Imagine Your Reality

In a recent post, Jeremiah Owyang discussed the necessity of integrating social media into Professional speaking, citing that monitoring the social media streams of information was as important as focusing on the in-person audience. He even suggested that professional speaker should expect to have a clicker in the one hand (to advance slides) and a cell-phone in the other to monitor the social media. I’m going to be devil’s advocate and disagree with him somewhat.

I don’t think monitoring social media whilst doing a speech is as important as focusing on the real-time audience. I think it can be a component of monitoring audience reactions, but even in those cases, it should just be a complement to what the person is already doing in terms of monitoring and responding to audience reaction. In fact, what we need to remember, in this particular case, is that social media is a tool, used to monitor conversation. However it should not become such a focus that the presenter is spending more time on it and less time on presenting a good speech.

Here’s another point to remember. No amount of monitoring the conversation will decrease the reality of a bad or unprepared speech or presentation. And if that’s what you’ve delivered, trying to respond to all the tweets will take up too much time. A better avenue would simply be to do your best to prepare a good and relevant presentation, which means that you need to spend time doing the necessary prep work and research.

The other reality is, you’ll never please everyone or answer every question to every one’s satisfaction. There will always be one or two people who will feel that what you presented wasn’t what they thought it would be. If the majority of your audience likes your presentation then you’ve done it right.

If you want to incorporate social media into your professional speaking (and I agree with Jeremiah that this will become more and more important to do), I’d suggest NOT using your cell-phone. If you do, you’ll be constantly looking at it and getting distracted, when you should be focusing on the audience in front of you. Instead have a laptop setup at an angle where you can see it, but it’s a bit to the side. Or two laptops, one for the presentation (if you’re using powerpoint), and one for your social media monitoring. While you are speaking, occasionally glance over at the screen and quickly skim over what’s being tweeted and then either answer questions from the tweets, or continue with your presentation, but adjust as needed to help you stay on top of your presentation.

Most importantly stay focused on the people in front of you. They want you to engage with them, and yes social media is one way to engage people, but in our enthusiasm to embrace social media, we mustn’t forget that it’s equally important to engage people in-person as well…and when you’re presenting a talk, people do want that in-person engagement. Monitor the social media stream to help with your presentation, but keep it to a minimum. your main goal, afterall is to present your talk and you need to stay focused on doing that, instead of splitting it, by worrying too much about how people will or won’t react.

On Monday, I started the Fast Track program with the National Speaker’s Association. It’s a program focused on teaching you how to become a paid speaker. Needless to say that’s one of my goals, so it made perfect sense to start attending the class. While there, we also got some recommendations for books that we might want to read and I ordered them from the library on Tuesday night.

Something I’ve always found important with anything I do professionally is the value of getting additional training on what you are doing. The truth is you can never really be an expert on a subject, if you’re really serious about that subject. And I say that because if you feel that way about the subject, you’ll always be trying to learn something new about it, or experimenting with it, or getting training on it, because you want to see what other people have to say.

Something I do on a fairly regular basis is attend seminars other people offer on the subjects I teach about. I want to see what they have to say about the subject, and I always learn something I didn’t know about the subject that I can take back to my clients to help them, as well as continuing to develop myself as a professional.

Getting additional training is the mark of a true professional. It says this person believes in the value of getting more education about the subject s/he is an “expert” in. It shows that s/he is willing to go the extra mile to learn new information and keep updated and informed about the topics and subjects important to his/her profession.

At the very least I think it’s important to be reading up on the subjects you teach on, or offer services and products in. I’m always reading at least one book on a subject related to business at a given time, so that I can learn more about what I’m teaching others. I don’t feel this makes me less genuine. If anything it shows that I want to provide the best information possible to my clients and recognize to do that I need to learn more.

When you start thinking of yourself as an expert, do a humbleness check on yourself and take a class, read a book, or do something where you learn from someone else about your field of study. Challenge yourself to learn at least three things from the class, book, etc. Doing that will keep you humble and also help you learn something new about what you love doing.

I presented a talk on Sunday on hypnotism. It was the first time I presented this particular talk, and I knew, by the end of it, that I’d done ok. Not great. Not good. Ok. And my audience knew it too. Now I definitely engaged them and I presented some interesting material, but the questions they asked were what really made the workshop shine. The questions shows med areas where I could expand and improve my work presentation.

And what really helped were the eval forms. The eval forms provided further helpful suggestions and advice for improving the workshop. I already know I’ll be incorporating most of the suggestions from the workshop into my next version of it, so that’s better.

If you’re a public speaker, or even aiming for the stars to become a professional speaker, an evaluation form is definitely a tool you want in your toolbox. My evaluation form gives me an idea of what people thought of the program, me as a speaker and suggestions for how I can improve. Additionally, people can also indicate if they want to hear back from me about future workshops, one-on-one coaching, or a variety of other information. Essentially it doubles as a potential intake form, and it certainly has helped open doors for me when I followed up with people after the presentation.

If you’re not using an eval form, consider creating one. It doesn’t take a lot of work, it makes you look a bit more professional, and it can really go a long way toward helping you get some new clients, while also improving the quality of your speeches. You’ll get some useful advice, and be able to follow-up with people, without it being invasive. That’s definitely a win all around.