Image Credit: Wies van Erp
Remember the old days? Those were the days when we’d write a speech, travel to where we were going to be giving it, wait for our time to talk, get up on stage and deliver our speech, and then drive home? Well, welcome to the 21st Century. Now that so much can be done online, we no longer have to drive anywhere – your next speech could be delivered online. The importance of public speaking has never been greater. However, this is a brave new world – do you know how to be a leader in this space?
Be Interesting
A key point about any speech that you are going to be giving is that nobody is going to take the time to come listen to you if you are not interesting. Every speech that you give, even if it is online, has to be telling your audience how they can go out and do great things. You have to be willing to take risks when you deliver you speeches and by doing this you can change the status quo.
Deliver More Than You Promised
When I show up to hear someone speak, I generally have a set of expectations. If the speaker meets those expectations, then I leave the speech feeling as though I got my money’s worth (even if I didn’t pay anything to attend). However, on those rare times that a speaker over delivers and I end up getting a lot more from the speech than I had expected, these are the times that I leave feeling pumped up and excited. When you deliver an online speech, you’ll want to over deliver. This can be as simple as sending a copy of your slides to everyone who attended the presentation after it’s over. Give them more than they expected and they’ll always come back for more.
Don’t Forget The Real World
It can be all too easy to slide into the virtual world of online presentations. We can’t see our audience and we generally don’t have to dress up from the waist down. However, we all need to keep in mind that we are presenting to real people no matter where in this big world they are located. This means that when we are not presenting, our time would be well spent going out into the real world and meeting the people who attend our online presentations. Put a name with a login and find out what they really think about you. This is the best way to become a better online presenter.
Say Good Things About Other People
As a presenter, you want people to be saying good things about you and your online presentations. In order to make this happen you, of course, need to do a good job. However, something else that you need to do is to take the time to complement other people. For you see, when you complement other people, your audience will see you as being a bigger person and the person that you complement will get the word that you are saying good things about them and may return the favor. Make sure that when you complement someone you are very specific: tell people why they should pay attention to this person. This shows that you’ve been paying attention to them.
Make Sure That You Have A Vision
Finally, when you are making an online presentation, it all has to mean something. You are giving this presentation for a reason. Yes, you might be getting paid to do it, but you choose to take the time and be online right now and talk about this topic as opposed to all of the other things that you could be doing with your time. Why? Hopefully it is because you really believe in what you are talking about. When you believe in what you are talking about it comes through in your speech and your audience will start to believe in it also.
What All Of This Means For You
The world is changing. Whereas we used to travel to a location to deliver a speech, that is no longer necessary. Now, thanks to the amazing technology that we have available to us, we can simply go online and deliver a speech and share the benefits of public speaking with an audience. However, this changes everything for us. How can we lead an audience when we can’t even see them?
The answer is that we need to make sure that we are interesting and that we’re talking about interesting things. When we make a presentation we need to over deliver and provide our audience with more information than they were expecting. We have to keep in mind that even though we can’t see them, our audience is made up of real people and we need to go out and meet them. We can generate good karma for ourselves if we pay complements to other people. Finally, we need to have a vision and we need to allow it to come through in our speech.
Yes, moving into a new age where we can now make our presentations online is both daunting and just a bit scary. However, we can’t stop progress and so we all need to learn how to not only survive, but thrive in this new world. As long as we are going to be making presentations online, we need to learn how to be leaders in this new online world. Follow the suggestions that we’ve covered and you’ll soon be the master of this new world.
– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™
Question For You: Do you think that you still need to go out and meet people if you are using video with your presentations?
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Note: What we talked about are advanced speaking skills. If you are just starting out I highly recommend joining Toastmasters in order to get the benefits of public speaking. Look for a Toastmasters club to join in your home town by visiting the web site www.Toastmasters.org. Toastmasters is dedicated to helping their members to understand the importance of public speaking by developing listening skills and getting presentation tips. Toastmasters is how I got started speaking and it can help you also!
What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time
Creating a speech is something that I think that all of us put a lot of time into because we understand the importance of public speaking. When we’ve been asked to make a presentation, we take our responsibility seriously and we try to do all of the things that we know that we should do: we research the event that we’ll be talking at, we try to understand who will be in our audience, we build a speech that we think has great content, and we practice giving it so that we’ll do a good job on the big day. However, do we spend enough time on our first words?