Ep 75 What is the Best Communication Medium for You March 15 16

What is the best medium for you.

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public to the media, at work and in life. Speaking with TJ Walker.

In today's program, I'll be going into great detail on how you as an individual, as an organization, big or small, should really decide what medium is best for you. Where do you want to focus most of your energies when communicating with people? But first let's go to some of the viewer mail. As you know, this show is primarily about me answering questions from you. You can email me questions infoediatrainingworldwide. You can post them on Twitter, Facebook, wherever you see this show. So just a quick, quick reminder, do.

You have a speaking related question for number one USA Today best selling author TJ Walker? For more than 30 years, Walker has been a public speaking coach and media trainer to presidents of Countries, Prime Ministers, CEOs, Nobel Peace Prize winners, professional athletes and Ms. Universes. Send your questions to infoediatrainingworldwide.com or on Twitter J. Walker.

And by the way, we take not just questions but comments as well. This one comes in today from one of our viewers, regular viewers on YouTube. By the way, those of you listening on itunes and podcasts around the world, the show is available on video as well on YouTube, Flickr, Dailymotion, number of other sites and for those of you who are watching this on YouTube or a video file sharing site, you can also subscribe on itunes and listen to it. Sometimes that's more convenient. You're on subway or in a car, airplane. That can be easier going right to the mail. This is from E. Dunlop commenting on my show about the Amy Cuddy, the well known psychologist at the Harvard Business School who has the second most popular of all time speech on Ted.com she says. TJ I agree with you. Amy Cuddy does seem a bit gimmicky to me. Surprised they didn't just have her at TEDx. This trend of highly credible professionals selling us gimmicks and snake oil scares me. And by the way folks, you can disagree with me too. I am going to go into more comments on this Amy Cuddy situation later in the week from some of my colleagues who feel I was too harsh on Amy Cuddy. And again, brief summary. Amy Cuddy says that if you stand like Wonder Woman, you will fill your body with confidence. Your body language confidence will make you feel more confident. You'll give a great speech. I criticize that saying it's basically a stupid waste of time. You should actually focus on having a great speech like Amy Cuddy. Does a few points. A great personal story, as Amy Cuddy does, and great graphics as Amy Cuddy does. That's why she's successful, not because of standing like wonder woman. So, Mr. E. Dunlop, thank you so much for writing in. We will be following this controversy. It's gotten a fair amount of attention and there has been some backlash. So I do want to follow up on that. And by the way, if you want to not just ask questions, but criticize me, disagree. Take an issue with something. Feel free. I will share everything and everything, anything and everything on this program with your fellow listeners and viewers. All you have to do is post it wherever you see this show, whether you're watching it on Facebook or listening to it on itunes or on my blog. Now to the central issue, the central topic of the day. What is the best medium for you? This is an issue that everyone has to face in the modern world. As Gary Vaynerchuk says, every company is a media company these days. If not, you're in big trouble. You could say, well, I'm not a media company. I am a pipe supply company. Your website is a medium. Your newsletter is a medium. Your Twitter page or your Facebook page is a medium. And you've got to figure out how to use it effectively to communicate. Now, there are some large corporations that take the attitude of, oh, we're big. We have 200 people on our communication staff. We can do everything. Maybe, maybe not. But for most organizations in the world, you've got to make very serious choices. You've got to be strategic. And strategic is really just a fancy word for figuring out what not to do. Because if you really tried to use every single communication tool available to you today, you can have thousands of employees and there'd still be some new social media site or some new vine video app or Snapchat app that you haven't gotten to. So you have to really come up with a strategy and figure out what not to do, and then to figure out what is most effective. And it's not always an exact science. I want to share with you some of my own failures in this regard. So when YouTube started more than 10 years ago, I thought, great, here's an easy way to share video, because I've been making videos for decades, but it hasn't been easy to share with people. So I said, okay, here's an easy way of doing it. So I went all in on YouTube. I've had 10,000 videos on YouTube, but here's what I found. There's so much clutter on YouTube, it's really hard for people to find you, especially if you're giving serious, helpful, logical, rational, straightforward how to information and you're not glitzing it up with special effects and beautiful naked people and that sort of thing, which obviously this show is not about. How do you really get an audience? So audiences have gone up and down. But I chose the medium of video because I teach people how to speak. And what makes people nervous about speaking is that people can see you and you're doing it in front of people and you can't hide behind a keyboard, you can't hide behind a special effect. And that's what's different about speaking. And it involves your body and your hands and your voice. So I have always maintained that for what I do, even though I've written books and newsletters and blogs and all of that. I always try to direct people to video YouTube. But I've used plenty of other platforms and certainly I've experienced some success with that and some of that has resonated. But recently doing more research, what I found was that the competitors I had, people I respect, nobody really seemed to have a good regular following when it comes to their YouTube channel. The people who somebody might have a video clip with, you know, 2 million views. But it was kind of a one hit wonder. There was a randomness as far as people in my niche, communications consultants, media trainers, public speaking experts. I simply didn't see anyone putting out regular content, whether you define that as daily, weekly or three times a month, putting out high quality content on a very regular basis and those videos getting overall a high level of views and their overall channel getting a high level of views. Again, you see one hit wonders and then you see they haven't put out a new video in four years, but they have 12 million views. How does that help on a regular, ongoing basis? So I started doing more research and I've had people telling me about itunes for oh tj, you got to do a podcast. And probably eight years ago or so I did have staffers take the audio portions of videos I do and put them on itunes, but we just forgot about it. It was something we probably did for three months. Forgot about it. But I did some real media research and some soul searching three or four months ago. And what I found was that I actually do have a competitor and I'll go ahead and give her a shout out a plug. Lisa B. Marshall, the Public Speaker's Quick and Dirty Guide to Better Public Speaking, which is a great podcast. I'd recommend you subscribe to it. She has a massive audience and she's why she'd been doing it for nine years. The audience grew slowly over time, but now she has a quarter million plus downloads listeners every single month. That's what I consider a real success. So part of my due diligence was not just doing what I've been doing all along. It's not enough to do a lot because I was doing a lot. You constantly have to calibrate, see what's working, see what isn't working, look at the competitive landscape. What are the people who you respect actually doing to communicate with their customers, their prospects with the community you care about, with your industry? And so I found Lisa B. Marshall doing this thought, wow, she's really onto something. Now. Her show is weekly and it's audio format and it's typically under 10 minutes and people absolutely love it. So that's what made me think, if her audience is so much larger than mine, and I'm doing video, sometimes 20 videos a week, she's doing one audio a week. Maybe she knows something I don't know. And that's why when January 1, 2016 rolled around, I decided I'm going to do a daily podcast. Now, time will tell if it's smarter to do this daily or weekly. I choose daily because when I look at the history of talk show hosts, media personalities who've had the biggest impact on popular culture and within their niches, it's people who have daily shows from the political world, rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Pat Buchanan, for many years, Dr. Ruth Westheimer had a daily show for many years. So many Johnny Carson in the pop culture reign, it's people who have daily shows. I just didn't see a lot of examples of people who started a weekly show. I mean, Emeril in the food world, I didn't see a lot of examples of people who started a weekly show and really took off at a huge level. So that's why I decided I would do a daily show and that I would do it in audio, even though I happen to believe video is the superior medium for people learning about public speaking some level. It doesn't matter what I think. Now, here are the results. I am recording this program on March 3, 2016. So we are two months and three days into the program. In fact, this is actually episode 75. So I've done 75 of these programs and already my audience is larger for my podcast section of the show, the audio version of the show, than it is the video version. Now here's the thing, and you can say this is a sad, depressing fact. I've been doing videos on YouTube for 10 years. I've been doing audio podcasts for itunes and other podcasting services for two months. And my daily audience is now bigger for the podcast than for the video. Why is that? My theory is it's simply easier for people to find me on itunes. And whatever you're doing, whether you are a billion dollar construction company or a one person consultant on diversity, you need to think about how people are going to find you. So for example, if somebody goes to YouTube and types in public speaking, they are going to have an extraordinarily difficult time finding me. They're going to have to go like on page six before they find any videos from me. Therefore, it's highly unlikely that I'm going to get new subscribers to my YouTube channel from people who are searching for public speaking. Now, it is true that you type in media training. I'm number one as of this production date on YouTube crisis communications too. But my biggest phrase, in fact the name of this show is Speaking with TJ Walker. It's not media training with TJ Walker. Speaker is the larger. Speaking is the larger umbrella term. But here's the interesting thing. If you go to itunes the first week I started this show and you type in public speaking, boom, I'm right on the screen. Even on a cell phone, certainly on an iPad or a computer, I was in the top 10 and on the top five for some of my keywords, even in the top two for presentation skills and media training. So if someone went to itunes and they wanted audio content specific to public speaking, boom, they definitely found me. The other thing is, other than Lisa B. Marshall, if they wanted someone who had new content, they this week you're really down to a couple of choices. So anyone who wants new regular content, boom, it was very, very easy to find me. So this is not to suggest that you have to do an audio podcast and it's certainly not to suggest you have to do a daily podcast that is too much for most, even some big corporations. That could be too much. But I do want you to see the thought process of try stuff, figure out what works, measure, look at the competition, keep measuring, see what works, do more of what works. Now, at some point, if my video audience goes down, at the moment it's going up. But in theory, if the audience to the video portion of my show goes down and the audio keeps going up into the millions, I might say I'm not even Going to do video. It's not a lot of extra work. But all things being equal, it is simpler to do audio. So what does this mean for you? You need to ask yourself some hard questions. Number one, what is it your audience wants? How do they like to receive information about your subject matter, about your product, your service, your. Your niche? That should be your first concern. Not what's comfortable for you, but your audience. You might not be comfortable doing videos or audios. You don't like the sound of your own voice, get over it if that is what your audience wants. But you've got to match it to what's relevant. If you are a writing instructor and you teach people how to write and you have novel writing boot camps and summer camps for kids on how to write, I would suggest your primary medium would be text. Write more books, write ebooks, write blog posts. Have lots of blog posts a day. I probably wouldn't even worry about video other than a couple of intro ones on your site. So people get a sense of who you are and get a sense that you're a real person. Because you are about text, you are about writing. So demonstrate writing. If you are a graphic art specialist, then you should be really communicating graphically and you should be putting up a lot of pictures on Pinterest and Flickr and your Facebook page. You should be constantly demonstrating what's unique about yourself as it relates to graphics. So focus on what you are about now. If you're not completely sure, you're going to have to try different things and you might not get it right. I hope you're smarter than I was and you don't go down a rabbit hole for 10 years and waste a lot of time and money. I'm not saying mine was all wasted, but in retrospect, I should have monitored more closely and I should have done a stronger test eight years ago, nine years ago with the audio podcast. And a part of that is, I'm ashamed to say, just my own ego. I'm thinking, wow, I'm a TV star and I'm a talk show host and I'm good on tv, so I want to do that wrong. The focus has to be what is convenient and useful to your audience and what do they actually use. And I'm already seeing that more and more of you prefer audio. Now. I'm still getting a lot of feedback from people who feel like they're learning a lot from the video, too, so I'll continue that. But don't make the mistake. I do. It's not about what you want to avoid. It's not about what you like and think you're good at. It's got to be about what actually reaches your audience. Focus on that, and over time, you'll build an audience and you'll build your business. You'll get more people aware of whatever issue you're trying to put a spotlight on. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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