The Three “E”s of Successful Public Speaking
(5 Comments)Posted on December 17th, 2012
How many times have you attended a speech and decided whether the speaker was worth listening to within the first few minutes of their pitch? Often they hadn’t even gotten deep enough into their presentation to present metrics worth judging but you’d already made your decision.
The election season we all just sat through was an excellent example of this. Regardless of which side voters were on, candidates were often chosen with little regard for the facts or issues. And often no amount of facts or figures could change their minds. After all, you can’t logically talk people out of something they didn’t logically talk themselves into.
So if you’re sitting in the auditorium at a seminar and your first impression is that the person speaking isn’t worth listening to, what’s the chance that you’ll actually pay attention? First impressions are critical to getting you to appreciate what’s being said; regardless of the quality and veracity of the information you’re hearing.
If you’re following me so far, the obvious question for doing a great presentation becomes, “So how do I make a powerful first impression?”
From all the years I’ve spent watching and studying speakers, I’ve narrowed the requirements down to two simple attributes.
First, the most important thing a speaker can do to make their audience comfortable is to be comfortable themselves. After all, no one wants to sit and watch a presenter who’s squirming on the stage. Worrying about a speaker is about the worst feeling an audience member can have besides out-and-out hating the person up on the platform.
Talking about being comfortable on stage is easy. But actually learning to be comfortable is a whole lot harder. Common knowledge in the speaking business says that the best way for a speaker to be comfortable is to know their information cold. The thought is that if you know what you’re talking about, there’s no reason to be nervous.
But I believe that knowing your material backwards and forwards is simply the cost of entry. You can’t sit at a poker table if you don’t ante up, and you can’t get up in front of people if you don’t know your material. Knowledge and expertise are critical but they’re table stakes.
You know the old saw about the best way to get to Carnegie Hall? “Practice, man, practice!” It’s the same with speaking in public. The best way to get good at it is to speak in public. A lot.
Sure, you can read a book on presentations to absorb best practices (I’ve read them all, by the way. The best of the bunch is I Can See You Naked by Ron Hoff). But reading a book on speaking in public is about as effective as reading a book on swimming. You can read the book and pass the test, but when you get thrown out of the boat you still won’t know how to swim. And someone can even toss you the book, but unless it’s made of Styrofoam, that book ain’t gonna help you keep your head above water.
The second way to make your audience comfortable is to establish, right up front, the value proposition of your talk (more commonly described as “what’s in it for me?”). The sooner the audience realizes that your talk is going to be valuable to them, the sooner they’ll be on your side. How do you do this? Take a tip from Sixty Minutes commentator Andy Rooney. Remember how he used to start his whiney diatribes? Rooney would raise his owlish eyebrows and screech, “You ever notice…” and then he’d be off on his rant about ill-fitting toupees, or airline food, or speaking English in France, or whatever. But by starting with that ubiquitous question “You ever notice…” he got us all to agree, “Yes, I have noticed that, Andy, tell me more.” Rooney was the master at letting us know that the bit he was about to do was going to be about us. And we’d pay attention.
A good speaker can be entertaining, enlightening or educational. A great speaker can be all three. The best speakers are all three “E”s AND make you think they’re talking directly to you.
The Deadbeat Brand
(28 Comments)Posted on May 29th, 2012
Have you ever been witness to the Pocket Pat? When it’s done well, it’s a thing of beauty, lemme tell you.
I was invited to lunch by a guy I’ll call Lloyd. He’s a successful local businessman and pretty wired into the goings-on in South Florida. When the bill came for our lunch, Lloyd made a flourish of snatching the check from the waiter and announced that it was his treat. He snapped open the restaurant’s little vinyl folder, examined the charge, and reached for his billfold. That’s when I witnessed the Pocket Pat as performed by a master.
Lloyd looked up at me with a look of abject horror as he went through the motions of patting down each of the pockets in his suit. “I must have left my billfold on my dresser at home,” he said. “I’m so sorry. It was my treat.”
“Was” clearly was the key word. I picked up the check and handed the waiter my credit card.
Months later, Lloyd called me to get together for lunch again. Now I might be crazy but I’m not stupid, and I really didn’t relish getting together with him and watching the Pocket Pat again. After all, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice — well, you know what happens then.
But before I could beg off, Lloyd reminded me that he owed me lunch from the last time and it was his treat. He’d be sure to remember his wallet. Okay, so maybe I was wrong. Maybe he really did forget his wallet. I forget things all the time. It could happen to anyone.
Near the end of the meal, Lloyd answered a call on his cellphone. After listening to the phone for a minute or so, his face drained of all color and contorted in pain. “Oh my God, I’ll be right there,” he said as he hung up.
The he mumbled something about having to attend to an emergency while he absentmindedly reached into his pocket and threw a bill on the table as he ran off.
When I finally looked down I found a dollar bill laying there. “He must have meant to leave more,” I thought, “but was clearly distracted. An honest mistake.”
I paid the other 27 bucks.
Stupidly, I agreed to have lunch with him again a few months later. Not because I wanted to pay a third time, but because I needed to ask him about a particular piece of business that he was privy to. Plus, I figured he’d already exhausted his bag of tricks and wouldn’t dare try to shaft me again.
But you know what they say about fighting with a pig — in a word, don’t. They’ll just pull you down to their level and cover you with mud. Plus, the pig enjoys it.
This time I was in a hurry and told Lloyd, who I was now referring to as Pocket Pat (just not to his face) that I had a hard stop at 12:50 and would have to leave then. We picked a cash-only Cuban restaurant near my office. Service was slow and we didn’t get done until almost 1:00, so when the $17 bill came I was really in a hurry. Pocket Pat again made a flourish of pulling out his billfold, but wouldn’t you know it, all he had was a hundred. Well, we could always wait for the waiter to get change (did I mention that I was now 15 minutes late?). I threw a twenty on the table and rushed off to my next meeting.
So why am I telling you all this? Is it because I enjoy telling people I like and respect that I’m a chump? Hardly.
The point of this blog is to talk about branding and Pocket Pat has certainly developed his own brand. After all, as Dov Seidman writes in his book How, “How you do anything is how you do everything,” and needless to say, I’m not the only one Pocket Pat has snookered. As my former partner Phil Schwartz used to say, “If they’ve screwed you, they’ve screwed everyone else.” And being the gossipy little biatches we are, we all talk about it. So Pocket Pat is known around town as a conniving deadbeat.
You see, brands are created whether you decide to build them carefully and compulsively or do nothing at all and just let them develop. The problem is, you only have so much control over what people think of your brand to begin with. And if you’re not scrupulously managing your messaging and activities, you’re abdicating responsibility to lots of forces outside your control, many of which are eager to see you fail — or at least laugh at you behind your back.
Saab didn’t control their brand. Instead of consistently standing for something emotional and focused, they kept grasping at straws and searching for meaning. What happened? While their Swedish countrymen, Volvo, became one of the most profitable European brands in the United States, Saab has been passed from hand to hand and may or may not be out of business by the time you read this.
Sarah Palin didn’t control her brand. Given the opportunity to run for one of the most powerful and prestigious offices in the world, she didn’t do her homework and prepare for news interviews. Instead she watched her public persona dwindle from superstar to question mark to laughing stock. Sure, she built a name for herself and put some money in the bank, but at what cost?
Puerto Rico didn’t control its brand. Once one of the most desirable tropical tourist destinations in the world, years of inconsistent messaging and an island-wide obsession with the Statehood vs. Commonwealth fight has eroded the brand so thoroughly that the Dominican Republic — still arguably a Third World country — has eaten PR’s lunch, fufu and all.
Like Pocket Pat, all these brands lost market share because their actions were not in lockstep with their messaging and chipped away at their marketability. As we’ve said many times before in this blog, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy who you are.” And if the who you are does not present people with a consistent and compelling image of what’s in it for them, they probably won’t buy at all.
Unless it’s lunch. And you’re with Pocket Pat.
The Simple Precision Of Language.
(14 Comments)Posted on October 6th, 2010
Do you know how to read musical notation? If you do, you know that when you’re reading music you’re actually reading at least two things simultaneously. Written music tells you what note to play and when to play it.
Written language, on the other hand, only tells you one thing – what letter to pronounce. Of course, punctuation helps indicate pacing – pause at a comma, stop at a period, I’m not really sure what to do at a semicolon – but it’s still up to the reader to interpret how the author wanted the piece paced.
For example, read the following sentences aloud and place the emphasis on the underlined word. You’ll see how the pacing, and the meaning, can change based on where you choose to place the emphasis.
I didn’t say you should leave now.
I didn’t say you should leave now.
I didn’t say you should leave now.
I didn’t say you should leave now.
I didn’t say you should leave now.
I didn’t say you should leave now.
I didn’t say you should leave now.
Music notation is not like that. The composer provides the note to play, the time signature to play it in, the exact time each note should be played, the way the note should be attacked and the volume with which the note should be played. That’s why an entire orchestra can play a piece of music simultaneously and get it mostly right on their first reading. Of course the conductor can add flavorings and nuance, as can each player, but the basic structure still provides instructions for every part of the composition.
At the same time, musical notation has a way to allow the musician to add his or her own ideas, or improvisation, to the piece. Here the composer might suggest what the musician should play but also provides for the instrumentalist to create their own music and explore their own musical ideas by playing what they feel, and hopefully, what fits into the structure of what the rest of the ensemble is playing.
Ironically, written language, which doesn’t put nearly the same restraints on interpretation of prose, has no such flexibility. Sure, a rabbi or minister might halt their liturgical reading to allow parishioners to riff on a theme (they call it private mediation) but when was the last time you were reading a novel and the author inserted a few blank pages for you to add your own thoughts? There’s no room for readers to add their own words to a written piece.
That’s why sarcasm and irony seldom works well in print or static online advertising. It’s one thing for the copywriter to add their own inflection to a headline when they present it to a client but it’s quite another to expect a reader to add that same emphasis. Instead, the language of ads must be clear, simple, and to the point. Hopefully this will cause an emotional response without depending on a specific interpretive performance from the reader.
Imagine if Gershwin had e-mailed the lyrics of his famous song to his manager:
“You like potato and I like potato,
You like tomato and I like tomato,
Potato, potato, tomato, tomato,
Let’s call the whole thing off.”
Say what? Call the whole thing off just because we use the same words? Clearly something was lost in the transmission.
Remember Gershwin when you’re writing to be understood and when you’re writing to be influential. Your reader most certainly won’t read your text the way you want them to; instead they’ll bring their own pacing, emphasis and meaning to your words. To build your brand value it’s important that your intention be so clear that your audience will internalize it no matter how they pace their reading.
By writing simply and clearly, the results of their interpretation will be music to your ears.
Branding Yourself
(No Comments)Posted on May 27th, 2009
Via: Owen Frager
With Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter becoming your defacto resume, and shaping the image how most will perceive you, our friend Jay Berkowitz shares a great read from the Brand Building Blog.
To make it simple, branding yourself is about letting everyone know who you are and what are you specialized in. Branding yourself is part of the many things that will help you create success, because it will help you to attract people from all walks of life to be your friend, your network contact, a new client for your business, or maybe someone who wants to introduce you to other of the same type of interest. Branding yourself is a major part in Internet marketing or the network marketing industry.
-
Follow Bruce on the Web
-
By Bruce Turkel
