• All those fancy charts you want for your presentation are locked behind paywalls? Do a google image search for what you’re looking for, like “number of Facebook users“.*
• Want to know what “real people” say about something? You’re not going to find it on LinkedIn or Twitter. Use OpenBook.
• Want honest feedback? Don’t ask people if your presentation was “okay” or if you did well. Say, “tell me three things I can do better next time.”
• Always have a plant in the audience prepared to ask a question. No one wants to be the first person to raise their hand.
• Conversely, always be the first person to ask a question, if you’re attending a seminar. Make it an interesting one, but easy. It gets the ball rolling, and it’s the nice thing to do.
• If you’re on a panel, ask questions of your fellow panelists. Your audience came for a discussion, a conversation, not a talk from a hydra.
• Smile and have a sense of humour.
• If people look bored, move on to the next slide or point. It’s your responsibility to be interesting, it is not their responsibility to care. They were probably forced to attend anyway.
• As Kurt Vonnegut said about storytelling, “start as close to the end as possible.”

*IF THE CHART COSTS MONEY, BUY IT. Only use this as a way of seeing what’s available or getting the sense of some statistics. (I’m serious. Don’t be a dick.)

1. Assume everyone wants to go eat lunch, get home early, or anything else other than listen to you talk anymore. Speak as if the time you have with them is precious, and given to you begrudgingly

2. Don’t think, “What do people want to hear from me?” Think, “No one really wants to hear from me, so how can I at least make them feel like this time hasn’t been a waste?”

3. Always end a little bit early, your audience will appreciate it

4. For God’s sake, never run overtime

5. If people aren’t asking questions, don’t try to fill the question period with more of you talking. Lack of questions means they’re done with you, let them leave (not necessarily a bad thing! They heard enough, you did your job)

6. If you start a bit late (for any reason, including projector issues), that doesn’t mean you can run over the scheduled ending time

7. See my favourite Kurt Vonnegut rules of writing:

• Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted
• Start as close to the end as possible
• Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense

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.

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.”

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.

So I’ve already told you how to dress business casual at work, and now it’s time to throw down a little wisdom about making friends at the office.

It can be a grueling thing to do, as most people are kind of, well, boring, you know?

But it’s important to try because someday you might need them for something. Like money or drugs.*

Step one: Assert yourself.

Find someone in upper management whose personality you find abrasive and show them what’s what. When they try to be nice and ask you if you’d like to join them and their colleagues for lunch, say, “yeah…. not so much.”

Then they’ll know that you make the calls around here. They won’t make the same mistake again.

Step two: Be a little coy with the women.

Some days the office will be a little quieter while your coworkers are out “making deals,” or sleeping in. If you sit near a member of the opposite sex, make sure you respond to their comments about how quiet the office is by saying, “yeah, there’s no one here to hear you scream.”

The silence is golden and laced with friendship.

Step three: Have priorities and make sure people know them.

If anyone asks you a work-related question, make sure you say, “shhhh, I’m watching a YouTube.”

Step four: Don’t listen to a single thing I say.

Seriously, I’ve done every one of these things and @a__money and @pirie can attest that it’s not helping in the friend-making department. But what would those jerks know?

*Like alcohol or Benylin Night

UPDATED: @a__money reminded me of another piece of advice I should pass along:

Step five: Know how to put people in a good mood.

People can be a little testy on Monday morning, so make sure you’re able get the day off to a great start. I recommend having a “pump up” song to get everybody smiling as you set off on another busy week. Here’s the song I play a few times a day to make sure office morale stays high.

I wrote a guest post over at the lovely @aliasgrace‘s blog East Coast by Choice about how to dress “business casual” for your office job.

2) Jeans. Notice I didn’t says “pants,” or “bottoms.” This is non-negotiable. If you’re not wearing jeans don’t whine about not being comfortable: YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG. Jeans = comfort. Except if you accidentally buy jeans with a button-fly at the Gap because you’re terrified of clothes-shopping and store clerks and dressing rooms and taking your pants off. If that happens (I have this friend who says it can happen and that you shouldn’t judge him!) then you’re in trouble and you’ll only wear them when your other jeans are dirty or something, or you can’t find them because they’re lost in the pile of dirty clothes and sadness somewhere on the carpet of your bedroom floor. Where was this going?

Go check out “Joel Kelly’s guide to dressing sensibly in an office environment.“

Sunday was Halifax’s first PodCamp, and yours truly held a discussion on how and why you should unfriend people.

You can watch the full thing here in five parts: http://vimeo.com/album/60055 (thanks to @paulwesson for recording and uploading!)

And @philswinney gives a great review of it on his blog, along with a summarizing video: http://blog.philswinney.com/?p=128

Find his or her name in your list of friends, and click the little “x”. That’s all there is to it.

The top referrals to my site come from people searching for something along the lines of “How to unfriend someone.” It’s really not that hard, it’s not something you should be taking tons of time to think about. It’s not serious. You’re not blacklisting them, (unless you are actually going to block them, which is recommended in some cases) you just don’t consider them really good friends. Like, real-life friends, not the bastardized term “friend” we use on the internet.

If you’re considering unfriending someone, it’s the right thing to do. You can always friend him again, later. “But,” you say, “won’t they be offended?” Maybe. But seriously, if you’re done having him on your friends list, why do you care? Someone who makes you feel obligated to friend them is far from a friend, he’s a leech.

Facebook for almost all people is a collection of names and nothing more. It’s not a network of trusting and trusted friends. It’s a phone book with pictures.

You don’t have to friend your boss, you don’t have to friend your coworkers. You don’t have to friend anyone you don’t want to. If you’re worried that your boss will be mad at you, then you have a pretty terrible job, and a much bigger problem than internet etiquette.

Imagine a world where your friends list is populated only by close, real-life friends. People you trust with your personal thoughts and feelings, people you can count on to help you out and who you want to help. You know, friends. Wouldn’t that be great? Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to censor your thoughts about something because you’re worried the wrong person might see it?

Oh, and if you’re thinking, “But what if a real friend on my list sees something I’ve written and then passes it on to someone else?” Well, if you’re concerned about someone doing that, then he’s not your friend.

Unfriend him.