Becoming a competent, rather than just confident, speaker requires loads of practice. Here are a few tips to start sharpening your presentation skills:
1. Death By Powerpoint
In order to avoid this disease, should have no more than 10 slides, last no longer than 20  minutes and have no text less than 30 point font.
2. Be Entertaining
Your speech should appeal to your audience’s emotions. Remember that no-one will pay any attention to you unless you give them the WIIFM – the most listened to radio station in the world – the What’s In It For Me. Be very clear about this and use it to your advantage.
3. Slow Down
Nervous and inexperienced speakers tend to speak way too quickly. Slow yourself down to a pace that seems unnaturally slow and use the power of the pause to add dramatic emphasis.
4. Eye Contact
Make eye contact with every person in the room. Address each person with a complete thought before pausing and moving on to the next audience member. 
5. Become A Story Teller
Your speech should always be visual so paint mind pictures for your audience. Explain your points with short stories, quips and anecdotes. Great speakers know how to use a story to create an emotional connection between ideas for the audience.
6. Project Your Voice
Even if you’re delivering your speech with a microphone make sure you throw out your voice at least 3 feet or 1 metre in front of you. You want everyone to hear your passion and power and this just won’t happen if you don’t push your voice out. You can practices this at home to a dot  on a wall throwing your voice out like a ball to hit the target.
7. Be Animated And Use Gestures
Allow yourself to speak with your hands to add passion to your performance. One of the worst things you can do in delivering a speech is to grip the lectern or keep your hands plastered by your side or behind your back. Relax and allow your whole body to impart the story and connect with your audience.

Written on April 23rd, 2013 by Uyen Vu​

Research shows that online video is one of the fastest routes to conversions, customer engagement and clickthroughs.

A January 2013 report by Econsultancy explored the relationship between savvy online video marketing and retail success with surprising results. The study found that shoe e-tailer Zappos boosted sales by between 6 and 30 per cent after embedding online videos throughout its product pages. It also reported that equestrian sports supplier Ariat saw a 160 per cent conversion rate increase after product videos had been viewed.

Here are tips for using online video to drive user engagement, search value and your bottom line. 

Create customer-friendly content
Think strategically about the type of content that’s likely to resonate with your customers and then generate online videos that they are compelled to tweet, cross-post and share. Try creating product demos that highlight the features and benefits of your product or how-to videos that take the pain out of a simple task. You’ll be surprised at how focusing on relevance will accelerate your engagement levels while heightening site traffic and sales.

Keep it short and sharp
It’s important that your videos are short, sharp and interesting enough to capture your customer within the first few seconds. Remember that your ideal prospect is likely to be bombarded with messages and it’s vital to set yourself apart. It’s also critical to optimise for SEO by using keywords in your titles, descriptions and tags. Making an effort to be SEO-friendly from the outset often equates to a stellar performance when it comes to search.

Don’t forget to measure your results
Whether you’re launching a full-scale video marketing campaign or including video content across your e-commerce site, it’s essential to track your results. If you keep on top of metrics such as traffic sources, views, viewing time and audience information, you’ll glean enough information to help supercharge your online video efforts.

Online video is a powerful way to drive brand awareness and capture new customers, but it depends on how fast you can master the basic skills. What are your foolproof tips for blitzing video marketing?

Content from Ragan’s Annual Corporate Communicators Conference

Would a crisis situation catch your company off guard?
Just because you haven’t faced one doesn’t mean you won’t. Instead of shaking in your boots, be ready.
Dallas Lawrence, chief global digital strategist for Burston-Marsteller, offers 12 tips:

1. Know and engage key conversation drivers early and often. Find the people who are talking about your brand. Engage with them and keep the conversation going.

2. Know your antagonists. Identify them. Watch them. If they disseminate inaccurate information about your brand, you need to be there to make it right.

3. Avoid the information vacuum. Lacking official news, CNN scraped together what it could to inaccurately report “breaking news” during the Boston bombings. Don’t try to be first—be accurate.

4. Develop clear and effective platform-appropriate messaging. Lawrence cites the Domino’s pizza crisis that featured two employees doing disgusting things with pizza, recording it on video, and posting it to YouTube. Lawrence says Domino’s was right to respond in the same medium—video.

5. Own your brand before someone else does. Social media makes it easy for people to hijack brands by creating fake accounts. Own your space in social media to ensure no one tells your story for you.

6. Know who speaks for your brand. Identify your spokesperson and arm him with information.

7. Integrate your social media channels. Are your social media channels integrated to amplify each other? Have a strategy in place.

8. Make sure you know what you’re talking about. Ashton Kutcher expressed outrage after Joe Paterno was fired and later admitted he didn’t know anything about the situation. Don’t pull an Ashton Kutcher.

9. Own up quickly. “There is an enormous willingness to forgive, as long as you’re willing to admit you were wrong,” says Lawrence.

10. Use humor—if appropriate. Sometimes a situation is so bad there’s only one tool you can use—humor. “This is a very tricky weapon to use,” cautions Lawrence. You don’t want to use it in life and death situations or tragedies.

11. Beware of data-hunters. “If you are in business today, you are in the business of data,” says Lawrence. There are people who are aggressively trying to get your information. Have a plan in place to protect it.
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12. Arm your employees. Employees are your secret weapon. Tell them what they can do on social media—not what they can’t. Arm them with information and empower them.

Here’s some tips to help get your messages across best:

1. Use a friendly tone like you’re at a dinner party or a BBQ chatting to friends.

2. Be genuine and passionate.

3. Imagine you’re talking to one person only not an en mass audience.

4. Avoid big words, insider jargon or fancy acronyms.

5. Pitch the level of conversation at around a 15 year old mentality. If a 15 year old can understand and appreciate what you’re saying, you are right on target.

6. Sound conversational, have a smile in your voice (if it’s not an horrific or sad topic)
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7. Use gestures to animate your performance.

Published on 20th April 2013 by Erik Bernstein.

Be the source of information and stop damaging rumor and innuendo in their tracks

​A huge part of successful crisis management is finding, or creating, the opportunity to tell your own story. Why, you might ask? The main reason is that it’s going to be told either way, and if you clam up, it won’t be people with your best interests in mind who do the telling.
One of our favorite sayings is, “in the absence of communication, rumor and innuendo fill the gap.” Would you rather get out there and talk, or have your detractors, competition, or random speculators on social media fill in the gaps with whatever fancies them?

How can you be in position to take control of the story? Here are a few tips:

Preparation: There’s what word again, “preparation.” It’s not by chance that this step appears in just about every crisis management how-to we publish. Preparing crisis plans, messaging, etc. is THE premiere way to ensure that you’re ready to react to a crisis while others are still standing in the gates.

Communication: Want to be the source of the story? Make it easy. Have an online newsroom, not tucked away behind some teeny-tiny link at the bottom of your site, but in a highly visible location somewhere up top. Fill it with the latest information on your organization and the current crisis, so that media or stakeholders looking for the latest info “straight from the horse’s mouth” are actually able to find it at any time of day, from anywhere in the world. In addition, make yourself readily available to stakeholders and the media alike, so that when they hear negative chatter it’ll be run by you before being repeated.

​Relationships: Despite what some would have you believe, media relations have not gone the way of the Dodo. In fact, the rise of e-reporting via social media has made it even more important to build strong relationships with the people who cover your industry, whether accredited reporter or mommy blogger. For instance, if you scratch a few backs by sharing any juicy scoops you can offer, chances are you’ll get a chance to speak your piece when reporting negative news about your organization.
If you don’t leave gaps in the story, then rumor and innuendo have nowhere to gain a foothold. Take these lessons to heart, and become the go-to source for information in your next crisis.

Whether to media, to your team or to a large audience, here’s a few tips to get it right:

1. Focus on three key messages. No more.

2. If you try to communicate more than three points, people
will remember nothing.

3. If you have more than three points, write an article or a book. Leave the extra ones out of your verbal presentation.

4. State your most important message first – don’t bury the main message.

5. A good speaker/media communicator is also a good editor.

6.If you could write the headline and the first three sentences to your story in the newspaper, what would they be?

​7. Messages that come out of your mouth need to be shorter, simpler and less complex than messages you put in press releases, columns, brochures, manuals and books.
Want more tips? Just ask me … I have plenty!

1. Know Your Material
By the time you get to your video shoot, you should know your material by heart if not word for word. Record yourself on your smart phone and listen to it as often as you can. Walk with it in your ears, drive with it in your car, sleep with it in your bed. You’ll be amazed how fast you integrate it!

2. Befriend the Autocue
Being able to read naturally from an autocue or teleprompter has become a necessary skill for any corporate executive whose job is it to communicate. Still, it’s a tricky skill to master, as it can impede the natural rhythm of our speech and add unnecessary pressure. My advice? Make friends with the autocue and learn to lead the read by setting your own pace. Also practice focusing in on the middle word on any given line and get used to taking in the words that come before it and after it in order to avoid eye movements.

3. Dress For Success
Even though the news that you’re about to star in your company’s upcoming video production can be cause for celebration, don’t rush off to invest in a new wardrobe – unless you know what works best. Dark, solid colors such as navy blues and blacks work best on video; detailed, bold and intricate patterns can cause problems for the camera. Please don’t wear an ill fitting brown suit – that will simply take your power away! Avoid green, (this is good general fashion advice) but especially true when shooting against a green chroma key background. Same goes for blue if the screen is blue. Always ask what colour the screen is beforehand. Remember, pastel and neutral colours, clean lines and simplicity work best on camera!

4. Make the Most of Your Muscle Memory
If you’ve been in the workforce for a while you probably have years of experience communicating in a calm and controlled manner. Use these traits as a basis to your delivery and add ‘performance passion’ to what you do on camera. Electronic media actually plays down your performance so you need to lift your personality to a level where it almost seems a bit silly for yourself. A great technique is to rehearse as if you’re delivering pantomime style to a group of pre-schoolers. When you return to your usual corporate style, your body subconsciously remembers many of the emotions and gestures that came from playing with the script during rehearsal.
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5. Use the KISS Principle
Always make sure you use professional equipment and professional operators if you want to appear your best. Like bad wedding photography, little things such as poor lighting and below par sound quality have the potential to turn your production from professional to amateurish. If you need advice on crews to use, feel free to ask me – I know loads of great operators – all over the world!