Dahle Communication

Know Your Audience - IBM marketing should read this article

An important feature when speaking is knowing who your audience is. This is one of the most vital pieces of information you need to have if you are going to be successful. However, this is not just for public speaking. With any form of advertising or marketing, you need to know your audience.

I was reminded of this when my wife came home from work one day with a pen from IBM that was sent to her office. It is a $150 pen in a very nice box that was sent with a letter. The letter talked about how they have done their research and feel that they could help improve her employers bottom line. Sounds like a great deal right? One problem - the company she works at has been bankrupt since last year and is closing its doors on Wednesday.

So, they clearly did not do their research. They probably did some research - maybe they looked at some old data and looked at a couple of key things - but they clearly did not know their audience.

Make sure you have done your research. Make sure you have prepared yourself for your audience. Fine-tuning your speech based upon your audience is so important it cannot be ignored. Take the lesson from IBM to heart - if you can do this, you are going to take one step closer to being a successful speaker.

Before giving a presentation try to get an idea of what they want

Next week I am going to be giving a presentation to Sioux Falls Up & Coming - a group of young professionals that meet weekly to "pursue common goals and inspire great change." Luckily, I know most of the members of Sioux Falls Up & Coming and follow them on Twitter. I say lucky because of what I was able to do - get feedback before my presentation.

 Audience adaptation is a big part of giving a speech. If you know what your audience wants to hear, you can adjust your speech to fit that audience. Politicians try to do this all the time. When they are in Iowa, they will talk about Ethanol subsidies and Farm subsidies. When they are talking to business owners in New York, they will talk about tax policies and business investment. Unfortunately for most of us, we only have a small view of what our audience will be before we give the speech. We usually know some of their background and an idea of what they would like, but a lot of times, we have to generalize things because we don't know as many specifics as we would like.

So what I did was simple: I asked the members of SFU&C who are on Twitter what they would like to see. The feedback I got from them was great. It gave me some ideas that I might not have covered when giving my presentation. This is going to ensure that my speech will be a success.

If you can do something like this you absolutely should. If you can get a better idea of what people are looking to learn from you - you can focus in on those aspects. While sometimes you can't cover everything people want and you have other things you want to cover - having some idea of what people want is going to help make that speech a success.

Why are teachers the worst listeners?

Being in the education world for a long time I have come to realize a few things. One of those is the simple fact that teachers are the absolute worst audience you will ever have. Its something I never thought would be possible. Teachers demand respect from their students and want them to make sure they are listening so they can learn something. In my aspects as a speech teacher, I always stress the importance of listening as a sign of respect to the person speaking. Unfortunately as teachers, we must have missed that lesson.

Let me give you an example. During staff meetings the principal is talking to the teachers. While I am sitting there quietly listening, there are many staff members talking away discussing something that happened that day or something they are planning on doing later that week. Part of this is understandable since teachers don't get a lot of opportunity to work with each other and this is one of the few times during the month that they might see other teachers (its a fairly big school).

However, I get so frustrated with it and I'm not even the one doing the talking. We get frustrated when our own students won't listen, yet here we are ignorning our own principal.

What I want you to learn from this is something that all of you should know - treat others how you want to be treated. All of us know this phrase - it is something that we have heard for a long time. However, the situation I talked about with teachers is not uncommon to all businesses. Most people like to talk and they have a hard time NOT talking when others are speaking.

Keep this in mind when you are listening to a speaker - and hopefully others keep this in mind when you are speaking.

Repetition is the Key - Using Twitter as an example

One of the key methods of public speaking that I learned early is the idea of repetition - you have to repeat yourself a lot when speaking because there is a good chance that people either didn't hear you the first time or they weren't paying attention. When speaking, you have to repeat yourself to ensure that the key ideas you want to get across are remembered.

This can apply to Twitter as well. In fact, I am going to use twitter in two ways to describe what I am talking about. First off, lets look at how to use Twitter to promote certain sites or posts of your own and then using Twitter enough times to emphasize how repetition is used to increase web traffic.

First off, lets look at how people use Twitter to promote their sites. If you have ever followed people on Twitter you notice a couple of things. First off, there are those who tweet waaaay too much. I really don't need 40 of your posts on Twitter clogging up my feed. What this has taught me though is that your posts can get lost in the mix on Twitter. Let's say I post something on Twitter early in the morning - if someone isn't on twitter or checking their tweetdeck or other device, they are going to miss that tweet if they are following several people or just a couple of people using Twitter who post 200 tweets a day. Instead of having it get lost there are a couple of things you can do. If you post something on Twitter that people like they will RT it so others can read about it. However, if you know how Twitter works, you know that when someone RT's it, that doesn't mean your followers on Twitter will see it. What you can do is go in and post onto Twitter three or four times that day. You don't want to post the same exact thing though. You want to change things up. Phrase it differently or ask a different compelling question that might trigger some thought. Repetition - that way people will be able to see your post throughout the day and will hopefully click on your links.

The second way to look at repetition and Twitter is SEO and repetition. In doing some looking around the web and getting involved in things like Alltop and Speaking Pro Central, I was interested to see some blogs getting a pretty high ranking for a certain word like Twitter. When checking out their blog, I noticed that they used the word Twitter a lot! This helped with their search engine optimization because they used that word (in this case Twitter) more in their post, so it increased their SEO. If you have noticed, I am using this post as a bit of an experiement. I usually don't use a single word that much, but thought it would be an interesting experiement to see if using the word Twitter that often really would help - my guess is that it will be okay.

Remember some of those web ideas when you are speaking. Most people are passive listeners and will not catch everything that you throw at them. Most of the time you will need to emphasize things a few times for them to latch onto it.

Travis

Keep Their Focus - A Lesson From Amsterdam

If you haven't seen the urinals that they use in the Amsterdam airport, here is a picture. There is a black fly etched into the urinal. You might be asking yourself: why? Why would they etch a fly onto a urinal? Well, the reason is simple: spillage at the airport has dropped by 80% because of the fly. Apparently, if you give a man something fo focus on, they stay on target. Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein's talk about this in their book Nudge. They state "tiny changes in environment can influence behavior" and they call this "choice architecture." I think its great that men need to have something to focus on when using the bathroom to avoid spilling. There are now even companies that have been created following the Amsterdam model. The Urinal Fly company gives you stickers that are guaranteed to stay on the toilet.

What does this have to do with communication? Well, how many times have you felt that people were not focusing on your speech? Have people tended to drift when you speak? If this has happened, you need to change the way you do things so you can give them something to focus on. People tend to drift and daydream when they don't have a compelling reason to focus. Your message needs to have that fly to focus on.

Figuring out what that fly on the urinal should be can be tricky. However, just being aware that you need to have something compelling for people to focus on is a start. From there, you just have to keep working on it and figure out which one works...and which ones are just going to keep spilling over.

Travis

Listening well is just as important as speaking well

Most people are shockingly poor listeners -- a lot of times we fake paying attention and even if we are paying attention, most research suggests that we only grasp 50% of what we hear and after two days we forget half of that information.  Think about that for a second.  If you give an important speech that has a great deal of information in it, after two days, most people will only remember 25% of what you said.

While ensuring that the audience listens to you is important, I wanted to look at a different aspect of communication:  Are YOU listening to your audience?  Its an interesting question that you should be asking yourself.  What does it mean to listen to your audience?  Well, there are several different aspects that you should focus on while giving your speech to ensure that you are listening.

1.  If you are using feedback posts like Twitter (as mentioned in this blog post) or something similar, make sure to read each of them carefully and address something if it is being brought up by a few people.

2.  If there is a Q & A session during part of your speech, make sure you carefully listen to each person to ensure that you understand where they are coming from and what exactly their question is.

3.  If someone brings up a concern that they have during a break, make sure that you listen to their concern and don't just brush it aside.  Joseph Thornley of Thornley Fallis talks about this in his recent blog post.  He stated that he didn't really listen to one of the audience members concerns and sort of brushed it aside.  Needless to say, his review was not very good from that person.  

While those are some specific areas that you can improve your listening, there are a lot of different ways you can improve your listening for everyday things and not just when you are speaking.  First of all you need to take listening seriously.  Listening is an active process and you have to be engaged in it if you want to be successful.  Secondly, try to avoid distractions such as focusing too much on the persons delivery or a quirk in their presentation or focusing on some outside event that is making noise.  Eliminating distractions can greatly improve your listening skills.  

Unfortunately, there is so much more to listening, but I don't want to have this post go on for too long.  What we as speakers and communicators need to remember is that a great deal of communication is listening.  Remember that, and you will become successful in whatever business you are in.

Travis