Common Ground

Your Brand Tag

One of Seth Godin's readers points us to Brand Tag, a site that shows you a brand name and asks you to supply a word you associate with that brand.  You then get to see what other people associates with some of the biggest corporate brands around.  Interesting themes emerge - and boy are Exxon in trouble...

This got me thinking about applications to personal brands.  What would your colleagues & friends write in the box if your name flashed up? 

If, perhaps, the tags wouldn't be totally complimentary, I hope to help.  I'll be blogging in the next couple of weeks about what you can do to turn around your personal brand.  Ten easy ideas in all, under these headings:

Look, Sound, Touch, Learn, Disclose, Donate, Focus, Build, Personalise, Stretch

What Makes A Great Speech?

Answer supplied by veteran US presidential speechwriter Ted Sorensen in the New York Times:

"Speaking from the heart to the heart, directly, not too complicated, relatively brief sentences, words that are clear to everyone."

He cites as an example Churchill's opening line when announcing to the country the fall of France:

"The news from France is very bad."

Almost comic on first reading, the line later resonates with the essence of good communication: clarity and authenticity.

Question: could the same bad news ever be delivered unvarnished today?

Cameron's Keynote Makeover

It's long been a mystery to me why political speeches continue to be crafted from a template at least 30 years out of date - you know the kind of thing, clunking rhetorical tricks, over the top crescendos, constant pausing for (often) non-existent applause...

Today, David Cameron gave the stump speech a welcome makeover.  No notes, no lectern, no flights of rhetorical fancy.  Just a measured, conversational tone and a very simple structure.  Whatever your politics - whether or not you agree with the substance - take a look here. 

Do you agree that this style heaves the political keynote into the 21st century?

Free PDF Download: Six Secrets of Professional Presenting

I've gathered together some practical tips on professional presenting and created a FREE 16 PAGE report in pdf format for you to download.  In it, you'll find out how to:

• Craft a compelling message
• Involve the audience
• Communicate with clarity and authenticity

Download SixSecrets.pdf

Low Expectations

Neat post from Seth Godin about word of mouth springing from expectations. 

People's expectations of any kind of corporate communication - especially the "bog standard" presentation - are SO low that your attempt to raise the bar could literally make your career.

On Trust

Great post at Trusted Advisor which brings together ten great pieces about trust.  The Straight Talker's Manifesto is all about how to earn your audience's trust, and so win permission to communicate your message.  It rather assumes, though, that the message is worth having - that most often the intention is a genuine desire to engage rather than patronise or manipulate on the part of most professional communicators. 

It assumes that trust is still possible between relative strangers in a business setting.

I'm not 100% sure that it is. 

Rule 5: Work the Channels

You now face unprecedented competition for your audience's attention.  And just as attention spans have decreased, the range of information channels has proliferated.  So rather than listen to you, your audience could be Google chatting with friends, downloading the lunchtime news, replying to a handful of texts and plugging into their favourite podcast.

Your audience is used to processing information from multiple sources simultaneously.  This is the era of the over-stimulated brain.

You have two options. Carry on showing up with your hour of finely wrought argument backed up by two tons of bullet points.  Or accept that variety is the spice of presentations as well as life and maybe get people to start listening to you.

Howard Gardner came up with his theory of multiple intelligences over 25 years ago.  He identified 7 distinct human capacities:

• Musical
• Kinaesthetic
• Logical
• Linguistic
• Spatial
• Interpersonal
• Intrapersonal

Use them: consider the following:

• Music, before and after your presentation
• Props to hand around to the audience
• Images (not text) on your slides
• Case studies for group discussion
• Thinking time

Rule 4: Participants Not Spectators

Fortune Magazine recently ran a cover story on Generation Y in the workplace.  It's headline was "Manage Us? Puh-leeze."  A similar response is in store for any presenter who tries to lecture these Y-ers.

Generation Y matters, because it is almost certain to contain the talent you are most desperate to hire.  Increasingly, it will constitute an important segment of your client base.  So it make sense to understand how to communciate with that precocious generation born in the era of Thatcher and Reagan.

Generation Y is responsible for the explosion in popularity of blogging, the vast majority of votes cast in TV shows like Pop idol and the proliferation of websites like YouTube and Facebook.

The common theme is user generated content.

Today's audience expects co-billing with the presenter.  Throughout popular culture we are experiencing the rise of the audience as auteur, not spectator.

So once again the successful communicator will have to surrender the mantle of the expert and find ways for the audience to interact directly with the material.  This could be through breakout groups, case studies or keypads. Why not ask the audience some questions rather than endure those painful silent seconds waiting for them to ask you?  Anything to ensure the audience gets to shape (some of) the content.

Just about the only context in which the hour long monologue reigns supreme is in politics.  Avoid.

Rule 3: Design Matters

There are two aspects of design that you need to take seriously as a professional communicator.  One concerns aesthetics, the other functionality.

Let's take functionality first.  The chair you are sitting in was (hopefully) designed with your butt in mind.  The software I'm using was designed to produce this text.  What about your presentation?  I'm always amazed to be often greeted with a shrug when I ask coachees what the point of their presentation is.  Be clear about the purpose of your presentation - this is your core message.  "Begin with the end in mind" say NLP practitioners.  Nowadays software designers begin with the end-user in mind.  So should you.

Next, let's take the aesthetics of communication.  Look at what is hot in today's marketplace and generally there will be some presentational lessons to be learned.

For example, Nintendo's Wii is the current gaming phenomenon - it outsells its competitors two to one, depsite its inferior graphics.  Why?

Because people like the look.

Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of the Wii's revolutionary controller, outlined the rationale behind the product to Fortune magazine:

"We were losing out to the TV remote.  So we thought: what kind of controller can we create that won't make people afraid to touch it?"

The Wii looks different to its competitors in that it doesn't glorify the complexity of its own technology - it conceals it.  It looks so simple that a whole new generation - the over 60s - have been persuaded to try gaming for the first time.

Takeaway for you: the look of things matters.  Specifically, simplicity is compelling. Simplicity, as a design principle, encourages engagement and trust.  (For lawyers, this is largely counter-intuitive.)

Here's a presentation that models the kind of aesthetic I'm talking about:

Rule 2: Authenticity Rules

First there was sleaze.  Then there was spin.  Finally there was Iraq.

The result has been a disintegration of trust in the spoken utterances of politicians, which has morphed slowly but surely into kneejerk distrust of any public pronouncement.

Your audience has developed a preternatural ability to detect fakery.  There is zero tolerance for corporate ventriloquism these days.  So if you have the temerity to speak words which you don't fully own - ones formulated for you by your PR agency or HR team - then pack a parachute.  You are certain to be shot down.

You must write your own presentations, regardless of whether you are the world's greatest wordsmith.  Richard Branson certainly isn't - in fact I don't think his presentation skills have improved one jot in all his years in business.  This is central to his appeal - he's not slick, but then the age is signally sick of slick.

Own the words you speak, and the way you speak them.  One way of doing this is to make them up on the spot.  If you have no script then you clearly haven't hired a scriptwriter.  Notes - of any kind - denote an amateur communicator or, worse, an inauthentic one.

If that is too scary, then find other ways to introduce some spontaneity.  Read and respond to your audience's reactions.  Speculate.  Go off-piste.

By conveying that this is a work in progress, not a finished product, you will be letting the audience know that the material is authentically yours.

Next time:  Design Matters