Tag Archives: tips

Listen

Posted on by chrisbell

Listen to yourself when you speak.

Nothing is more certain to demonstrate how close you are to being in the moment than the words you use. If you are paying attention to yourself and the people who are listening to you, your humanity will shine through. You’ll find that you will use incredibly natural language. You will be having a genuine conversation.

On the other hand, if you’re merely filling time, you will notice jargon and buzzwords creeping out of your mouth. If you notice any “innovative”s, or, heaven help you, “paradigm”s and “omni-channel”s, then you can be certain that your mind is drifting. Use buzzwords as a trigger to interrupt yourself.

Stop.
Breathe.
Focus on what you actually want your message to be.
Start speaking again.

You’ll notice that your vocabulary improves. The words will seem to select themselves. And the jargon will wither on the tongue.

 

As a footnote, it’s worth noting that the idea of “genuine conversations” became the clarion call for all sorts of social web charlatans and new media chancers, who wrapped it up in the worst sorts of buzz and nonsense. We stopped talking to our customers about the charms of Twitter and Facebook as a result. Of course, we realise that these technologies are incredibly important to many businesses. A conversation doesn’t start with a tweet, though. It starts by being engaged in the moment.

Image from x-ray delta one.

Interrupt yourself

Posted on by chrisbell

The simple act of sitting and breathing can put you in a very powerful position.

Everybody’s minds will wander during the day. This is how the mind works and it is necessary. All of the sensations and feelings we experience need to be assembled and stored away for future use. These experiences are usually short bursts of fresh information that are overlaid against stored data. For instance, our eyes can only focus on a very small area at any given time; the rest of what we see is mostly remembered. When we walk into a room, we might look around and notice the chairs, windows and doors. If we sit on one of the chairs by the window and start reading a book, we will still know where the door is without having to check every moment. These memories of where things are are constantly replayed into our consciousness.

But when we sit and breath, we are effectively interrupting ourselves. We can stop and examine events around us and by paying close attention can look at how they make us feel. Once we start to consider these feelings, we can look at whether they stand up to scrutiny.

For instance, you may be in a meeting where a colleague appears to be deliberately ignoring you and passing over you as you try to interject with your ideas. It is very easy to allow frustration to build up. A little narrative can quickly form – you may tell yourself that they feel threatened by you, or that they feel that because the ideas are yours they are not worth hearing. Your brain may quickly throw in other instances of when this has happened before and so the story grows. You remember that time at university when your entire class seemed to be laughing at your controversial summary of the plays of Samuel Beckett, or when your physics teacher at school scoffed at your understanding of the flow of electrons through a wire. The brain loves to find patterns regardless of whether they have positive or negative implications for you. It will root through all of your memories until it has assembled a story. But it is your decision whether you listen to the story or not.

So, you’re back in the meeting. You clearly have something to say. The person running the meeting has their focus elsewhere. Breathe. Interrupt yourself. Don’t let the story build. Accept that your brain wants to tell you a story. Let the thoughts go. Bring yourself back into the moment. Concentrate on what is being said around you. Use that to refine the idea that you want to share. At any moment something could come up that may blow your idea out of the water. If you’re indulging in self-critical reveries, there’s a good chance you won’t notice. If it doesn’t, the time will come when you can impart your thoughts. And because you’ve been paying full attention it will be great.

 

See What You Mean

Posted on by chrisbell

Here’s a little story about a man called Sid.

Sid was a skilled machine operator, able to work as quickly as any man who could see. But, you see, the thing about Sid was that he had been blind since birth. Not just visually impaired, but totally blind.

In 1974, when Sid was in his fifties, he was offered a corneal graft which would, it was hoped, give him the gift of sight. With no little trepidation, he underwent the surgery. When he woke and opened his eyes, he was amazed to find that he could see quite clearly. It was completely overwhelming. The world had opened up to him, but he had no idea what any of it was or why it was there.

As his brain struggled to take everything in, he realised that he knew what time it was. He could recognise the clock on the wall AND work out what time it was showing, even though he had never seen a clock in his life. Psychologists intervened. They were intrigued. They probed and poked and questioned. What the heck was going on?

It turns out that, like the rest of us, Sid had learned to tell the time at school using clock faces and moveable hands. Unlike the rest of us, Sid had worked out what the position of the hands meant purely by using his sense of touch. His brain had then assembled the touch information into a picture that built up gradually in his visual cortex. When he woke after his surgery, this picture was so clear in his mind’s eye that he was able to recognise the clock and tell the time without even thinking about it.

The psychologists determined that the brain is programmed to construct images. It can turn the most abstract information into a useful picture. And it can do it even if we have never seen anything before.

Think about this next time you’re assembling a presentation.

Brains crave pictures. If you’re feeding your audience words on the screen, they will create their own images. And if they’re creating their own images, you lose control. If instead you keep text to a minimum and use bold imagery to support what you are saying, your audience’s brains can take the visual cues and store them alongside a general impression of what you are saying. This means that when it comes to them spreading your story inside their own organisation or networks they are more likely to accurately recreate what they have heard.

There’s a huge amount of psychology at work when you stand up in front of a crowd of people and start speaking. You should use it to your advantage.

image by moonlightbulb

 

 

Another alternative to PowerPoint – Haiku Deck

Posted on by chrisbell

Here’s how I assemble a presentation

  1. Think about me – what’s going to get me a round of applause and some friendly handshakes after I shut up?
  2. Think about the audience – what do they want to hear? What’s going to delight and amaze them?
  3. Get lots of paper, pens and pencils – sketch out a story that will fit 1 & 2.
  4. Fire up a browser, spend hours digging through creative commons licensed pictures, note the originator.
  5. Fire up some presentation software and load in all the pictures to support the story from 3.
  6. Carefully choose a headline to go with each picture to reinforce the story.
  7. If I’m going to share the slides, I fill in the notes section with the narrative I’m going to deliver.
  8. Practice.
  9. Deliver.

I like each presentation I give to be unique. This harks back to a time when I would have to give two, three or even four sales presentations each and every day. That’s a lot of talking. Especially over a ten year period. And I desperately wanted to avoid sounding like a member of cabin crew from a low-cost airline rushing through a safety briefing for the umpteenth time.

More to the point, I wanted to preserve my own sanity. Now it’s a stuck behaviour.

So if, like me, you want each talk to be fresh and engaging, you’ll spend a huge amount of time searching for pictures that support your stories. This is where Haiku Deck comes in to its own.

Fire up the app and you’re immediately in an intuitive place. Give your deck a name and you’re straight into choosing content.

haiku deck 1

Hit the picture icon and you get to search a creative commons library:

haiku deck 2

Once you’ve chosen your picture, you can add your headline and crunch your deck together in no time:

haiku deck 3

Of course, there are restrictions.

  • There are no builds, so if you’re an slide-animation junkie you’ll have to get your fix elsewhere.
  • You can’t use every font in the universe.
  • There are seven layout options.

But the thing about restrictions is that they encourage creativity. You only have room for maybe a dozen words and one picture – I find that exciting.

So, for a quick and dirty pitch round a coffee table, Haiku Deck is terrific. For 99% of your other presentations, it’s not too shabby either.

Writing tip – Start at the end and work backwards

Posted on by chrisbell

This is a brilliant tip for whatever you’re writing. And it is very powerful.

Think about writing emails. You might have an issue that you’ve been trying to fix. There may be a dozen or so people copied in on the email. Some are high up in the organisation, some are lower down. Everybody has a lot of emails to wade through every day.

But you find a fix for the issue. It make sense to you when you’re telling everybody to go through it in a methodical way – the kind you learned in science lessons at school. Apparatus, Method. Results. Conclusions. It’s the way we were taught to do it. And it’s part of the scientific method. At least, as far as we understand it.

So you start talking about the problem, how it first appeared, the trouble-shooting process, the things that definitely weren’t causing the problem, (we turned this off, tested again, tried another thing, tested again) and then finally say how you found the issue and fixed it.

What you should do is start your email saying “We found the issue and fixed it”. More than half the distribution list can then ignore the rest of the message. Problem solved. The ones that care enough can read through to the end, find out about your trouble-shooting process and, if they’re that way inclined, can replicate each step for themselves.

The science we’re taught in schools is quite separate from the way professional science works. At school, we’re taught to put important bit at the end. But if you ever read any kind of scientific paper, you’ll see that they tend to have the conclusions up at the beginning. Why? Because it makes it easier for science journalists to write headlines. And, although summing up scientific research in a headline may not necessarily enhance the greater understanding of what is going on, headlines tend to lead to more research grants. And scientists like research grants.

More broadly, journalists will always put the important bits at the beginning of a story. If you look at any big story in a paper it will break down into three parts – here’s a thing that happened – here’s why it’s good or bad – here are the facts. It’s always worth reading past the opinion and getting to the facts because they often change your understanding of the story. For instance – “House price rises cause cancer”, the headline may scream. “Thousands of Britons are putting themselves at increased risk of cancer as they work ever longer hours to meet high mortgage payments. This is a terrible indictment of our society, blah, blah, blah”. Tucked away at the end of the story though will be a fact about the survey, which is actually about the health risks associated with a sedentary lifestyle. If you just read the headline and the opinion you’d never understand that.

So start off with where you want to get to and write backwards from there. “In the future retailers will send boxes of groceries directly to a customer’s door on miniature flying robots”. Then talk about how and why.

But where do you want the end to be?

“The End” as it relates to this tip can simply be the conclusions that you want to reach. The flying robots. You can take it a step further, though, and think about “The End” as being the effect you have on the reader. “I want the reader to have their mind blown after they’ve read this”. “I want the reader to laugh out loud six times as they read this”. “I want the reader to quit their job and go and live as a hermit in the Himalayas”. It’s kind of similar to the idea of selling to your customer’s customer. Aim through your target.

This tip works really well with presentations. If you want to give a confident presentation, before you start putting it together imagine the warm applause at the end, or the handshakes and congratulations that come when you’ve finished. If you see that as the end of your presentation, you’ll be more confident about giving your talk, because you’ve already decided that it’s going to end in a nice place. All you have to do is put together and deliver a talk that will get you to your destination.

On frictionless sharing

Posted on by chrisbell

It’s now possible to share anything from anywhere.

Apple’s latest iphone software builds facebook and twitter sharing right into the core of the phone. Newpaper websites encourage button clicking and story sharing. There are even waste bins that upload pictures to Facebook to encourage recycling.

This is known as frictionless sharing, where anything that could prevent you posting your thoughts, location and pictures of kittens is eliminated. Of course, the point of this is to cause an increase in the amount of data that is transmitted stored about you. This data is valuable both to the mobile phone companies that charge you using it, and for the social web companies who want to provide advertisers with exact profiles about their users. And, of course, it’s a bonus for those consumers among us who want to post those pictures from that night out or that holiday without having to think too much about what they’re doing.

But what does it mean for businesses?

It goes without saying that businesses engaging on the social web all have strict policies in place, that they’re working to an editorial plan for content creation, and are scheduling posts to reach the audience when they are at their most engaged. (If you’re not, you’d better get in touch)

However, because of all this frictionless sharing from your audience and their peers, your carefully planned updates are in danger of simply sliding on by. Like  the beer bottles slung down bar tops in comedy western movies, they’ll keep skidding on until they crash to the floor, but without the hilarious consequences.

There are three possible solutions.

First, increase the amount of time you and your colleagues spend creating useful and interesting content. Just keep hammering out the updates in the vain hope that some will be seen.

Second, increase the repetition. Simply repost the information you want people to see two, three or four times per day.

Third, work even harder to make your updates even more relevant and even more shareable.

Of all of these, the third is the best option. Although the first two would not be defined as spam in the strict sense, they feel spammy and that’s probably worse.

Remember that nobody is here to hand you a living wage. If you want to cut through the noise, you have to sing your song with clarity. The only real way to make your updates sticky enough to attract a big audience is to make them so interesting that they get lots of shares, RTs and reposts.

Understand that not every post is going to garner a wide audience, but believe in what you are doing. Many of the beer bottles will hit the floor. It doesn’t matter Just make sure you’re slinging the best suds in town.

In praise of the linear presentation

Posted on by chrisbell

I love Family Guy. Many people do. If you’ve ever seen more than one episode you’ll be familiar with the plots punctuated with a constant stream of asides, prefigured with the phrase “It’s like that time when…”

Now, much as I love Family Guy, we all know that the fastest way to get from one point to another is in a straight line. If the stories that you tell follow this path (i.e., moving from the beginning, through the middle and on to the end without swerving off at a tangent), then they are linear.

In natural conversations with friends and family, our stories tend to wander. They take detours, they get interrupted, bits get forgotten, good bits get stretched out (sometimes beyond the bounds of truth). Occasionally, they end up in places we never expected to go to when we started the journey. It’s like that time when I was talking to Tony Wilson and Frank Sidebottom about how Northside would save pop music*. These are non-linear stories.

The business world loves a story teller. Particularly an authentic story teller. So now there are now lots of bits of software that let you amaze audiences with a non-linear presentations. We talked about some of these a while ago. We even hoped that they would improve. Sadly, they haven’t. And there are new entrants to the market, such as projeqt that let you pull in blog posts and feeds from the social web to help your story spin round with increasing non-linearity and, it’s makers hope,  authenticity.

The sad fact is that when we plan a presentation we still think in linear terms. More to the point, audiences crave linearity. They want to be able to follow the flow of your thoughts. And if you want them to accurately re-tell your stories, it makes sense to present them as logically as possible. If your story has a defined beginning, middle and end, it is much easier to recount.

I can only imagine what the ultimate non-linear presentation tool might look like. Perhaps it would require us to dump everything we have ever known or thought about or heard onto a server somewhere. It would have been trained to follow our usual set of stories to conjure the required audio-visual aid onto the screen behind us in perfect synchronicity with our diatribe. It would know who was in the room with us and whether they were secretly willing us to slip in a vignette about the first ever football match we went to. And it would always earn us a standing ovation.

In the meantime, it’s back to thinking in straight lines and putting in the hard work to be engaging and authentic people.

 

*Actual, honest-to-goodness true story. Don’t forget to ask me about it next time you see me.

The ROI of Social Web – or, Beware – business psychopaths

Posted on by chrisbell

 

The one constant word in the buzz around the web’s emerging technologies and techniques is ‘Social’. Whether web, media, networks, enterprise, capital, currency or bookmarks, everything is social.

Listen.

When you meet somebody in the real world, whether at a party, a networking event, a conference, or in a bar, do you try to build an ROI case first? Do you stay at home or in the office, eschewing all human contact until you can be sure that bumping into people and starting (or joining in) a conversation is worth your while? Do you ask people how much cash they’re carrying before you talk to them?

Looking to exploit social situations for your own personal benefit is a sure sign of psychopathy. Until businesses fully understand and accept that sometimes it’s just good to share, converse and communicate they will always make a mess of the whole social thing. Going into this looking for ROI will just leave you lost, alone and frustrated.

So, those of you wanting to build and prove an ROI case from the social web can go ahead and try. For my own safety, I will give you all a wide berth.

 

Posted via email from plainadvice’s posterous

Business Riffing…

Posted on by chrisbell

Here’s the thing.

Business communication is like a pop song. Trust me about this.

In any given lifetime, your audience will grant you two minutes and  thirty seven seconds in which to acheive two (2) things:

First – sing your song

Second – get everyone else singing your song, too.

For this to happen, your song has to be individual enough to be worth remebering. But it also has to fit within a style that is easy to recognise and accept.

Unfortunately, singing takes a lot of talent and a lot more guts. Not everyone can do it. Which is why most business communication comes over as a terrible dirge of confused ideas and lame cliches.

Applying the principles of pop to your business communications is not easy, but it works.

To start off with, you need a hook – a neat little riff or idea that is easy to grasp and even easier to repeat. Then you need to back this up with three other elements – a verse, a chorus and a middle-eight. Verses should be short and sweet but provide background, depth and colour to your hook. Maybe a handful of web-pages, maybe some of your staff tweeting around a theme, perhaps a revamped set of business cards with individual designs. The verse should lead into the chorus – this is where you can let rip. Your chorus should get you, your staff, customers, partners, the press and everyone else in the world screaming your virtues at the top of their voices. A simple statement that sums up the true value of you and your company. I’m going to repeat three words from that last sentence: simple, true, value. Simple. True. Value. That’s your chorus.

The middle-eight links your verses with your chorus. This may be the look-and-feel, or the tone of voice. The style of delivery, or the medium for delivery. A key point here is that nobody every listens to a song because it has a great middle-eight, but plenty of songs are left mediocre and forgotten because they had a weak middle-eight.

Of course, pop music has been constantly evolving, from Muddy Waters picking up an electric guitar to the Beatles harmonising with a string quartet, from Brian Eno’s synthesised noodlings to acid fuelled raves and warehouse parties, from Iggy Pop’s flailing nudity to Jay-Z’s tailored suits. So once you have your song down pat, you have to drop it and come up with something new. That’s why we’re here and why we keep coming back.

All together now, after 4…