthy reports about the 2006 and 2007 conferences. This year will be a little different. I’ll try the strategy of podcasting interviews with attendees and presenters. It fits with the theme of my own presentation, scheduled for 4:00pm Thursday:

Get more mileage for your work: Repurposing a speech for new media

Do you want to double or triple the size of your speaker’s audience without even leaving the office? These days you have the power to reach more people, any time of the day by turning your speeches into podcasts and Web postings. By simply putting an audio recording on a Web site and letting people subscribe to a feed, you’ll have a powerful way to extend your speaker’s voice to people not otherwise in the audience. Same with a blog. Unlike a scheduled speech, podcasts and blogs are always available. Drawing on his experiences as an executive communications manager at Hewlett-Packard, Ian Griffin will share best practices from the corporate world and tell you how to:

• Record, edit and post a podcast to the Web and iTunes
• Choose the best options for hosting and distributing podcasts
• Find technical help and information on audio equipment and sound editing software
• Know when it’s appropriate to repurpose a speech to a blog, Web site or podcast

Last month I attended an introductory evening on Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). It was taught by Jeff Slayter of the World’s Hidden Masters publishing company.The course promised that the techniques were for applying NLP, easily and professionally in business. To survive in a retracted economy only those with top leadership skills and extraordinary ability to create results will thrive.

Here’s Jeff’s infomercial:

World’s Hidden Masters is a leadership training organization offering cutting edge education for group and corporate settings. The content of our workshops are a culmination of a decade of world travel interviewing the top executives, coaches, investors and professionals on the models and systems they have found to be the most effective in creating results in business and financial growth through investments. Using a combination of proprietary models in business & financial systems, neuro linguistics, executive leadership tools, collaborative systems & movement analysis, we train executives, investors and professionals on how to create unexpected and sustainable bottom line results in their businesses and investments.

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Jeff is holding another introductory evening in San Francisco at 6:30pm on February 24th.

I asked Jeff how and why NLP is useful for professional speakers. To hear what he told me, click on the podcast icon below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:30 — 1.9MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

Continuing the tradition began three years ago and the year after, I can reveal that in the past 365 days I have, surprise, become another year older.

I fully embrace the transparency senior executives and politicians tolerate in regard to their age and biographical details. These days it’s only the plebs who have no online identity where anyone who is interested can find out your age, marital status and similar ‘private’ data points. As Sun Chairman Scott McNealy once remarked “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”

I’ve now reached the age where 57 years of variety is the spice of life. It’s not only policemen who look younger, suddenly President’s do. As my Irish father-in-law once remarked, you’re not really old until the Pope is younger than you are.

The difference between an average presenter and a great one is the ease which the speaker engages the audience. Great speakers engage people’s hearts as well as their minds. They involve everyone in the presentation. They talk with them, not at them. Content (“just the facts”) is less than 5% percent of what people remember about a speech. How you look and what you sound like are the other 95%. Use these 10 tips to involve everyone in the room as active participants in your program. They’ll remember you for it.

1. Engage the audience’s emotions. The best way to engage an audience is to tap into their emotions. Don’t just present dry facts. Involve them emotionally. One way to do this is tell a story in an interactive fashion. Help people see themselves as the hero of the story. Turn the ‘I’ in your story into the ‘we’. Use metaphors and analogies to help explain new concepts. Analogies are best taken from common experiences that everyone shares.
2. Get physical. People can only sit in place for so long. If your presentation lasts more than 45 minutes plan ways to move people around. Do a pop quiz where you ask everyone in the room to stand and then sit down as they respond to questions.
3. Make the speech compelling. Exhibit empathy with the pain the audience is feeling. Align your personal interests with those of the audience. Make every sentence count – eliminate fluff. Deliver your speech with passion and focus. Use evocative words that engage each of the five senses.
4. Be aware of different learning styles. Adults acquire knowledge in different ways. Every audience will include a wide range of ‘learning styles’. Visual learners will want to see your presentation and take a look at what you will reveal. They appreciate PowerPoint, graphics and handouts. Auditory learners hear what you tell them and decide if it resonates. They respond to stories and vocal variety. Kinesthetic learners grasp the foundation of your argument. Involve them in discussion and Q&A. Auditory Digital learners love to get a sense of your material and process the talk. Give them plenty of data, graphs and statistics. They need time to digest the information and a way to contact you after the program is over.
5. Move beyond PowerPoint. Remember that your presentation is more than the set of slides. The slides should complement your outline, not visa-versa. Consider switching off the computer and using the whiteboard or flipcharts.
6. Make eye contact. Before you begin speaking, take a moment to breathe. Then look at one person and connect with your eyes. Begin your speech talking directly to that person. After you finish a thought, pause and move on to the next person and repeat the process. This helps calm your nerves and connects with your audience one person at a time.
7. Avoid reading a verbatim script. Reading a script sounds stilted and distances you from people. Free yourself from having to use extensive written notes. Take your script outline and create abbreviated notes. Carry 3×5 cards onstage with large-font key words to jog your memory.
8. Listen to the audience. Communication is a two-way street. Your audience speaks to you all the time, whether with questions spoken aloud or their facial expressions and body language. It’s critical that you listen to them. Ask questions during your talk to confirm that what you are saying connects with what they are hearing. Use body language to react physically to the audience. Don’t just speak from the neck up.
9. Challenge the audience. Audiences love controversy. Always be controversial around issues — never around personalities. Challenge conventional wisdom. Point out a glaring inconsistency in received wisdom. Offer a clean, easily-understood solution to a complex problem.
10. Use humor. But never tell jokes. Self-depreciating humor works best. The audience who smiles with you is more sympathetic to your argument. Make sure that you connect humor to the point you are making. Keep it short and sweet, not long and drawn-out. Avoid saying, “This is a funny” before you speak. Avoid offensive and off-color humor.

Speakers who follow these tips will present with an authenticity and energy that the audience will feel and respond to. Speaking honestly in a manner that involves the audience minimizes separation between the person on the podium and the listeners. We can ‘tell it like it is’ so members of the audience move beyond where they were before we showed up.

Thanks to Devon for an extensive list tips on podcasting: Part one and Part two.