On Friday August 17, I spoke at a Connections Networking meeting in Santa Rosa to a group of women entrepreneurs. The subject was, “Your Big Mouth: Your Most Powerful Marketing and Public Relations Tool.”

Since I created all this juicy content for this speech, I thought I’d share it with you here. I’ve broken it up into three installments, but if you want to hear a recording of the actual speech, you can! It’s located at the end of this post.

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Picking up where we left off, here are some more suggestions for creating your presentation:

Give Something Away

Don’t you love getting an expected gift? Or being the one to win a raffle prize? Well, so does your audience. People love free stuff, especially if it is something they consider valuable.

In almost every speech I give, I have a drawing and give away a prize. Often, it’s a product of mine, like the Engage Your Audience CD or a Special Report. But sometimes I give away music CD’s created by my singer friends. So, if you don’t have your own product, give away something else.

Pass around a hat and let everyone put in their business card. Then, draw a name (or two if you have more than one prize to give away) and announce the winner. This is a great way to include your audience, create a little break from the subject of your speech, and get the business card of everyone in your audience! Now, you can follow up with them, ask them to sign up for your newsletter, or offer them a special discount on something.

My singer friends, Lua Hadar and Linda Kosut used to perform together as The Kitchenettes. During one of their gigs at a small San Francisco restaurant, they passed the hat, had a drawing, and gave away fun kitchen gadgets, like an old egg beater and a crazy apron. People loved it, the gifts fit “The Kitchenettes” theme, and Linda and Lua were able to collect everyone’s business card.

What can you give away? Can it complement what you are speaking about or help to promote your business?
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Before I continue with the Your Big Mouth series, I want to take a quick intermission to turn you on to some expert advise on creating great content for your speech.

My blogging buddy, Eric Feng, is a master public speaker who is currently blogging a great series of posts, called “7 Eric-trifying Ways to Charm The Pants Off of Your Audience,” that complement what we are talking about in the Your Big Mouth series. Especially Part II of his series where Eric talks about Solid Content & High Speech Value.

If there is no substance then there is really no point wasting your audience’s time delivering the speech. And for those of who are always seeking to impact your audience, this would be a good starting point.

Here are three questions to consider as you prepare your speech or presentation:

1. Does my speech contain substance?
2. Can the audience use it right away, like today?
3. Do they get better after hearing my speech?

Okay, hopefully some of that sounds familiar. But Eric continues with a cool way to set up an expectation of value by how you start your speech.

Also, Eric has some very fun ideas for jazzing up your speech in Part 3 of his Eric-trifying series. Though I can’t believe he suggests peeing with your mic turned on so the audience can hear you. That’s one way to get their attention!

While you’re checking out Eric’s blog, be sure to sign up for a free chapter of his soon-to-be-released book, “The FAQ Book on Public Speaking.”

And now on to Part III of “Your Big Mouth: Why Public Speaking is Your Most Powerful Marketing Tool.”

Last Friday, I spoke at a Connections Networking meeting in Santa Rosa to a group of women entrepreneurs. The subject was, “Your Big Mouth: Your Most Powerful Marketing and Public Relations Tool.”

Since I created all this juicy content for this speech, I thought I’d share it with you here. I’ve broken it up into three installments, but if you want to hear a recording of the actual speech, you can! It’s located at the end of this post.

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Now that you know the impact public speaking can have on your marketing and public relations plans, what are you going to talk about? How do you design a 20-minute speech that will represent you well, show your expertise and richly benefit your audience?

Whatever you choose to speak about, here is a good rule of thumb: Give your audience something they can put to use that day. Give them information, tips, tools, whatever, that they can use to make a change, to move them closer to where they want to be.

It doesn’t have to be complex or profound. It can be very simple. For instance, if you’re a nutritionist, you could tell your audience to drink an additional glass of water every day. Or three tips on how not to get sick on an airplane. If you’re an esthetician, it could be as easy as telling your audience to use sunscreen.

Give, give, and give good, usable information. In fact, think of your speech as a mini-training. What can you teach your audience that will allow them to make a change that will benefit them? A change they can start to make today?

Go deep, not wide. What I mean by this is, dig deep into one or two points rather than shallowly skip through 17 points. If you have 20 minutes, you have enough time to dig deep into one or two points, maximum. Maybe three if you push it. But why push it?

Your audience needs time and repetition to really digest and integrate what you are telling them. You already know what you know, but your audience may not. So, take the time to flesh out each point you make by using examples, stories, statistics, and anecdotes. Give people a lot of ways to get your point.

Anytime you can use a story to illustrate your point, use it. People love hearing stories, and they can more easily take in information when it comes in the form of a story.

I have a client who speaks on the driest material imaginable. Budgeting and cost analysis. His presentations are full of graphs, charts, and long columns of numbers. What a snooze fest!

But he enlivens his presentation with these great stories of his experiences in working with people, stories that sound like excerpts from a soap opera. These stories illustrate his point while keeping his audience awake and amazed.

Another way to illustrate your point is with a demonstration. Another client of mine is a hair stylist, and she did this fun yet highly informative talk on how to talk to your hair stylist. She asked for audience volunteers to role-play an imaginary conversation, making her points all along the way.

Invite audience interaction. How can you include them, get then involved in what you are talking about? This could be as easy as posing a question and having each person turn to the person next to them and talk about it for a few moments. Or you can use props, toys and handouts that become part of the party. Tom Antion is famous for having some kind of toy or gizmo at each person’s place that he effortlessly ties into the theme of his presentation.

Whatever you choose to do, do it your way. I can throw out ideas and suggestions, but you need to create a presentation that works for you as well as your audience. I may love using audience volunteers, but that might not sound all that great to you.

Always ask yourself this question: How can I offer this information in a way that would be outrageously fun for me? Let go of all the rules and suggestions and instruction, and ask yourself, “How can this be outrageously fun for ME?” Because if it’s fun for you, it will be fun and enthralling to your audience. And when you tune in to your sense of fun, you are tuning into your own creative juices and your natural confidence.

My client Sheila was so nervous about an upcoming presentation she had to give at an industry conference. She hadn’t done any public speaking for so long, and this was an incredible opportunity for her to establish herself as an expert in her field, and she was really scared of blowing it.

To make matters worse, the conference organizers demanded that all presentations follow a specific format that was highly restrictive and left no room for creativity or imagination.

I told Sheila to just forget about all the rules and regulations for now, forget about the prescribed format, and just ask herself, “How can I present this material in a way that would be outrageously fun for me?” As she sat with that question, she came up with a great idea that involved a ventriloquist dummy and some outlandish costumes. From there, she was on her way to creating a presentation that she couldn’t wait to give. And, yes, she was even able to make it all fit within the limitations prescribed by the conference.

We forget that self-expression can be fun. When we were kids, we knew that instinctively. We sang and danced and play-acted our days away, recruiting our friends to play along. I used to make my father sit through my created-in-an-instant musicals, filled with bad dance moves and questionable scriptwriting, but I was having the time of my life.

What kinds of self-expression did you love most as a kid? What venues of self-expression do you most enjoy now and how can you incorporate them into your speech? If you love to talk endlessly with friends, then you’ve got it made. Just get up there and chat away. If you love to draw, you can use flip charts, or create your own vaudeville-type announcement boards that announce each point as you present it. I love to sing, so if I can incorporate a song that ties into my speech, you can bet I’ll sing it!

In the next installment, we’ll talk about some more ingredients you can use in your speech that will make it fun and powerful for you and your audience.

Here’s the audio file of the speech I gave last Friday, August 17.

Last Friday, I spoke at a Connections Networking meeting in Santa Rosa to a group of women entrepreneurs. The subject was, “Your Big Mouth: Your Most Powerful Marketing and Public Relations Tool.”

Since I created all this juicy content for this speech, I thought I’d share it with you here. I’ve broken it up into three installments, but if you want to hear a recording of the actual speech, you can! It’s located at the end of this post.

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I’m going to confess right here and now, I am a marketing junkie. I love marketing. From the tried and true, good old-fashioned variety to the slick, new internet marketing. And I have spent thousands and thousands of dollars on all kinds of marketing tools, marketing plans, marketing trainings, and thousands more learning how to use blogs, podcasts, vlogs, article marketing, MySpace and Craigslist as marketing tools.

Gee, you would think I would be famous by now!

What I have learned from all this expense and experience is this: There is still no single marketing/PR tool that is more powerful, cost-effective, comprehensive and essential than your own big mouth: your ability to talk about who you are and what you do.

Because you can have the flashiest website, the most spectacular direct mail marketing piece, a stellar press release, and all the promotional do-dads in the world, but sooner or later, you are going to have to talk to someone. Someone is going to call you on the phone or come up to you at a networking meeting, and say, “Hey, tell me what you’re all about.” And what you say, how you say it and who you are being while you say it, is either going to move the relationship forward or stop it dead in its tracks.

You use your big mouth as a marketing tool all the time. When you go to networking meeting and you talk to others about your business. You use it all day long as you engage with clients, potential clients, vendors, associates.

But today, we’re going to talk about the big banana of Big Mouth Marketing, and that is public speaking.
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Hey, it’s summer. Time to lighten up and add a little sizzle to your next speech.
Here are some light-hearted suggestions:

The 7 “S’s” of Spicy Speech Writing

1. Surprise!

Even if you don’t like surprises your audience will. How can you surprise them as they sit there listening to you patiently? It can even be something simple like giving away a prize. You could even conduct a mini game show where you ask a question and the first person to answer wins a prize. Use props, sound effects or movements that are wacky and unexpected, but still fit in with the “theme” of your speech.

2. Sensual

How can you engage all the senses of your audience? A friend of mine does this by taking her audience on a visualized journey in which she describes a certain scene in vivid detail, including the sounds, smells, textures and sights. Another way is to actually have something they can touch or even smell. Kind of like show and tell. Their sense of hearing and sight are engaged by listening and looking at you, but can you spice it up by including props, photos, or by wearing an elaborate costume? Use music. If you’re telling them about your trip to Brazil, can you cue up some Brazilian music?

3. Simile & Southern Sayings

You know what a simile is, don’t you? It’s a figure of speech in which two very different things are compared in order to describe something. For instance, “her hair was like silk” or “the news hit me like a bucket of cold water.” The use of simile can spice up your speech because it adds imagery and the unexpected. Another form of simile shows up in southern expressions, like, “He was dumber than a sack of hammers” or “I was a sober as a preacher on Sunday,” or “she was two fries short of a Happy Meal.” These add a little humor and fun.

4. Sing!

Being a singer myself, I love to just throw in a song or a phrase of a song if it is relevant to what I am saying. People love it because it breaks up the monotony of talk, talk, talk and audiences appreciate anyone who has enough guts to sing a little, even if they can’t sing in tune. In fact, the worse you are, the more entertaining it can be for your audience. Just be sure to give it your all.

5. Self-Effacing Humor

My friend Jim always starts his speeches by making fun of himself in some way. It could be about how he’s dressed or some embarrassing thing that happened to him that day. He does this because it breaks that initial tension he feels when first gets up there and starts talking, and it gets the audience laughing right away. Besides, audiences tend to engage with someone who is not afraid to laugh at himself in public.

6. Significant Moment

Can you share a moment in your life that holds a lot of significance for you? Something that woke you up or changed your life? By sharing these moments or stories, you create an atmosphere of intimacy and trust, and people love to feel inspired by the experiences of others.

7. Story, Story and More Story

Stories are like salt and pepper. They should be your most dependable and highly used spices when it comes to creating your speeches. People love hearing stories. It must be in our DNA because we have been fascinated with story forever. Use stories to illustrate your points and your audience will be enraptured.

Let the 7 S’s of spicy speech writing zip up your speech this summer.

“Wow, there are so many eyes looking at me!” That was the first thing she said, our speaker for the morning. She was obviously nervous. She shifted her weight from foot to foot, fidgeted a bit, and then started talking about her subject. She didn’t get very far before she stopped and said, “Geez, I’m nervous. I had no idea there would be so many of you.” At this point, she seemed to lose her train of thought. She looked down at her notes but it was as if they weren’t there. “Man. Okay, let’s see if I can figure out what I’m saying…”

Just when it seemed that she would unravel before us, her audience rescued her. They jumped in with questions about her subject, even though she hadn’t said much about it yet. Any time she reached a place where she didn’t know how to proceed, someone from the audience would ask another question.

She got through her 20-minute presentation by answering questions. If the audience hadn’t swooped in like they did, who know what would have happened. And because they swooped in, I left that meeting thinking, we really can rely on the kindness of strangers.

We forget all too easily that people are basically kind. Audiences are generous and pretty easy going. They want you, the speaker, to do well and feel comfortable. So much so that they are willing to help you out in any way they can. But only if you let them.
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Okay, are you watching "The Next Food Network Star" on the Food channel?

This is my first year of watching it and I must say, I like it so much better than Top Chef on Bravo, mostly because the judges seem to want to help these chefs succeed. They give them suggestions and support rather than just tell them that their food sucks.

But I digress.

The Next Food Network Star is a reality show in which 11 chefs complete to have their very own cooking show on the Food Network, like Rachel Ray (who looked so much better when her hair was lighter) and Paula Dean. These 11 chefs are judged not just on how well they cook but on their ability to present their food with pizazz and personality. Basically, to show their star quality.

So, why am I talking about all this when I don’t even really like cooking all that much?

Because on the first or second show of the season, one of the chefs, Tommy  (here’s his photo), couldn’t stop his hands from shaking as he served his bouillabaisse. It was obvious that he was really nervous. So, at the time of the evaluation, just before they kick someone off the show, one of the judges, Bob Tuschman, told Tommy soemthing like, "Hey, even if you’re nervous, don’t show it. Don’t let us see it"

Basically, he told him to fake it. 

Now, you know my stance on faking it. I always say, don’t fake anything. Be real, be yourself, and don’t try to hide anything from your audience.  That old fake-it-until-you-make-it approach only reinforces the myth that you aren’t enough as you are. And it is this myth that causes the fear and anxiety most people experience around speaking in public.

But are there times when it is appropriate to fake it?
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Is it a sin to use notes when giving a speech? Should you have your presentation memorized and so well practiced that you never need to glance at a note card?

According to Garr Reynolds over at Presentation Zen and an email from Eric Feng at The Public Speaking Blog, you should never, ever use notes or cue cards. To do so, according to them, means certain death as a speaker.

I wholeheartedly disagree. There is nothing wrong with using notes as long as you don’t misuse them.

But before I dig into this, you should know that both Garr’s and Eric’s directives were inspired by Cingular’s CEO Stan Sigman’s recent speech at MacWorld back in January. Apparently Stan bored his audience by reading his speech from his 4×5 note cards. Ugh! Not only did he lose his audience but he inspired the online insults and distain of several bloggers who were in attendance.

But was Stan’s demise because of his use of notes or his misuse of notes? I believe it was the latter. I agree that no one should read their speech from there notes. If you’re going to read it, you might as well not even bother to present it.

There is a way to use notes effectively and confidently. To ellaborate, let me jump off of the points from Dale Carnegie that Garr used in his blog post. (They appear near the middle of his post).

Point One: "Notes destroy fifty percent of the interest in your talk."

My Take: Only if you read them or are so tied to them that you aren’t able to speak conversationally, naturally. Notes won’t "destroy" anything if you use them as a tool to keep you headed in the right direction.

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Last week, I was working with a client who had created an impressive presentation on the people of New Guinea. He had created a PowerPoint presentation, that consisted of these gorgeous photos he had taken himself during a trip to that far away land, that he augmented witih his many stories of his trip and many fascinating facts about New Guinea and the people who live there.

And while my client really knew what he was talking about, he had a tendency to slide in sideways when setting up his stories or segments. Rather than state a point, a fact or launch into a story, he would say something like, "What you see here…" or "Oh, yes, and this is where…" rather than start with a strong, clear sentence.

And all of this brings me to a recent post on Tom Antion’s blog, Great Public Speaking, where he gives you some Don’ts, and a few Do’s, when it comes to setting up a story.

Some good don’t’s in Tom’s post are:

Don’t say the words funny, reminds me of, or story.

Don’t say, I heard a good one the other day…

Never say, I don’t know if I should tell this one. If there is any doubt whatsoever that a story is not appropriate for a particular group, leave it out.

Tom’s advice on starting a story is this:

The best way to start a story is to get right into it. You should be into the story before anyone realizes it is a story. That way they are already deeply involved and don’t have time to resist.

Tom has a lot more good advice over at this blog. You may want to put it into your Google Reader. 

I always ask my clients, what do you want to experience when you are speaking in public?

The answers vary from "I want to feel like I’m doing a great job." "I want to get a standing ovation." "I want to feel like I know what I’m talking about."

But my favorite answer was, "I want them to think I’m great! I want them to be really impressed!"

Now, that was an honest answer. Because if you distill the other answers down to their essence, it all comes down to, "I want to be liked." Or, "I want to them to be impressed."

Now, there is nothing wrong with this desire. It’s an honest desire. But it’s also a desire that can really mess you up when it comes to feeling confident and free when you’re speaking or communicating in any way. If you are doing it to get someone to like you, or to be impressive, you will forever be at the mercy of someone’s good or bad day, their opinion or their state of mind in that moment. And it will drive you crazy.

That’s why I love the advice that world champion speaker Darren LaCroix gave to Eric Feng of The Public Speaking Blog about his purpose in being a speaker. Darren was commenting on Eric’s desire to WOW his audience, which is, again, a very honest desire.
Here’s what Darren told him:

"First of all, I must comment on your purpose. You say that you want the audience to go “wow” after the end of my speech… to me that implies that you want the audience to be impressed by you. Then you say that you want to be at the level of a champion. Do you understand that to speak like a champion, you must think like a champion?

Champion speakers do not aspire to getting a wow. We aspire to get the audience to do something for themselves, or to think differently about your subject or themselves when we are done. You need to think the same way. You cannot worry about what the audience thinks of you…that is an amaturish way of thinking. Think bigger. What will they “do” as a result of you speaking… make sense?

Don’t worry, we all start that way. A speaker grows incredibly when - as Brian Tracy says - you go from here I am to there you are."

Fascinating, no?

I love that Eric had the guts to share this feedback publicly so we could all benefit from Darren’s comments.

Now, I’ve never been an advocate of getting an audience to DO something. It reminds me too much of watching these evangelical, hypnotic marketing gurus speaking in such a way as to inspire the audience to buy thousands of dollars worth of their products.

But what Darren is saying is that it’s about inspiring your audience to do something FOR THEMSELVES, or perhaps even think differently about themselves.

What I also appreciate about this message is this: it’s not about you, it’s about them, your audience. It’s not about you being revered and admired and adored. It’s about your audience benefiting in some way by spending that time with you.

Now, as Lee Glickstein would say, just sharing your authentic presence is enough. That in itself can inspire and move people to a different place, a sweeter space.

So, don’t feel like you need to get your audience to do something huge, grand and dramatic. Remember, that just showing up with the purpose to be present, to be available to your audience, to be real, and to share what’s true for you is in itself inspiring and will move your audience in the direction they want and need to go.

Your authenticity and your ease in fully being who you really are gives the same to your audience. It awakens within them their owning knowing of what they need to do to move closer to that which will be in their best interest.