TJ Walker teaches how to give speeches on camera. Start by deciding what you want your audience to do, narrow your message to five key points with concrete examples, then rehearse by recording yourself and speak as if talking to one person.
What's the best way to prepare a speech and deliver a speech? If you're not speaking to a group of people face to face, but you're doing it online, where you're looking at a camera, the reality is it's not much different from an in person speech. The first thing you need to do is sort of step back and ask yourself, what's my agenda here? What do I really want this audience to do? Do I want them to buy from me? Hire me? Do I want them to invest in my company? Do I want them to vote for my candidate? What is it I want them to do for me? Then what you need to do is brainstorm on every possible idea, every message that might actually motivate that audience online to do the thing you want them to do. You may come up with 10, 20, 30, 50 ideas. The more the merrier at this stage. Now, here's the most important part. Before you hit record, before you go live, you need to scrutinize these messages, hold them up to the light and put them in priority. You need to figure out, you've got a hundred messages, what is the hundredth most important message? What's the most important message? Put them in priority. Now look at them. Anything that didn't make the top five, scratch them off, throw them in the trash can. Put that in the category of I'll email people stuff if they want to know about that. But you need to figure out what are literally your five most important ideas. Then what you need to do is figure out an example for each idea, ideally a story for each idea. Something that involves a conversation you had or someone had with another person in a particular place about a particular problem, how you felt and how it was resolved, and the message that people should take away from that story. You want, ideally, at least one story for every single message point. Now, do I want you to memorize all this? No, that's hard work. I want you to type up the whole story, word for word, and put a teleprompter in front of your camera so, so you can read it and not mess up a word. No, that is too much work. All I really want you to do is to get a single sheet of paper, type it up, use big bold letters, make sure it's on a single sheet of paper, make sure the font is large enough that you don't have to bend down or put on glasses, and then just put it in front of of your computer. Now you're in front of the camera, you can glance down, look at your first message and just talk, talk to the camera like you're talking to one person. So one of the things that is different about communicating to a group of people versus on a camera is you really want to give people a sense that you're talking to one person. Because when people are watching it, typically they are alone in their own home office or their own regular office office, or they could be on a bus or a plane somewhere. So you definitely do not want to have this projection tone of voice when I'm glad all of you could be here today. No, no, you want it to sound intimate, like you're talking to one friend, no matter how serious the topic is, and to really take it up a notch. If you want to prepare, do a practice. You've got your script. You can hit record on your webcam or your cell phone. Look at it. Here's a script. Now, this is a literally a script I used for a one hour presentation yesterday. Notice it only has five numbers. It's just five points and then a couple of words underneath each one to remind me of what to say. So it really is that simple. So the next step is to rehearse your presentation, practice it, record it, look at it, ask yourself, would I want to watch this person speaking? If you can't say yes to that, it means you need to do it again. Maybe tweak it, maybe come up with better examples. The number one problem in every presentation, whether it's to a live group of people in front of you or online in front of a camera, is dumping way too much data. Too many bullet points, too many numbers, and doing it at an abstract manner that is instantly forgettable. You've got to focus on the real challenge here. The challenge is not simply putting data out in the world. The challenge is to get people to understand the significance of it, to remember it so they can act upon it, and to know why you think it's important that they act upon it. That is your challenge when you're giving a presentation in person, but also online in front of a camera. Sam.
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