Benjamin Zander talks about ‘one buttock playing’ – being pushed over by what you are doing, what you are communicating. There is a point at which what we are doing takes over our thinking about what we are trying to do. To a professional communicator, that might sound bad, uncontrolled even. But it is the point at which you connect with the passion, and that is the point at which what you are doing makes an impact. So much communication is killed by a lack of passion, a lack of conviction, and smothered in doubt.

We have to do the things we are uncomfortable with enough times that we get beyond that discomfort, beyond the conscious thought, and into a state of flow in doing it. Be it blogging, emailing, running meetings, playing music, whatever it is, push through the discomfort to find the place where you can just do it. Be practiced enough to be confident in your capability that you don’t look up (or look down) and drop your flow.

But there is something else in Benjamin’s talk. Notice how he is aware of what he is doing, and able to explain it, very coherently and eloquently. That comes through observation. In teaching others, and watching them practice, we learn even more – and learning from the mistakes of others is usually less costly! As we practice, we spot pattens that work, and patterns that don’t.

In short, we need to practice to get things right, that’s hopefully obvious, but that inherently means being comfortable with being uncomfortable. We have to make mistakes, and watch other people making mistakes, to get to the point where, in Benjamin Zander’s words, we are playing on one buttock. It’s a difficult one to explain to the boss, but ultimately, we need those shining eyes to make a great business.

Related Posts

• Social Media Week London
• Do Your Employees Dance?
• Avoiding a Business Communication Crisis
• Thoughts Post MediaCampLondon
• Upgrading to WordPress 3.3.2

One of the recurrent themes whenever I get drawn into discussions around community, specifically the ‘on-line’ sort, is that of audience versus community. It is all too often that I hear marketing folks talk about their audience as if it was a community, and occasionally their community as if it was an audience. To my mind the two are very different things: an audience is gathered to listen; a community gathers to contribute. One is there to consume. One is there to produce. I don’t see one as any more worthy than the other – sometimes I want to be in an audience, sometimes I want to be in a community. You probably wouldn’t fancy trying to co-create with Take That or the Foo Fighters – you’re there to jump up and down and go deaf, or something like that. Conversely, if I go to a vendor’s user group event, I wouldn’t expect to get shouted at or drowned out.

What emerged from the evening’s discussions was that there are many different types of community. That might seem blindingly obvious, but you wouldn’t think so from much of the writing in the social media world. There are motivated communities – self motivated, or externally motivated (i.e. lead) – and there are unmotivated communities. Unmotivated communities rarely last, and are rarely ‘rewarding’ to be part of. Communities fundamentally exist to do something, or at least to support or preserve something.

My personal favourite minimal definition of community is ‘a group of people gathered around a purpose.’ I like it because of its simplicity, and because it is so actionable. The purpose might be to change the world (thank you to Misae Richwoods for raising the bar on that one), or it might be to exchange tips and stories about a new gadget. Another flash of the blindingly obvious was the realisation that communities are for a period in time. People join, their circumstances change, and they move on. They may stay for a long time, or they may move through swiftly. Similarly, a campaign-based community may have a relatively short life or a lifestyle-driven community a very long one.

The process of joining and leaving a community is not usually a binary one. It is a journey, and those who run communities need to be conscious of that. The moments of leaving or closing are points of difference, and potential friction (or explosion) if they aren’t handled well. That thought touches on many things, which the discussion came back too…

If you have an office without walls or desks, how would you know that you are in it? It’s the same with communities. While most on-line communities don’t have obvious rites of passage, they are there – even if they aren’t explicit. The users worked out how to get on-line, they found the site, they signed up, they managed to post a message. We’ll talk more about rites of passage and tokens of membership in a bit.

The higher the walls, the stronger the community. As the walls erode, the community weakens. Look at Usenet groups in the 90′s, and now Twitter. As the barriers come down, the community fragments, weakens, and finally is engulfed in relational noise. Of course, at the other end of the scale are communities that are [too] exclusive. Barriers to entry, i.e. exclusivity, can drive people’s desire to be in a community, as much as they keep them out. If it is hard to get in, people will stay. If it is too hard to get in, people won’t bother, and may even form their own ‘anti-communities’

Technology has radically transformed community life. The Internet has bulldozed geographic boundaries, eliminated cost and enabled even the most niche of interests to sustain sizeable communities. If you don’t believe me, go for a trawl through meetup.com (an online market place for arranging and managing community meet ups). There is something there for everyone – and I really mean everyone. Newer on-line services like Lanyrd and Plancast have made it easier to discover events and join the communities around them. See where your Twitter friends go to meet, search events in your area, or on your topic of interest. If you want a community, online or offline, you can probably find it, and if you can’t find it, you can create it for marginal cost and effort.

Social platforms like Facebook have made relationships objectively visible, and transformed ‘liking’ into more than just making a connection. They have become a means of association, and a form of visible badge. I ‘like’ Brand X says as more about my identity than just the fact that I have purchased their products. Communities have an ‘identity’ and people need to know what that identity is, so that they know what they are in, and more importantly, people need to know if they are ‘in’ the community or not. They also want to know if other people are inside or outside of the community too. It is all part of forming a group identity, and having a good sense of group identity is a key part of any thriving community. That identity might be supported by the shared stories that people tell, or by the provision of props (e.g. badges, uniforms, and so on). Having an iPad, an iPhone 4 and a MacBook identifies you as likely part of a certain community, just as having a suit and a Blackberry might identify you as part of a different one!

Some badges are ambiguous, some are not, some are conscious, some are not. All are earnt. The Flickr badge on my bag has started conversations, the WordPress badge has got me business. Those badges were obtained through relationships and through being at certain events. They have a story and meaning to them. They are explicit tokens, artefacts of being a part of something. They have a value far beyond their physical worth, they connect to memories and demonstrate participation. Most communities have some form of badges. They aren’t always as obvious as a piece of metal and paper, but they are there all the same.

Community defies our instant reward, popup culture. Communities take a LONG time to develop. Although sense of community can happen within 6 months, or even less, building a viable community, of any type, is a long hard journey. One of the things that definitely helps along the way is recognising the contributions of key community members. A big part of the evening’s discussion circled around the idea of making ‘heroes’ within the community. It works because it strengthens the identity of both the group and the individual, and also because it models the behaviours that are desired within the community. It is in our nature to copy leaders and those that we view as successful. That can be a constructive dynamic in a community, but it can also be a destructive one. An over reliance on the leader or key individuals can leave others feeling unwanted or even excluded.

There was and is much debate as to how much of community building is inductively learnt and subconsciously applied, and how much is conscious, constructed application. Many community leaders are ‘naturals’ rather than consciously constructed. It’s rare to find someone who learnt their community management skills in a classroom, and so that means passing on their skills is something best done through mentoring and working alongside, rather that in a taught course in a classroom. But you knew that already, didn’t you?

At one point there was a heated debate about WordPress versus Drupal. It was notable not for the technical content, but for how much of the debate was driven from the communities that were around each of them. There are certainly big technical differences between the platforms (I’ve built community sites using WordPress, BuddyPress, Drupal and Elgg), but the biggest difference is in the communities of users, developers, content producers and consumers around each. Products, inherently, have communities.

Looking at the ‘insides’ of a community, it becomes obvious that not all community members are equal. There are various different taxonomies that can be used to group members. I lean towards looking at levels of engagement: audience (the edglings), participants, contributors, through to co-leaders. Similarly, communication happens on a continuum from ‘top-down’ communication from leaders, to peer-to-peer discussion between members. Bernie talked about the impact of sending out weekly emails to one of his communities. The community became more active and engaged. People got more involved. Broadcast communication can be helpful, as well as harmful, in maintaining community cohesion and the energy levels within the community. It is all about striking a balance. Too little, and the community fragments and disperses, too much and it diminishes to an audience.

The spectrum for audience to community is a highly graduated one. We discussed many examples of the broadcast/performance vs community/contribution dynamic. For example, the Coke Facebook page that was started by two actors. Community or audience? Participation or entertainment? They aren’t dichotomies or dilemmas, they are  characteristics of moments in the story that becomes the community. How important is the brand of the community leader? Can they be invisible, leading from the shadows, or must they be known by name? Is there a continuum from audience to community? Real world examples don’t reveal simple yes’s and no’s. In the words of Ben Goldacre, “I think you’ll find that it’s a bit more complicated than that.”

So what triggers action in a community? Conversation needs to be peer to peer, not just top down. It’s one of the defining differences between an audience and a community. People want to have meaning, and to make a difference. Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs came up quite a few times. People have a need for significance and people want to feel wanted/needed. Many community drivers are around human emotional needs.

The evening’s discussion touched on issues of mono-culture and sustainability. Consistency is important – it creates and supports identity – but difference is also one of the key drivers of community too.  Communities can be long lived. Like some strange insect that can go without food for years, even if left sleeping communities can sometimes be revived. One of the stories I have heard a number of times about the Obama campaign is how it managed to bootstrap itself from the communities formed during the previous campaigns. Once a community is made, the individual relationships and connections created by it persist, long after the community has gone away.

So what is the role of a community leader? Are they leaders or are they facilitators? The answer seems to be yes and yes. The more challenging question was about the ability of community leaders to establish new leads, and the way that can lead to communities fragmenting or taking on a different path – even splitting apart. Good community ‘managers’ are passionate about the growth of the individuals within the community. The pattern is not about the growth of the community, the community only grows by the growth of the members. Good leaders establish sustainable behaviours: ‘this is how we do things around here’ – and recognise and reward those in the community who are active in supporting it. Recognition goes a long way: It supports the contributors, and it indicates desirable models of behaviour to others in the group.

Communities aren’t owned, and unlike an audience, they can’t be bought. Did technology enable niche communities, or did it actually cause the fragmentation that lead to them? On-line communities, freed from geographic restrictions, can fragment and merge more easily. As humans, we’ve been doing community since we started writing on cave walls, but technology is making (and enabling) us to look at the processes of community differently. Community is part of a cultural megatrend. In the off-line world, many places have forgotten how to do community – The motor car, the television and the privet hedge have enabled use to live socially in the most isolated of ways. In the later part of the last century we learnt to become individual actors, rather than group players. As we escape from broadcast media, and discover the Internet, we are starting to rediscover togetherness. There is a growing desire to create communities, and reintegrate society.

Of course it is all ripples against ripples… We have always been in communities, it is the new lens of social media and the rise of Twitter and Facebook that have turned the cameras, quite literally, back on to ourselves.

In a cruel form of irony, it way well be the mass data from these platforms that starting to create mass customisation/personalisation that breaks up community again. What you read in your Twitter stream or in your Facebook updates is personalised for you. No one else reads the same things in the same context. In social networks, everyone is part of a community of one. It is a scale free network that puts you at the centre of your world. Traditional communities don’t work that way. They are about shared experiences and shared stories – they are more universal than personal. It’s all about creating the shared experience, the stories that people tell about the community and that they have in common. Shared challenges, external threats and common victories bind communities together. They create emotional connections between people.

The nature of what ‘global’ means is changing. Geographic barriers are breaking down…. However ‘Global’ has come to mean a trans-country set of niches… Physical communities are still challenged by geography, but global ones are challenged by a sea of niche interests and a dwindling commonality in what people are interested in.  As opposed to the universal markets that broadcast media and a global film industry created, social media creates micro-worlds with micro-celebrities and loosely bound connections.

Is community growth formulaic? There are certainly patterns. We discussed the early church, Toastmasters, the Mormons and dozens of examples of communities that have grown and persisted. Sometimes communities are for a reason, a season, occasionally for a life time. Communities and members aren’t forever. There is a time, a place and a purpose.

What does community mean to you?

Related Posts

• One Thing To Get Through Tough Times
• What will Enterprise 2.0 look like? Some Thoughts from Crystal Balls
• Communication – Becoming Fluid by Getting Uncomfortable
• Community Relations
• Social Media Week London

With that out of the way, let me share a little about what is happening. The first Social Media Week took place in New York last year and was a great success. This year Social Media Week is happening in six cities around the world. The schedule of events can be found on the London site, with more events being added all the time.

I plan to be at the Social Graph event at the IAB on Monday, followed by the opening night reception. I will be joining a fantastic panel including David Terrar, Ala Patrick, Euan Semple, Mat Morrison, Dr Sue Black, Shefaly and co on Tuesday Evening for a session on Social Media in Enterprise. Lightning 10 minute presentations, followed by Q&A, at Cass Business school. If you are working with social media in a business setting you’ll probably want to book here now! The week for me rounds off with  “Social Media Measurement” at Sun’s offices on Friday, where I will be chairing the afternoon session.

Key event details:  Mon 1st Feb – Fri 5th Feb, 2010

Location: All around London.
Website: http://socialmediaweek.org/london
Twitter: http://twitter.com/smwldn (for the latest updates)

In other news, the blog got into the Technorati top 100 for Small Business Blogs, which is a gentle nudge to blog some more. We’ve been doing some very exciting things with WordPress for Redcatco’s customers, and are adding in some new server infrastructure in the next few weeks as well!

Related Posts

• Communication – Becoming Fluid by Getting Uncomfortable
• The Social Media Business Case?
• Social Media in Business in London
• The New Business of Business
• Do Your Employees Dance?

Like most people, I’ve not had much reason to study bees. At least, not until I started studying the psychology of language. Dave’s bees do fascinating things, like building the honeycomb pictured here. Bees are viewed as hyper productive, industrious creatures, working away industriously. The hive is the very model of business, full of busy bees.

But did you know that bees spend a fair bit of their time wandering about aimlessly, and a fair bit dancing too? Bees major product is honey. Producing honey requires nectar, which the bees stumble upon by foraging. This is where the dancing comes in. The dancing gets work done efficiently.

When a bee finds a source of nectar it comes back to the hive and does a ‘waggle dance’ for its co-workers. The dance communicates the location of the nectar, indicating the direction and distance. The dance also communicates the type of nectar, by including a sample of the newly found treasure as part of the communication process. The co-workers then mobilize to bring back the rest of the new find.

It is a process of innovation and discovery. A single bee, with the time to wonder, makes a discovery. It then shares the discovery with the hive. The process maximizes the return on the new discovery, while minimizing unfruitful searching by other bees.

Do your employees dance? Do they have the time and tools to communicate where the nectar for your business is to other employees? Do they celebrate and communicate success? It is as important to the modern business as it is to the bee hive.

It always makes me sad when I hear a business shutting down communication channels that employees use – be it instant messaging, video conferencing or a community forum. In the wake of that decision is a hive of workers with less information to make them successful, and a less productive community.

Internal blogs and wikis and open communication channels (rather than closed point to point e-mail systems) are an essential tool for showcasing the steps to success. Did you just make a big business win? Then make sure everyone in the business knows. Let them know why it was a big win, and what enabled it to happen. Do a waggle dance! 

It isn’t just for the benefit of current employees. Hopping back to the bees for a minute, the nature of the waggle dance is unique (if you want to know more, check out Karl von Frisch who pioneered the study of bee communication). If you take a different sort of bee and introduce it to the hive, it will not be understood. Although eventually, after some mis steps, the bees will learn to communicate again.

How are new bees in your hive able to learn the language to communicate with the existing bees? Wikis and blogs provide a place for new staff to come and absorb the culture and language of a business. That gets them productive more quickly. They are called business wikis for a reason.

New employee hire orientation isn’t a one off event. It is about binding people into a community and enabling them to be part of it. That is a two way process, requiring good communication tools.

Bees have a specific place where they can come to dance. For some species it might be at the entrance to the hive, for others it is vertically on the comb, but there is a place.

Does your business have somewhere for employees to dance?

Related Posts

• Communication – Becoming Fluid by Getting Uncomfortable
• Social Media Week London
• Avoiding a Business Communication Crisis
• Power up your business with a Wiki
• A Perspective on Community

It used to be an issue in developing countries, where a few hundred Kilos of copper were worth a day’s wages. That equation now holds true in Europe as well. Systems do get broken, and good businesses should plan for that – see Seth’s post this week: “What do you do when your systems break?“.

Expect the unexpected isn’t just an aphorism, it is good business productivity advice. Many of these people that lost their phone lists also lost their broadband connection at the same time. That means people and businesses with no phones and no Internet.

Now that copper is so valuable, what’s your communications back up plan? Given that most people have mobile phones, the ability to make calls isn’t lost – it just becomes slight more expensive. Also, with many service providers it is possible to divert a landline number to a mobile one. Watch out for how you activate the divert – if it requires Internet access or the phone line, that’s going to be a problem. For the call centres I used to run, the divert process was automated.

So, what about Internet access? Well, the good news is that mobile data services are becoming more and more affordable, even here in the UK. Another alternative is to know where your local WiFi hotspots are, or have an exchange agreement with another business or friend in a nearby town. That way there is somewhere to go to get those critical e-mails out (or in!), and let people know what is happening, if you need to.

As Seth points out in his post, you also need to give staff (and yourself) flexibility about how to deal with the ‘normal’ day to day business. You may not have access to all of the usual systems and information, but make sure that remains your problem, not the customers.

It’s amazing how dependent us business people are on e-mail and web these days. Services can be vulnerable, so it is worth having a good recovery plan worked out ahead of time. That way you are prepared when things do go wrong, minimizing the impact on productivity.

Related Posts

• Communication – Becoming Fluid by Getting Uncomfortable
• Social Media Week London
• Do Your Employees Dance?
• A Perspective on Community
• The Social Media Business Case?

It stimulated lots of thinking, and there are certainly some big issues to deal with. The three speakers were:

• Charlie Robertson of Red Spider.
• Andrew Howells of Zype.
• Quentin Boyes of Honeycomb Software.

For those that missed then, Qik‘s Mireira Fontbernat vidoed the sessions: Videos from “Should Brands be Broadcasters?”. I’m not sure the event being broadcast via Qik falls into the “ironic” bucket or not. Regardless, very useful, and a sign of the times: One person with a mobile phone can broadcast an event across the globe, receiving questions in real-time from the viewers. It feels a little like the future.

• Traditional broadcasters are moving into community building.
• The big brands are using their own broadcast media to create interaction.
• Individuals themselves are becoming broadcasters (via blogs, vlogs, Facebook, Twitter, …). 

Charlie spoke about some of his work in creating more interactive, community-based experiences for broadcasters. Enough to be worth a whole separate post on the nature of community. Andrew talked about Honda’s recent marketing (see the Honda channel on YouTube to see some of their content) and the use of Homechoice (owned by Tiscali) as an interactive TV platform. The fact that a company most known for being an Internet Service Provider bought an IPTV service provider tells you something about the changes afoot.

Of course, the idea of broadcasters and brands having a conversation is really an illusion. The problem with conversations, as Twitter users know, is that they don’t scale well. The reason brands used broadcast media in the first place wass the ability for a few people to reach several million.

There are costs to that efficiency. Traditional broadcasting is one-way. That makes broadcasting efficient for the sender, but not for the receiver. When I watch a broadcast, it isn’t tuned to my needs or where I am at right now. My only control is to turn it off, just as I turn it on. Broadcast is also a time sink. If 100 of my friends start broadcasting even 1% of their life, keeping up with it all would consume 100% of mine. I wouldn’t even have enough time left to do my own broadcasting! Shocking. Some would say that might be a good thing. Just one minute of broadcast video could consume hundreds of hours worth of other people’s time.

When media was expensive to create, there were man barriers – good and bad. Volume was low, quality was (usually) high. With low cost broadcasting, thanks to the Internet and much more affordable video kit, those barriers have moved. Loose a day watching YouTube and you’ll feel how.

New media is blurring the lines between broadcast and personalized two-way communication. I can watch a Qik video broadcast and send comments back to the person filming. With services like Blogstar the producer not only has chat, but they can also turn the camera on the audience members – as I discovered during Phil Cambell’s The Gravity show. It certainly ramped up my participation!

What conversations have, that broadcasting looses, is that ability to listen. Listening creates interaction and context. In a conversation, I can listen to the other person and understand where they are coming from. And perhaps what they want too. I can tailor what I say to take account of what they already know, and better explain what they don’t. That conversation is unique.

A conversation is a kind of negotiation, or a knowledge journey. Traditional marketing fails at this, spectacularly. That is why it wastes so much time (for the receiver and the sender). Being efficient is more about the listening than the speaking, and listening takes an investment of time.

In the workshop I ran this week, looking at creating service level agreements and managing to them, the big take away was the importance of listening. Companies and people are all too keen to ‘get their message out there’. More often that not, a little listening saves a lot of talking. We need some technologies to balance all of this new broadcast media – filtering or switching off is only part of the answer.

When we listen more, we need to do less.

Related Posts

• Social Media Week London
• The Social Media Business Case?
• The Social Media Expert – Wicked Problems And Failure
• On-line Trust, More than Liking
• Authenticity

Or would we be better off without it.

A number of things have put e-mail at the top of the discussion list in recent weeks, from blogs to national TV. The BBC’s Money programme covered the topic last friday (March the 7th – if you can use iPlayer link here: The Money Programme), with the accompanying news article “E-mail is ruining my life.”

Information Overload via E-Mail

Information overload is a growing problem, and e-mail is right in the middle of it. People are overloaded by their personal email, from SPAM to Facebook notifications and seemingly endless forwarded emails. Even musicians suffer from information overload these days.

It is something when it makes it on to national TV – it doesn’t seem long ago that I had to explain what email was. Now I’m helping people deal with e-mail over use. It is clearly a problem of epidemic proportions. Lots of people have been researching the issue, like Nada Kakabadse at Northampton Business School (on the lift site here). She was recently quoted in a New Scientist article on technology addiction:

“Companies offer technologies like PDAs and Blackberies and just expect people to learn how to use them. They don’t consider the possible negative sides. New technology gives a feeling of having more control, but it may be only a feeling.

We don’t want to be in a situation in a few years similar to that with fast food or tobacco today. We need to pay attention to how people react to potentially habit-forming technologies and respond with appropriate education and policies.”

There is the backlash, lead by people like Tim Ferris, of the 4 hour work week fame, and others, who advocate minimising e-mail use. From e-mail free days to keeping your email client shut, checking email just once or twice a day, people are trying to tame the beast.

The technology elite are moving away from e-mail to new tools like twitter and pownce to get away from the torrent that floods the inbox. Some even proclaim that email is dead (or maybe not).

The Problem with E-Mail

The reality is that there are a number of problems with how e-mail is used today. Many people use it like an instant messaging tool – sending and expecting immediate responses. This has become more common because of tools like Blackberries, which provide this experience, most of the time at least.

The nature of our psychology, combined with a Blackberry, starts to distort our world view. I had mobile e-mail for a number of years, but I don’t currently. That is very much on purpose. My out, in, then out again perspective has made me realise the pros and cons of these tools:

• It is hard to have a meaningful conversation or meeting if someone is fiddling and distracted. We aren’t wired to have two conversations at once.
• Just because email is instant for you, doesn’t make it instant for others. Instant e-mail makes us unwittingly selfish. Don’t cancel a meeting when people may already travelling there and have no access to email. If you do, at least call. Don’t expect an answer at 2am.
• Email should never be used to avoid an awkward conversation or to hold an argument. There just isn’t enough salient indicators in email to convey emotion. We have no better communication medium today than having a face to face conversation.

One of the biggest challenge with e-mail is that it has no obvious priority level. Yes, emails can be marked high or low priority, but that is rarely used well. The other issue is more around time sensitivity. One email might be something for review or information that can be tackled any time in the next few weeks. The next email might be for a call starting in 2 minutes, or to do with an urgent customer problem. Thus we are drawn in, and our time disappears to the inbox.

E-Mail Isn’t Working

To be frank, E-mail isn’t work, it is communication. It is a means, not an end. Imagine if you spent the whole day chatting on the phone. Assuming you aren’t a call centre operative, you’d probably be viewed as well below the bar from a productivity perspective. We must reconstruct our work lives so that they are not so dependant on e-mail. We can’t do this on our own, it must be done in conjunction with the community that we interactive with. Don’t worry, you’ll be joining a growing bandwagon of reformers.

Declaring e-mail bancruptcy is not the answer, but refinancing is. I’ve already written about 7 common e-mail mistakes (there are more), but let’s come at it positively. Try this:

• Turn off automatic email checking in your email client (tell me which client you are using, and I’ll tell you how to do it).
  • This stops email interrupting you (even those little pop up messages play havoc with your attention and reduce productivity).
  • You will become concious of how often you check for email
• Try using Instant Messaging or the phone instead of email.
  • Get a corporate system or try MSN or Skype.
  • But avoid getting drawn into long conversations – more on Instant Messaging.

Send Less e-mail, and you’ll get less. Now, back to some real work…

Related Posts

• e-mailing your way to oblivion
• Is Broadcasting Something to Shout About?
• Communication – Becoming Fluid by Getting Uncomfortable
• A Perspective on Community
• Social Media Week London

Larry’s overview of the shifting world of content and copyrights and wrongs is truly thought provoking. The tectonic shift happening around creative commons is something anyone in the information industry should familiarise themselves with. The way that Larry communicates his message is noteworthy. Here are a few things he does that you can easy to apply to your own presentations:

1. Using visuals to emphasise your emphasis!
2. Illustrating using parallel stories.
3. Anchoring key concepts in order to back reference them.
4. Silence is more powerful that words.

Watch the talk, then read the explanations.

Use visuals to signal your emphasis

This is huge part of what your slides should be about, visually highlighting your verbal message. A slide with one word calls that word out when you speak it. It makes it stick and it makes it stand out. It works for short phrases too. Notice the use of black on white, then reversed white on black in the slides.

Illustrate using parallel stories.

We aren’t always great at getting things when they come at us head on, but we do get a story. Notice how Larry uses the story of flight and trespass, weaving it across into his message. If you want to get a complex issue across, it is easier to explain it in terms of something that is already familiar or that is less complex. Is there a parallel story to the one you want to tell? Tell that first, then link your concepts back to it. People will understand more and remember more.

Anchor key concepts then back reference them

Notice how Larry anchors his points with a word or a visual, then uses that later to reference back to his point. This is a great communication technique. When you make a point, anchor it with a visual or a distinctive phrase. You can then use this visual or phrase to remind people of that concept later in your presentation. It is a bit like creating a short cut or a bookmark that you can click later. Visual anchors make a rapid connection, in fractions of a second. As soon as you see the image of those planes in the last part of the presentation, you reconnect with his first story. Powerful isn’t it?

Silence is more powerful than words

One of the most impactful points I have seen made from a slide was made by not reading or mentioning the last point on the slide. In Larry’s presentation, there is the moment where he puts up a slide and mentions the TED ‘no commercials’ rule. Job done. Not reading a bullet point, or putting up a slide then not commenting on it, actually communicates something. In a smaller audience, it can cause people to ask about it, which is a great dynamic. Silence can be a communication tool.

Larry’s presentation is great, although he doesn’t engage with slides in the way that Al Gore does (see A presentation from Al Gore), which leaves you wondering when to look where. Also his eyes didn’t always connect with audience, but he makes very good use of pauses and word emphasis and is a pleasure to listen to all the same. Compelling content and presentation.

In your next presentation try anchoring your key points with simple visuals  and tell a clear story.

Related Posts

• 10 Things Not To Do In Business PowerPoint Presentation
• Preparing to Present – A Check List for Presenting at a Conference or Large Event
• 10 Tips for better Powerpoint
• See it, hear it – not the death of powerpoint
• Communication – Becoming Fluid by Getting Uncomfortable

The actionable take aways and triggered thoughts for me:

• The research referenced is a good confirmation that it makes sense to draw a diagram (or create something visual) when talking with people. It helps to create focus. It also assists people who work visually rather than verbally, and speeds knowledge transfer.
• PowerPoint slides full of words are counter productive. I so often see PowerPoint used instead of a real document, when people are too lazy or scared to produce one. Text heavy slides take people’s attention away from what is being said…
• Never loose your audience to the slide, by putting up a screenful of text! I see this happen over and over. Huge slide of text. Audience lost READING, no longer LISTENING.
• Don’t read a word heavy slide to you audience. It can come across as insulting. Remember…
• The slides are there to support the speaker. The speaker is not there to support the slides!

I love the picture of a slide at a conference half way down the page. It is used as an example of poor PowerPoint use – I think might have I sat in on that presentation! Much of what is written there applies to communicating even when you are not the kind of person who uses PowerPoint.

Related Posts

• Larry Lessig – Copyright and Great Presenting
• Communication – Becoming Fluid by Getting Uncomfortable
• A Perspective on Community
• Social Media Week London
• Do Your Employees Dance?

E-mail lacks so many of the visual and auditory cues that we need to communicate effectively, yet people write less clearly and deliberately than they would in a letter.

The opportunity for mis-communication and emotional trauma is almost endless. Recently I have been comparing the organizational effectiveness of e-mail, phone calls, conference calls and face to face communication. I am sure you won’t be surprised to hear that e-mail comes out bottom in terms of results achieved against time invested.

My conclusions?

• If you can pick up the phone and get hold of the person, pick up the phone. In the long run it is actually quicker and cheaper.
• A conference call will achieve more than an email storm almost any day.
• If something has emotional element (e.g. might cause a strong emotional reaction), then the communication does not belong on email.

Related Posts

• E-mail 2.0
• Is Broadcasting Something to Shout About?
• Communication – Becoming Fluid by Getting Uncomfortable
• A Perspective on Community
• Social Media Week London