I’m pleased to report that ‘Professionally Speaking’ is available as a podcast in iTunes. Here’s how to find it:

Open iTunes and choose ‘iTunes Store’ then search for ‘Ian Griffin’ to find the Professionally Speaking podcast and hit Subscribe to receive regular updates.

I’m also listed on Podcast Alley {pca-f771c3467b53e71e4556c2edecd0844c}
(Which required me to post the claim tag above on my blog – hope it works….)

As well as on Yahoo Podcasts and Podcast Ready.

I had no idea there were so many great podcast directories out there! If, like me, you are getting more and more of your information from podcasts (which I listen to in at the gym, in the car and while walking the dog) then regular searches of these sources of info will pay off, big time. Believe me, you won’t find this many options on commercial radio or television.

My current playlist favorites include:

• Killer Innovations, HP’s irrepressible CTO, Phil McKinney shares his insights into what makes innovation happen.
• Start The Week Plummy accents and barbed wit combine in this wonderfully cultured BBC Radio 4 discussion forum.
• The Onion Radio News Doyle Redland anchors this quick dose of headline humor.
• This American Life Ira Glass’s quirky PBS radio show tells the story of real people in an unreal world.
• The Wizard of Ads Roy H. Williams works wonder with words.
• Letter to America Hipsters Jett Loe and Wayne Ordinary American take Belfast, Northern Ireland, by storm.
• Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders from the Stanford Technology Ventures Program dishes the inside scoop from the movers and shakers in Silicon Valley.
• Polyamory Weekly Tales from the front of responsible non-monogamy from a pansexual, kink-friendly point of view.

OK, OK, so I put that last one in there to see if you were paying attention! But seriously, podcasts are a great way to keep current with special interests of EVERY kind!

Enjoy!

Associations across America spend millions on meetings and events.

Dr. Bill Wittich, incoming NSA Northern California President, shared his expertise Saturday on how professional speakers can market themselves to Associations. Bill spoke on the panel of experts at the St Patrick’s Day Pro-Track meeting.

Click on the podcast link below to hear Bill tell us why Associations are such a lucrative market and his secrets for networking your way into a speaking engagement.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 4:50 — 2.2MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

Thanks to Brady for telling me about about an amusing Oddcast demo.

Oddcast does text-to-speech conversion. You can play with the nationality and sex of the speaker. Hear the same words spoken in the voice of Audrey or Charles from the UK. Then skip over to the USA and hear how Claire or Mike would say it. Next, switch to any one of a dozen other nationalities to hear Jolie or Bernard from France; Reiner or Klara from Germany or many others speak.

You could be boring predictable and type in a phrase like “You are so sexy” or more adventurous and cut and paste the text from a Robert Frost poem or the opening words of your next speech.

Beware, you can only play around a few times before the system thanks you for visiting and puts a stop to the fun.

Enjoy!

The National Speakers Association Northern California Newsletter goes out monthly to over 600 subscribers. Each month we profile one of the Pro-Track training group. This month I’m breaking new territory by including a podcast of an interview I recorded to supplement the written profile.

Pro-Track Profile: Nannette Carroll

Nannette Carroll approaches all management challenges as communication opportunities. For over 20 years, her upbeat management seminars have helped participants use their process skills to discover root causes for people problems. With this knowledge, managers can implement lasting solutions. Her background as Director of Management Development/ Training for a Fortune 100 gives her a uniquely helpful perspective on aligning process, project and people management.

Nannette sets high standards for achievement while creating a fun, supportive, collaborative environment for participants in both workshops and speaking engagements.

As well as being a member of the National Speakers Association she is active in the California Writers Club and has a book coming out soon.

Nannette and I talked in a rather noisy hotel lobby during a break in the Pro-Track Saturday training on March 17, 2007 – St. Patrick’s Day!

Podcast Note: The opening and closing royalty free music is from a track called Games by the band Sour Monkey found on the Public Music Project website.

Click below to hear my interview with Nannette Carroll.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:24 — 2.9MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

A recent podcast of the wonderful BBC Radio 4 programme, Start The Week, featured an interview with Bamber “Your Starter For Ten” Gascoigne, host of the long-running TV quiz show University Challenge. This was a fixture on British television during my formative years. I’m still embarrassed to admit I failed the qualifying rounds at Leicester Univeristy in 1972 and so never appeared on the show along with the other scruffy undergraduates of the era.

Gascoigne is an established author and historian who has launched a fascinating Web 2.0 venture – Timesearch – an intelligent search tool that organizes results on historical time lines.

Timesearch is an invaluable tool for the professional speaker or speechwriter. Suppose, for example, you are an executive at the Hewlett-Packard Company scheduled to speak in Sydney at a Chamber of Commerce event. A simple query in Timesearch focussed on Australia in the 1930’s would show the major events that occurred at the time Bill & Dave were establishing HP:

you can immediately see that the Sydney Harbor Bridge was only seven years old when HP was started in the Palo Alto garage in 1939. Robert Menzies became Prime Minister that year. Both useful local references to build into your notes. Icons to the left and right side of each reference link to Google Images and other website search results to enable easily building your speech content on this topic. So far, so good.

But what if Timesearch allowed wiki-like user generated content to be added to the 10,000 entries Gascoigne has entered into the current database? Now that would be way cool. It would, for example, allow HP’s archivists to add the company timeline and show the intersection of HP’s history with world events. Family histories and details of individual lives and locations would enrich and extend the tool. Gascoigne revealed plans on Start the Week for this exciting option as the next stage of development for Timesearch.

For now, the tool offers a valuable source of ideas for your next speech.

Consider one more example, using fascinating historical cross-references to demonstrate cultural sensitivity. Say you were addressing a visiting delegation from Korea:

How impressed would they be to hear you quote the fact that Koreans invented bronze movable type 60 years before Gutenberg built his press in Germany?

Use Timesearch today to enrich your presentations. And check back shortly to see if it allows you to load your own data into it so your biography becomes a part of world history. Timesearch: when things happen to good people.

I went over to leafy Woodside last Saturday for a half-day NSA/NC mini-meeting featuring Mitch Gooze, an expert on direct marketing.

Mitch quickly summarized the received wisdom in the NSA – that if you have products (Books, CD’s, DVD’s, Special Reports etc) to sell both at the back of the room when you speak and from your website while you sleep you will increase your income above and beyond mere speaking fees. So far, so good.

Where Mitch went into new territory (for me anyway) was by pointing out that the heavy hitters, such as Randy Gage, make mega-bucks because they have more people to sell products to than anyone else. They’ve grown a mailing list of prospects who they then market to over the Internet. Mitch claimed Gage has over 150,000 qualified names on his list to whom he sells $80K worth of products in a weekend.

This is not spamming. It’s not multi-level marketing.

It’s capturing the names of visitors to your events and to your website and keeping in touch with them (via online newsletters, email updates and so on) so they’ll be a potential customer base for information products you develop and market to them.

The stars must have been in alignment for me that evening. Lights went off, new vistas opened. Since Saturday I’ve discovered a whole world of expertise out there which helps drive anyone with information to share (give away or sell) to the largest possible online audience.

Want to know more?

I recommend checking out Fred Gleeck (enter your name and email on his site and download his 5 massive eBooks on Selling Info Products, Publishing for Profit and more), the Internet Marketing Podcast with Mike Filsame available on iTunes and Tom Antion’s Internet Marketing Programs.

None of these guys can make you an instant millionaire. It might take a few months.

What do you think? Too good to be true? Let me know if you have tried any of these programs and if they work for you.

I can think of better ways to spend a sunny Sunday afternoon, but I had no choice but update my WordPress software on my web site today.

My ISP was no longer going to support some older software the WordPress version I installed in November 2005 uses. So I spent 2 hours backing up my blog, deleting the original version and then upgrading to the latest version.

Tedious stuff, and something people who use a blog hosting service don’t need to ever worry about.

But having the blog on my own server hopefully drives traffic (and the all important Google page rankings) to my site.

I also took advantage of the upgrade to switch my ‘Permalinks’ from a numbered entry to a title – something Google also likes.

All this has left a few things broken, my Blogrolls did not display at first, after a couple more hours experimenting they do, but without the all-important description. I will fix this soon.

The end result should be that I’ll have the ability to install some of the more recent plugins for WordPress – such as one I need to allow me to launch a podcast feature on my blog.

Let me know if you find anything ‘broken’ in my blog so that I can fix it pronto.

Creating a Bestseller and a Bestselling Career: 101 strategies and tactics

Over 100 NSA/NC members and guests enjoyed a morning with the “NSA power couple� Karyn Buxman-Godek, CSP, CPAE, and Greg Godek, ABC, RSVP. One of NSA’s most romantic and successful couples shared their secrets for creating a “best-selling career� – combining public speaking and writing books. They promised to deliver the goods on how to:

• Write books quickly
• Create killer keynotes
• Employ humor secrets from comedians and storytellers
• Successfully and effectively market like a maniac
• Generate speaking opportunities
• Harness your creativity

Karyn has been a fulltime keynote speaker for 20 years. As humorist, she founded The HumorLab, an organization that researches the art and science of humor. Greg is best known for his 2.5-million-copy self-published book, 1001 Ways to Be Romantic. Around NSA he is known as the editor of the Writers PEG e-zine, and as a marketing maniac willing to brainstorm with anyone.

Karyn and Greg built best selling careers as information brokers by combining the best of both worlds. She’s a speaker who writes; he’s a writer who speaks. Between them, they cover a lot of territory. It is summarized in their list of 101 Strategies and Tactics for success — no matter if you are more comfortable holding the pen or walking the podium. In the hope that I won’t contravene the Fair Use copyright laws I’ll list those that impressed me – to get the full list you would’ve had to have paid your $70 fee to attend the event.

Jump off the cliff

Take risks with your business. Avoid paralysis by analysis. Mimic the software industry — release version 1.0 and then refine and re-release. Version 1.0 of a your book may be 3 pages each of 12 chapters that will expand and grow as you gather feedback from people you share ‘pre-publication’ copies with in exchange for proofreading and their suggestions about what to add. (NOTE: Some use a blog in the same way – as a test market for your ideas and a forum to gather feedback.)

Write a great title

Books like Who Moved My Cheese? and Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus are mega-hits because of their title. Likewise, those that people ask for in Barnes & Noble as that seven habits book or the Prophecy thing sell as much by virtue of their title as their content.

To test-market a title share the idea with your favorite Starbucks barista then casually ask the next time you are in there if they remember the title. If a couple of dozen strangers can recall it then you have a winner.

Invest in designing the book cover

People do judge a book by its cover. So invest in the services of a pro designer to create your cover. Avoid covers that scream ‘Self Published’ to the world. Greg finds it useful to ask his designer for three concepts:

1. The cover you want
2. The cover Random House would create
3. A wild and crazy cover — within reason

Select the best font and images from these three and the result will be a killer book cover. The cover must address the audience. Be wary of putting your picture on it unless it’s a souvenir book (to sell from the Back of Room after speaking when the audience is fired up and wants a piece of you.)

Writing the book is the easy part

It’s all about marketing, positioning and branding. Publishing is a detail. Publishers are not really interested in selling books. They look first to grow their catalog with new titles. It’s your job to push product. Greg recommends negotiating long and hard to get a couple of thousand extra copies at cost + 10% (NOT wholesale – that’s one way the publisher rips off authors!). Use these books to power your publicity machine. Send a dozen at a time to local radio stations that will interview you and then give away copies to listeners who call in. Run a coordinated and relentless publicity campaign. Use the book to build your reputation and career. Professional speakers use their book to secure speaking engagements. Reach media people via the Radio-TV Interview Report. Use the book to generate articles about you. Tie into topics people are interested in. Coordinate with the annual cycle of news coverage (Valentines, Christmas etc.)

Speaking tips

As much as Greg told us about being successful in the publicity and publishing worlds, Karyn shared more about what makes a successful speaker. Writing might net you $1 a copy, speakers can command fees of $3-10K a speech. So you wanna make $100K a year? Do the math.

Look for humor in real life

Use stories instead of jokes. Funny means money. You don’t have to make stuff up – real life is full of humor. Audiences appreciate humor that makes you the fall guy. Most adult humor comes from pain. Triples are funny (A-one, A-Two, A-Three). Use funny words: “Chihuahua” beats “a dog”. Keep a humor file. Keep a file of ‘saver’ moments (for when things go wrong on the podium – lights fail, mike cuts out, PowerPoint goes black, you trip over). Get Jeanne Robertson’s book Don’t let the Funny Stuff Get Away and Terry Paulson’s book Making Humor Work.

Look for sponsors

If an event can’t afford your fees, get a sponsor. Local and regional sponsorships from major corporations are easier to come by than a national contract. Approach sponsors who want access to your audience. Tie the benefits of your speech back to product they wish to sell. Check out Aldonna Ambler’s talk from the 2oo4 NSA Convention on Corporate Sponsorship on the NSA website.

Look to improve

Invest in annual coaching. Invite other speakers to come see you. Join a Mastermind group. Always over-deliver. Stay active in the NSA. Read in your field and keep a clipping file. Study your competition. Use Mind Mapping to develop ideas. Show up to the conference early and attend other sessions. Track your topic with Google Alerts. Invest in an audio recorder and keep it with you.

Thanks to NSA member and Search Engine Optimization maven Steve Mertz for highlighting Wordtracker – a keyword research tool. This is invaluable for anyone writing a blog, researching a book or conducting a marketing campaign. It’s simple to use. Just enter a keyword see the ranking of the most popular uses of that term for the past 90 days.

Why bother?

If you are delivering online content the best keywords to use in your copy are those words and phrases commonly typed in by your potential customers, but which aren’t used much on your competitor’s websites. Wordtraker lists popular search terms.

For the cultural anthropologist or sociologist this also provides fascinating insights into contemporary mores. Here are a couple of examples.

Culture

An edited list of the rankings:

6104 the culture show
2324 mexican / mexico culture
1904 japanese culture
1867 chinese culture
1171 italian culture
1055 brazil / brazlian culture
1035 french culture
881 american culture
707 spain culture
650 aztec culture
631 native american culture
594 irish culture
592 german culture
590 african culture
587 indian culture
582 greek culture
569 jamaican culture
529 india culture
514 spanish culture
458 organizational culture
453 mayan culture
167 british culture
162 corporate culture

I’d never heard of the BBC program The Culture Show – it looks interesting and its popularity means it outranks the next five searches combined.

The listing of different country cultures contains some surprises. Mexico is the most popular individual country. Combining Mexican / Mexico/ Spanish and all the Latino countries (including Mayan) gives a total count of 8708. The next most popular individual countries are in Asia. Then Italy, Brazil and France. There’s a drop off to American culture (an oxymoron?). However, the real loser is British culture – the sun long since set on that yardstick of civilization.

At the bottom of the list, deservedly, is corporate culture. The ultimate non sequitur.

Speech

I did a detailed analysis that combined the many variations of ‘Wedding Speech’ ‘Best Man Speech’ and ‘Free Best Man Speech’. The result clearly shows the overwhelming interest of the general public in the wedding ceremony as the ultimate public speaking venue. One can only imagine the sweaty palms of the fathers of the bride and the best men across the nation furiously Googling their way out of a tight corner.

Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech lives on as the single most influential call to action ever delivered. I don’t believe he employed a professional speechwriter for that one, did he? The next most popular individual speaker was also, unfortunately, influential in his own way. The third name on the list has never, ever, delivered an influential speech. Period.

19956 wedding speech
8013 i have a dream speech
3102 freedom of speech
2411 persuasive speech topics
1088 famous speeches
693 parts of speech
631 text to speech
911 free retirement speech
419 hitler speech
368 speech recognition
347 great speeches
336 figures of speech
540 speech writing
289 speech therapy
264 bush speech
261 free retirement speeches
259 graduation speeches
234 state of the union speech
192 speech pathology
190 informative speeches
188 informative speech
178 demonstration speeches
172 funny speech topics
146 christmas speeches
144 speech writing services
142 buy a speech

Other interesting keyword searches using Wordtracker: thin, free, green, paint, print, stock, Bill, Ian.

What have you discovered with Wordtracker? Leave a comment.

Ethnomethodology is concerned with the methods (the “people-methods”) by which that social order is produced and shared in different settings.

It seeks to describe the practices individuals use in their descriptions of different settings. It examines in minute detail the ways in which people participate in a taken-for-granted world and raises questions about how this is accomplished.

This might strike some people as asking questions about the bleedin’ obvious. But wasn’t it asking questions about the “obvious” that got Newton, Galileo, Copernicus and others started? Their insights came as a result of asking questions about the very things others took for granted.

Ethnomethodology claims we are all constantly making use of unstated “methods”? in our daily lives to create a “taken-for-granted” world which we feel we “know” and can be “at home” in. We perceive our social world through a series of patterns we have built up for making sense of and coping with the variety of situations that we encounter everyday.

These patterns are often repetitive, confining even.

We use patterns to define ourselves in contrast to another: the presenter vs. the audience; the speaker vs. the listener; the same-old same-old conversation between husbands and wives, parents and children, executives and staff. Some call this their “comfort zone”. People new to public speaking feel discomfort and fear when they step out of their comfort zone and stand on the podium. It’s not part of their pattern.

As Adi Da Samraj writes in his poetic parable The Mummery Book:

(c) 2007 The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam Pty Ltd

The Mummery of life-and-world-and-death is a constant Melodrama—made of opposites and contraries. And life is always “self-and-“other”?—in a Growling! pit.

There is only a pattern. Patterning, in Clicks! and Clacks! Appearance, Shift, and Change. Always repetitions—and, yet, never the same.

The countless pairs are not Recognized, As Is, by the always ego-“I”—in its waking, dreaming, and sleeping, here. The oblivious little play of twos—never exactly Founders, in their One. Forever—there is only “she” or “he” or “it” or “that”?, and the always-remaining “I”. The “I” and the “other”—forever waiting, for the One-and-Only One. The One That Always Already Is—Infinitely Expanded, Beyond the persistent point of ego- “I”. Beyond the egg of attention, and its Klik-Klak visions of eternal “difference”?.

— Adi Da Samraj, The Mummery Book

The creation of social order by a group of benighted egos minimizes the chaos of random human interaction and the confusion which would be experienced if we saw everything as if it were the first time. When that order breaks down you get the social interaction typical of the insane asylum. There’s value in the comfort zone, but also limitation.

Executive Communications Lessons:

By examining how a stable social order is created out of the independent actions of individuals Ethnomethodology has value for someone creating a presentation that’ll be given to a group of individuals assembled into an audience.

Knowing more about the glue that holds everything together provides insight for the savvy speaker.

The question is what level of understanding we want. Is it enough to know the big picture rules (when to kiss, bow or shake hands) or do we need a more detailed grasp the the minutia of social order.

Yes, we do, say the Ethnomethodologists.

By conducting a microscopic analysis of the ‘technology of interaction’ – the structures that underlie conversations – we have a framework to understand:

1. The setting of a talk (which could be a face-to-face discussion between two people or a presentation to a large audience by an executive) and how that “affects the shape, form, trajectory, content or character of the interaction”?.
2. The form of the institution where the talk is delivered and how that dictates the type of presentation delivered and the ‘turn-taking’ mechanisms enjoyed by presenter and audience member. (Think about the unstated assumptions that dictate when it’s “OK to ask a question” and when it’s “rude to interrupt”. Realize that this differs between, say, a small group of C-level executives meeting in the Boardroom and a mass of techies in the audience at a Conference.)
3. The ways in which the participants ‘conspire’ to create the context and constantly reaffirm the fact that they are participating as an audience member at a public presentation (This might sound weird at first, but think of all the unstated assumptions that a good grade school teacher, or seminar leader, leverages to ‘impact’ their audience.)

One limitation: In taking a relativist stance ethnomethodology cannot make moral judgments about meanings. Therefore it cannot address problems such as inequality and power. But, realistically, this isn’t a big problem. There’s not a lot of mileage in revealing how centers of power and inequality affect communications within corporations. Everyone is pretty clear on who has the chops by Grade Level and Title when it comes to communicating. It’s obvious that people pander more the CEO’s sense of humor and are more willing to laugh at his jokes than they are with people of lesser status in the organization. Dictators go mad because everyone agrees with them. Get over it.

Next time I’ll consider some specific lessons from ethnomethodology around what is called situated actions. Being aware of this will sharpen your capability as a public speaker to think on your feet — to anticipate alternative courses of action and their consequences while in the middle of a presentation.