Discover the Impact of Technology in Public Speaking! 🎤

Do you struggle with fear, doubt, and worry in your public speaking? Do you find it difficult to connect with your audience and deliver presentations that leave a lasting, positive, unforgettable impact? If yes, then let's dive in the world of public speaking and presentation skills with your host, Eric Edmeads. Welcome to the Unforgettable podcast.

Welcome back to the Q and A section of the Speaker Nation podcast. I'm your host, Erik Ed Means, and as always, I'm answering your questions about your speaking career. And today the questions are focused on technology. That is to say, how can you use technology effectively in your speaking career? Question number one is this. What are the best types of visual aids for your speech? Well, I'm going to say this. The very best visual aid for your speech is the audience's imagination. I want to be really clear about this. I hardly ever use slides. I hardly ever used technology to enhance the quality of my presentation. And the vast majority of the time that I see people doing it, I see it as a crutch. I don't see it as something that is adding, but rather distracting or detracting from the quality of the presentation. Not always. Not every time, but the majority of the time. And so the very best visual aid that you're ever going to have when you're delivering for an audience is the audience's imagination and your capacity for. For creating an experience for them through the magic of storytelling. Now, that said, there is a time for using technology for your speeches, and I want to give you some examples of how I've done it and when I think it's really powerful. Slides can be amazing. But slides should never guide your presentation. They should only ever be an accent to it. So, for example, if you have just finished climbing Kilimanjaro and you want to provide proof of that, a photograph of you standing at the top of Kilimanjaro can be very useful. So slides can be used for evidentiary purposes. Slides can also be used for evoking emotion. That is to say that if you would like people to feel overwhelming feelings of love, maybe you show them a really cute picture of a golden retriever cuddling with a baby because you are trying to evoke a particular emotional response. So you can use technology like that. And one of my other favorites is music. Music can be unbelievably powerful in a presentation. It requires a higher degree of choreography as to what you're going to speak about, because you need to make that what you're speaking about matches the music you're using. But I can give you an example of how I use it most often, and that is when I'm doing visualization exercises or even guided meditations. Then I have music, and the music adds so much depth and texture to the entire experience. One last area of technology I want you to think about, and that is lighting. It is really important that you are well lit when you're speaking, well lit for the audience, and well lit for any cameras that might be running. And also, you want to make sure that the lighting is set in a way that it is not obtrusive to the audience. Just recently, I was at a conference that had these big spotlights on the audience, but the trouble was, is they were aimed a little bit low and they were burning out the eyes of the audience if ever they turned around. So you want to make sure that the technology you're using relative to the lighting, it's good for you and it's good for the audience. And I said that was only one more, but there's one more, and that is the microphone. The microphone can be one of the most powerful tools you have up there because it allows you to modulate your voice and allows you to make, you know, sound effects. There we were, walking through the alley. It was dark at night, and you know what I felt? I felt my heart in my chest. There are things you can do with a microphone, there are skills you can learn where you can use the microphone as an instrument to create all kinds of accent for your talk. So these are some of the ways you can use technology to make things even better. Question number two. How can speakers effectively use social media to enhance their speaking career? Well, that's a big question, isn't it? And of course, we have some masterclasses on that and workshops on that that go into a deep dive. But for here and right now, I want to suggest that you think of social media in two different ways. The one is, in cultivating an audience, you see, these days, the person who owns the audience is really in command. I can tell you right now that in the old days of book publishing, the way it worked was you wanted to write a book, and you went to the agent and you wrote a proposal, and the agent took your proposal and they rewrote it, and then they sent it to a publisher, and you basically begged for the opportunity to write your book. But nowadays, if you have enough followers, they come to you or they respond to you a lot more quickly. So one way to look at social media is that social media is about you cultivating an audience. And if you want a really great cash course in this, honestly, you should watch the Justin Bieber movie. I know it seems like an odd referral coming from a guy like me, but I can tell you right now, if you watch the way Justin Bieber used social media to attract people to each of his initial engagements, we're talking about going to little radio stations and performing and using Twitter to get 20 people to show up, and then 30 people the next one. By the time he was done with that tour, he was selling out Madison Square Gardens. Now, I'm not suggesting you or I are going to do it quite the way Justin Bieber did, but the point is, is that if you recognize social media is a cultivation of your existing audience, that's a very powerful thing. Now, the next thing is that you can use your speaking, your speeches and presentations to create content for your social media. I want you to know that you should never, ever take the stage without a camera spinning. You should record every single thing you do, sometimes on a phone, sometimes with a professional camera, record them, and then you have those videos so that you can create compelling stories and compelling reels. One more thing, thinking of stories and TikTok and so forth, that as you grow with your notoriety and you create more and more followers, people start to become curious about your life and what it's like to do what you do, whatever it is that you're speaking about. And so what I often do is open up Instagram and share the behind the scenes. I share them, what it's like to walk up to the podcasting studio or prepare for the event, doing my sound checks and so forth. And that's another great way to use social media to involve people in your story. The more involved they feel in your story, the more committed and loyal they become to you. They start getting to a place where anytime you come to town, they want to be there. So social media can be a really powerful tool. What are my thoughts on virtual versus public and live speaking? Well, I'm going to break it into three categories. There's pre recorded virtual, there's live virtual, and then there's live speaking. I can tell you categorically, my favorite is live. I love being in front of an audience. I can speak for hours and hours and I can interact and I can run workshops for days upon days, and I absolutely love it. And. And I love it for so many reasons. But the biggest reason is because there's a exchange of energy going on. I'm putting out tons and tons of energy, and I'm Receiving energy back. And it's a phenomenal exchange of energy and I love that so much. And so it's my favorite, favorite kind of speaking. It's limited though, isn't it? It's limited in its scope. I mean, you know, if you want to run workshops, it means people need to fly to you, it means you need to rent a venue. There's only so many people you can fit in the room. And so there's certain limitations with life. Might be my favorite version. But when you start looking at virtual, you have a bunch of advantages. So zoom, you know, steam yard and a variety of different ways to broadcast yourself out in the world. Facebook Live, Instagram Live. These are also really powerful ways that you can present to people. And truthfully, the mechanisms of engagement that we teach here at Speaker Nation, they're cross platform. There are some subtle differences between camera work and an audience, but the truth is, storytelling, voice modulation, facial expressions, all of those things are true across all the platforms. And so I really do like live webinar speaking and I really, really enjoy live interaction with people online because it creates for me a little bit of that live audience feeling. But let's talk about the prerecorded stuff. It's my least favorite kind. Here I am doing it with you right now. I've done it all day today. And I'll tell you something, I've learned to love it. And I'll tell you why, because it's the ultimate in leverage. Some years ago, I rented a studio just down the street from my house and I spent a week with a fabulous film crew from Mindvalley and we recorded the first professional version of Wildfit. And to this date, tens of thousands of people have watched those videos. Tens of thousands of people from all over the world. And so you see, each of these mediums have different advantages and disadvantages. Well produced, strategically designed, pre recorded content has the incredible capacity for leverage. You can put those things on YouTube and they can just go out there like crazy. Then you've got the live webinar format. Well, there are big advantages. I live in the Caribbean and so what it means is when I have 500 or a thousand or a few thousand people watching me live, guess what? I didn't have to fly to them and they didn't have to fly to me. Pretty carbon neutral, I would say repurposable, because of course we record all those things, which means we can take out the snippets and use them in social media. And then we go to my favorite venue and that is the live event. The live event with anything from 50 to 5,000 to 50,000 people. I love it. I enjoy it. Maybe it's that inner rock star that wants to come out, but I really like doing it. And guess what? It's also repurposable. Some of my most popular videos on YouTube are talks that I did live that were captured very well and then published on each of those venues. Each of those mediums can be incredibly powerful, and I suggest that you use all three once again. As always, I'm answering your questions to help you refine your speaking skills and your speaking business so that you can truly be heard. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe, leave us a review and share it with your friends. You can share it with them at www.unforgettable show.

So that's it for today's episode of Unforgettable. Head on over to itunes or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week who posts a review on itunes will win a chance in the grand prize drawing to win a private $25,000 VIP day with Eric Edmeads himself. Be sure to head on over to Unforgettable show and pick up a free copy of Eric's gift and join us on the next episode.