TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

8 Aug 2016 · 3 min

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3:14

TJ Walker addresses how organizations should respond when an executive’s poor presentation goes viral. He warns against paying online reputation specialists to "bury" links (which can backfire), stresses the real problem is weak presentation skills, and recommends corrective action: hire a presentation coach (he names Jared Breaux and himself) and create many strong public appearances to "crowd out" the negative clip. He illustrates the strategy with Bill Clinton’s 1988 convention speech — Clinton responded by appearing frequently and improving through practice rather than attempting media manipulation — and notes special scrutiny for publicly funded institutions (taxpayer money angle).

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Over at the broadcast asked the question to his followers and people around the Internet, what do you do if one of your executives gives a presentation and it is bad? It goes viral, it's shared on social media and this executive is being ridiculed in social media because of a bad presentation. This does happen. It's happening more frequently than ever because more people are there capturing a presentation or on a cell phone. Couple of things not to do. Don't spend a lot of money on so called reputation experts online to bury your links. That often backfires. And if you are part of any larger institution, a college, anything that receives tax money, once word gets out of that, the media will eat you alive. The traditional news media will eat you alive as wasting taxpayer money. Various universities in California and elsewhere have experienced this firsthand. The first thing I would do is if. And it's not just somebody who fell off a stage in an accident that they had no control over. If somebody is giving a presentation and it's just awful and it's boring, the first thing to do is correct the problem. The problem isn't that people have spotlighted this on video. The problem is this executive is actually giving boring, awful, tedious presentations. So the first step, sorry if this sounds self serving, the first step is to hire someone like Jared Breaux or me to teach this person how to give better presentations. The next step is seek every opportunity possible to give presentations and to share them on social media. And to have so many good presentations, it crowds out the bad. That's really the best way of dealing with this situation. Thinking back to a pre digital era, look at what Bill Clinton did after 1988. Some of you may have forgotten or didn't know it in the first place. Bill Clinton gave a nominating speech, major, major address at the 1988 Democratic convention. And it was an awful speech. He was booed, he was panned by all the critics. It was all anyone was talking about. This guy's ruined his political career. What an awful speech. So did Bill Clinton hire reputation counselors and sit there and strategize of how they can manipulate the media and get them to redo stories or say, well, he's really a good. No, he went out the very next day. He went on Johnny Carson, made fun of himself, allowed Johnny Carson to make fun of him. And more important, he went out and gave at least 300 speeches a year for the next four years until he won the Democratic nomination. And those of you who are Clinton followers or just students of good speaking know to this day he gives more than 300 speeches a year. So it's okay to have one bad speech. It's okay to have a speech that people are making fun of, whether it's on the Tonight show or in social media. But if you speak, and you speak regularly and you are routinely interesting, the good will crowd out the bad.