Archive for April, 2007

WORKING WITH SMALL AUDIENCES

April 30, 2007 at 10:20 am · Filed under Media Coaching, Presentation

No, I don’t mean a theatre full of people of restricted growth, or whatever the current term is. I mean that room full of chairs, sparsely populated by people of all shapes and sizes.

Although many people profess to be more nervous in front of large groups of people, I bet that many of us would rather face that fear than what appears to be a show of apathy from whoever was invited. The most important thing is to maintain your professionalism. I was once at an event which over-ran badly, leaving an audience of only three people of the original two hundred or so. I was there to the bitter end, mainly because the organiser was giving me a lift back to the station. To her credit, the last speaker did her full speech, with no reference to the paucity of recipients. At the end, the three of us gave her a standing ovation. One of the other audience members came up to her, shook her by the hand, offered his card and said “Call me – we’d love to have you speak at our conference”. You never know who is watching. Always, always do your best, whoever you are speaking to.

By Alan Stevens, Media Coach www.mediacoach.co.uk

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FOUR WAYS TO RUIN A SPEECH

April 30, 2007 at 9:54 am · Filed under Presentation, Public Speaking

 - GUARANTEED No, of course you don’t want to make a mess of your speech. So here are five things to avoid.

1) Make fun of your audience. OK, a little light humour doesn’t hurt. Oliver Double, in his great book “Stand-up”, tells a story about when he was playing a student union and said “It’s funny being here, since it was where I was going to study – then I passed my A-levels”. The silence he suffered that night shouldn’t happen to you. If you need to make fun of someone, make it yourself.

2) Read it from your notes As children, we like a bedtime story read to us. As adults, we want to hear a story told with passion and power, straight from the heart. If you work from a script, you might as well send an actor to do it for you.

3) Run over time You have made an agreement to deliver your speech in a certain time. If you haven’t been given an allotted time, tell the audience at the start how long you will take. The audience agrees to be attentive for that period. If your delivery exceeds their attention, beware. 4) Pretend you know more than you do. Your audience will not be easily fooled. If you try to give the impression of being an expert in a topic that you don’t fully understand, they will see through it. Talk only about that which you know and understand. Leave everything else alone.

By Alan Stevens, Media Coach www.mediacoach.co.uk

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Get Noticed – 17th April 2007

April 27, 2007 at 10:21 am · Filed under Media Coaching, PR

This month our PR spotlight is on Julie Woodard of www.maroque.co.uk who has been a PR coaching client for approximately 5 months. The Moroccan food, beauty products and homewares from www.maroque.co.uk have been featured in BBC Homes, BBC Antiques, Period Ideas, She, House and Garden, Instyle, The Sunday Times, Saturday Telegraph, and The Evening Standard. 

Read on to find out what works for Julie…Julie, how much time do you spend on PR?
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I aim to spend about 6 hours a week on all PR/Marketing activities. I would like to spend more, but spending 6 would be nice on a more regular basis.

What PR activities have you found that work for you?
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Articles work really well, even if they don’t use the article straight away, they come back. Product emails are useful, as it keeps the awareness there (and once the list is done, it’s fairly straightforward to do).Competitions are a fairly cheap way of getting yourself known and even better if you get the contact list of all entrants 


Where are you now with your relationships with the press?
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Fine if I can get hold of them. I need to work on building relationships, so they think of coming to me for anything Moroccan, foreign, exotic.
What do you enjoy least?
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The time taken in getting hold of people. And sometimes they can be plain rude.Also getting started. Faced with a big PR list, I can turn procrastination into an art form. 


What’s been your highest point so far PR-wise?
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Having House and Garden phone up and say they would be using a part of my article I sent to them about 4 months earlier. And could they have the products to photograph. I was definitely on a major PR high that day, I could do anything.And your lowest?
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First time phoning beauty editors, I had no idea people could be so rude.I have since watched the film Devil wears Prada, and I’m sure I spoke to several of them. It took a while and Paula’s talking to Journalists course to regain the confidence to pick up the phone to them again. 

What have you learnt?
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To me, help and guidance are essential. I floundered around like a fish out of water not quite knowing where to start, until I joined Paula’s coaching sessions. The results are amazing and from a small business point, where you can find time (not easily) but cash is tight the results are amazing. PR certainly made a big different to my sales, where as advertising didn’t.

What advice do you have to give?
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It is most definitely worth putting the time into PR. But get the right support; it makes your time more productive. 

What did you find helpful about your PR course and coaching with Do Your Own PR?
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The monthly coaching sessions are invaluable to as it gives me the structure I need, support and someone to brainstorm ideas with. The writing newsletter course was brilliant as it gave me a formula to work from, which made the task of writing them less daunting.

And finally, can you link a rise in turn over with PR?
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I strongly believe PR had had a very positive effect on increasing by turnover. I set myself a target turnover to achieve in a set period, spending the time and money on PR and I far exceeded my target and even my expectations.

By Paula Gardner, Founder of www.doyourownpr.com

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– Communicate with confidence, speak with style

April 27, 2007 at 10:09 am · Filed under Media Coaching, Presentation

WHAT’S YOUR AESOP? An Aesop, in TV Terms, is “the moral of the story”. There is a limited number of Aesops that TV dramatists use, such as –

  • Honesty is the best policy
  • Be true to yourself
  • Follow your heart
  • Change is good
  • Change is bad

OK, there are contradictions. But as you know, there are no moral absolutes (sic). The moral is, you have to have a moral. When you deliver a speech, there has to be some point to it. There has to be a message that the audience take away. It doesn’t have to be one of the TV drama clichés, either. However, over the years, I think I could count no more than 20 distinct morals from the speakers that I’ve seen. The important thing is that the message you intend to send is the message that arrives. The best way to deliver your Aesop? Tell the audience what it is.

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