Joel Kelly's Blog — Ingenioustries.com

HOW-TO Become a better public speaker

by Joel on 2010/06/16 · 18 comments

After doing a post about how to become more social if you’re shy, I thought I might talk a little bit about becoming a better public speaker.

Now, I’m not about to suggest I’m an amazing public speaker by any stretch, but I’m all right. Good enough that I don’t mind throwing down a tip or two that might help you out if it’s something you struggle with. 2408993662_318d0a1193

1) Practice
Sorry, I know that doesn’t sound terribly helpful, but it’s obviously the most important thing. Take every opportunity that you can to do some public speaking. Do a presentation for your coworkers, classmates, or colleagues. Volunteer to get up there and explain something. The more you do that, obviously the better you’ll become.

2) Don’t read
Don’t read off your slides (if you’re using slides) or notes. You’ll seriously do more harm than good. You’ll get tied to them and you’ll sound and look unprepared.

3) No bullet points
Put your bullet points on the takeaway document you pass out after your presentation. Your audience will read your slides before you’ve even started addressing them, and while you’re slowly talking them through the bullets, they’re already bored. Don’t do it.

4) Don’t over-rehearse
Once you feel like you’re almost there with your presentation, stop rehearsing at home. Your next one will be your best. If you completely nail it at home you’ll try to replicate it perfectly when you do it for real, and you’ll get too caught up trying to remember how you did it last time. Your presentation should strive to improve upon the last time you practiced it.

5) Watch other presentations
Go to TED.com and watch other presentations. Notice what makes some people really good, and others pretty boring. For instance, notice that Sam Harris almost never says “um” or “uh” or anything like that. Saying “um” is still something I struggle with. I got out of practice forcing myself to avoid it, and it’s completely slipped back into my presentations.

6) Have a plant in the room
Not, like, a literal plant (well, feel free, but I don’t know if it will help), but someone you know and trust who can give you some confidence. Someone who will be the first person to ask a question at the end. Nothing’s more awkward than a silent room during question time, so try to make sure you’ve got someone in the room who’s prepared to ask you something. Once someone’s broken the ice, others will follow.

7) Avoid “tricks”
People will tell you to imagine the audience in their underwear, or don’t look directly at people, but at the back of the room, and other tricks like that. These are crutches. They may help at first (especially if you’re super nervous or frightened), but if you rely on them you’ll never improve. Get used to looking audience members in the eyes. There’s no other way to know if they’re listening or liking what you’ve got to say. If you stare at the back of the room people will notice, and they’ll start to tune you out.

8) Know your information, not your presentation
The problem with over-rehearsing and bullet points is that they make you concentrate on your presentation and not the information in it. What if the projector doesn’t work? What if you’re asked right before to deal with only one facet of what you’d intended to speak on? Know your subject matter well enough that you can adapt. You may never have to, but being that prepared will make for a much better presentation. Check out this great talk by Merlin Mann. Due to technical difficulties he had to present for over an hour, with no slides.

9) Be prepared to fail
You will crash and burn sometimes. It happens. Don’t take it personally and don’t beat yourself up. Just try to note what you could have done better and improve for next time. It’s not the end of the world. And don’t blame the audience.

10) Be prepared
This is the most important point. Being unprepared is not an excuse to do poorly. Don’t tell your audience, “sorry, I’m not really prepared, I’m just winging it.” Don’t advertise on Twitter the night before that you haven’t finished your slides yet, or you’re still working on your talk. If you don’t care enough to be prepared, why should your audience care enough to listen — or even show up? This is especially important if people are paying to attend the conference you’re presenting at. If the conference cost that person $400 to attend, imagine that it cost them $400 just to see you. As Seth says, “a presentation isn’t an obligation, it’s a privilege.”

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HOW-TO Be Social if You’re Shy

by Joel on 2010/06/07 · 15 comments

If you know me in person, but have only met me a few times, you might be surprised to find out that I’m actually a fairly shy guy. But honestly, I got bored of being shy. It’s tiring being stressed out all the time about what to say, what to do with your hands when you’re talking and all that. So here are my tips for being more social:

1) Arrive on time. If you’re too early, you’ll look awkward. If you’re too late, everyone will already be off in groups and you won’t be able to break in. Be among the first five to get to a party/event (or a proportionate number if it’s a huge event). You’ll be in for the duration, then. Anyone who tells you to go “fashionably late” doesn’t know what it is to be the awkward late person who has no one to talk to.

2) Have a hook or story prepared. If the conversation lulls, don’t be afraid to go into a random anecdote, if it’s funny or really interesting (ask your friends if it’s actually either of those things). You can even be completely open that you were just filling the silence. It’ll be appreciated.

3) Don’t sit at the very end of a table, or the middle. Take a corner seat, or close to them. There’s something about the asymmetry that will pull people to you.

4) Don’t force your gestures, but over expression with your hands is better than under.

5) Be in context, at first. Everyone will tell you to “be yourself,” but you’re shy and you don’t talk very much in public. What they really mean is that you’re talkative and interesting when you’re with your friends. So talk to new people as if you’ve known them forever. Be a little more open than they might even expect. If you’re sincere and happy and you take an interest in what they’re saying, you’ll be gold.

6) Everyone will tell you to “ask questions”. Absolutely, do this, but you’re not interviewing people. If it feels at all like that, you’re doing it wrong. Better to have a bit of silence then a stream of questions.

7) If the conversation dies, bail. Seriously. You don’t have to wait for it to come back around. Go to the bar, the bathroom, whatever. And when you go back, head to a different group of people. It’s a party/conference, you’re expected to move around.

8) Speak up! The trademark of the shy, awkward person is that no one can hear what you’re saying. You might even have to force yourself to talk louder than feels comfortable.

9) All confidence is false confidence. At least, that’s how it will feel. So go in confident even if you’re not sure why. The rest will follow.

***

So I haven’t blogged in, like, ever. And I’m going to tell you why.

Because I got tired. I burned myself out trying to get two videos done a week, plus another podcast with my friends, and my full time job. Sure, I had the time to churn out the posts (they didn’t take too long), but I didn’t have the time — or energy — to make them good.

And that’s the important bit. To make them good enough for you to actually take something away from it and do something. Not just go, “huh, well that’s neat,” and then forget about it.

Because that’s what pretty much all marketing blogs are. I mean, they’re all just wannabe Seths. They make some distant analogy between marketing and some reallife situation, throw in a quirky image, and then shove it online. I did plenty of that, so I’m not absolved from this critique. Just please take this post as part of my penance.

I don’t want to put a video up, or another text post, ideally, unless I’ve got something useful for you to take away from it. Or it’s funny. Or you’ll find it interesting past the 5-minutes-after-you’ve-read-it mark.

Shy? Have more questions? Let me know in the comments.

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How do we update the infrastructure of giving?

by Joel on 2010/02/24 · 7 comments

The infrastructure of giving requires an update. The barrier to participation has become so low that people are able to feel like they’ve done something without actually doing anything. You can click Join Group or retweet about a cause and feel like you’ve done a good deed, when you’ve really done nothing other than become conspicuously compassionate.

How do we make actually helping as simple as pretending to care?

I proposed a system of allowing people to have their credit cards charged whenever they retweet a message about a particular cause, or append a special hashtag to their tweets.

Twitpay seems like a viable way to implement this en masse.

But what about the life time value of contributors (LTV)? If charities and not-for-profits are most successful if they can increase the money given by a smaller number of people, does making it easy for mass groups to give only a little work against this?

How do we use social media to publicize the needs of not-for-profits without people feeling like they’ve done enough just by “creating awareness”?

The problem:

Social media makes people feel like doing nothing is enough
Text campaigns and tweet-to-give systems don’t allow charities to track LTV, and may make people less inclined to do even more (the same problem when people click Join Group, or retweet)
People are lazy, and the friction of giving needs to be reduced

Can we use this as a forum for ideas and potential solutions? If we have ideas, is this an opportunity for a group like Apps4Good to help develop a solution?

We need to both raise the bar for participation in social causes, and make it simple for anyone who wants to actually contribute.

Please, share this post with your friends, and share your own ideas of what can be done about this problem in the comments below. We’ve talked about this, we’ve started to “build awareness,” now let’s get off our asses and actually accomplish something.

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Social media has lowered the bar for doing good

by Joel on 2010/02/22 · 17 comments

The infrastructure hasn’t caught up to our laziness.

We’ve so lowered the bar for participation in movements for social change that people are able to feel like they’ve done good without ever doing anything at all.

Clicking retweet, or becoming a Fan of a cause on Facebook. These small, inconsequential actions are letting people feel like they’ve done a good deed, and may, in fact, keep them from actually doing something. By stating their intentions of good they’ve made themselves less likely to actually do something.

However, we can’t assume that people will identify their own inaction and immediately seek to do more. Some will, surely, just as a certain fraction of any group will always do more than the rest (in fact, this small fraction will do more than all the rest combined. A predictable imbalance).

The problem, though, is what we count as “doing.” If this small group begins to feel like they’ve satisfied their need to do by doing almost nothing, we’re shooting ourselves in the foot. We’re allowing those likely to take action to be satisfied with inaction. When publicly joining a Facebook group or retweeting something about a particular cause in an effort to be conspicuously compassionate is seen as doing enough we do far more harm than good.

What, then, are we left with? A generation of conspicuously compassionate, “passionate” people who accomplish nothing.

We need to raise the bar for participation. We need to insist that you don’t get to feel like you’ve done good unless you’ve actually done something. We need to make it clear that you’re not part of a movement or taking action unless you’ve left your chair or opened your wallet.

And we need the infrastructure to catch up to our laziness. We need more campaigns that allow us to send a text message to a cause that charges money to our phone bills. We need to be able to send small amounts of money by retweeting or clicking Join Group.

The problem with sending a text message is that, unless you tell your friends about it, no one knows. We want others to see our crocodile tears, our tweets and retweets. We want others to see how much we “care.” That’s okay, it should just cost you money. By signing up to a service just once, you should be able to have your credit card charged whenever you tweet about specific causes or append them with a hashtag.

Make it as simple to actually help a cause as it is to pretend to care.

Until the infrastructure catches up to our laziness and the bar for participation is raised, social media has not done as much good for social change as we’d like to pretend.

Update:
My friend Darrin alerted me to this article about Twitpay, whose version 2.0 allows users to have their accounts charged when they retweet a not-for-profit’s messages. A great step toward toward reducing the friction of giving.

Twitpay 2.0, if you will, processes the financial transaction using a proprietary payment system. Charities post—or “tweet”—a request for donations. To make a payment, the donor reposts—or retweets—that message. Doing so authenticates a transfer of money from the donor’s account to the nonprofit’s.

The retweeting function not only reduces friction in the giving process, it helps promote the cause and spreads the message across Twitter.

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