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So Leonardo DiCaprio's acceptance speech at the 2016 Oscars was the most tweeted moment ever from the Oscars. Why?

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So why was Leonardo DiCaprio's speech so talked about? Why was it the most tweeted moment ever from the Oscars? Because his speech wasn't overly dramatic. It wasn't tremendously emotional. It wasn't extremely funny. Wasn't funny at all. Why do so many people think he gave a great speech? And I do think he gave a great speech. Let's isolate the fundamentals, because there's a lot of things he did in this speech that you could do, not necessarily for your next Academy Award speech, because those are hard to get. But for any speech, a business meeting, a Little League awards ceremony, any type of speech, there are things he did well. For starters, he was obviously prepared. He didn't get up and do one of these, oh, I didn't think I was going to win. I didn't prepare anything. Nothing is worse than that. He clearly respected his audience. He was planned and he prepared. He didn't do the blunders that most people make when they're giving acceptance speeches. But first, I want to isolate on what the strengths were. He was brief. He wasn't cut off. His whole speech was two and a half minutes long. He covered a lot of ground, though. He gave thanks, but he gave thanks in a meaningful way. When he mentioned someone's name, he talked about how they championed the movie at a particular part. When he thanked Martin Scorsese, he had the respect to call him Mr. Scorsese, and he thanked him for what he taught him in the craft of filmmaking. So all the thanks were personal. When he looked at the director or co star to thank them, he paused and he actually looked at them. So everything came across so much more sincere. He didn't try to cram in the name of every single accountant and tax advisor he's ever had and every single friend from childhood. So it wasn't boring. He gave thanks, but it was focused. It was done in a genuine way. He talked about the immediate movie and what was so special about that. But he also talked about his history, who gave him his start, and other people he's worked with along the way. He also brought it to a higher purpose. He talked, and some of you might not like this, whether you agree or disagree with his stance on global warming, he tied in themes of the movie that were from more than 100 years ago into modern day man's relationship with the earth and the planet, and why he thinks people should care more and more about the environment and promote politicians who care about the environment and vote for and donate to politicians. So he tied it to a higher purpose beyond himself. And by the way, he came across quite high, humble, too. He did not come across as arrogant. He didn't say, well, it's about time. After six nominations, he came across as humble, likable, dressed up. He obviously respected the momentous occasion. And finally he had a call to action. At the end, he actually asked people to do things specifically to help the environment. Now, you might not like celebrities getting involved with politics, but it wasn't partisan politics. It wasn't for any one particular candidate or party. It was about an issue and a cause that increasingly people all over the world are very much concerned with. So all of those things are things he did extremely well and why he came across as a true class act. And that's why I think he did it so powerfully and why it was tweeted, because it did stand out as just a complete, total class act. Now, certain things he didn't do that so many Academy Award winners do that are just mistakes. First of all, this idea of getting out of paper, a long laundry list of reading. Well, Broadway stars don't read from a script. This is a performance. The Academy Awards is a show. So I think it's frankly a disgrace for people to get out and start reading a piece of paper. It shows they're not prepared and that somehow they think this show is less important than other shows when the reality is most people who win awards on the Academy Awards are going to have a much larger audience the night of them winning than anyone who ever saw their performance. Now, a little different for Leonardo DiCaprio. He has been in a few things, like Titanic, that more than a few people saw, but still, it was a gigantic audience. Even though ratings were down, it's still a huge, huge audience. He respected that. So he didn't come out with notes to read. His head wasn't down. He was giving good eye contact. He didn't get up and stammer. I don't know what to say because he clearly thought about it. I'm not an advisor to him. He didn't hire me to be a media trainer. But he clearly rehearsed this. If nothing else, he's won a lot of other awards this year, so he got to rehearse with some of those acceptance speeches. The next thing he did is he didn't waste time talking about the fact that he doesn't have a lot of time. You see this time and time again from winners at award shows where they get up and they waste half their time complaining about the fact that they don't have a lot of time complaining about the fact that, oh, I hear the music, they want me to get off. He just spoke. He didn't talk about what he was going to say. He didn't talk about how much time he had. He didn't talk about how much time he didn't have. He just spoke. And that's frankly what I believe you should do. And anytime, whether you're giving a two minute speech on national tv, whether you're giving an hour speech to colleagues or professionals at an industry conference, unless you're an academic professor lecturing to students who are in your class and going to be tested, in general, you're better off not talking about what you're going to talk about or talking about your time. Just talk in a way that's interesting and focus on that and the time will often take care of itself. Now, Leonardo DiCaprio is not going to be remembered in history or in pop culture because of this one speech, because he has so many memorable moments from so many great movies. But I do think this is another piece of the puzzle that builds. His overall reputation as a true class act is someone studios like and respect. If you're a studio producer or a studio head and you're thinking of investing a couple hundred million dollars into a movie and you're thinking of paying an actor $20 million and you're hoping it wins awards, you sure are going to feel more comfortable if you know that actor is going to be a class act for the award season. Not just the Oscars, but the Screen Actors Guild Award and the Golden Globe Awards and the People's show, all these other award shows, it's a huge, huge, important part of the marketing and the PR for movies. And that's why a lot of actors can either hurt or help their reputation because of how good they are promoting. I mean, let's face it, Arnold Schwarzenegger is not the greatest actor in the world. His range of accents isn't exactly in the Meryl Streep range, but he is known as an absolute workhorse when it comes to promoting movies, doing interviews for movies. You send Arnold Schwarzenegger to a Cannes Film Festival and he is notorious for doing every single interview, even if it's not 90 in a day. I don't know if Leonardo DiCaprio has quite that same reputation, but certainly for the big moments he performs. He took his spotlight that he had winning the Best Actor award and he ran with it in the 2016 Oscars, and that can only help his reputation. But please, take away the right lessons from here. It's not about because he's better looking than you or me that he gave a great speech. It's not that he could name drop Martin Scorsese, although that never hurts. It's just basic fundamentals. Being prepared, having something interesting to say, not giving a whole laundry list of names, not doing a data dump. You hate it when you go to a mid level manager meeting and someone gives you a big data dump of sales projections by the week for the next two years. That's really no different than an actor standing up and thanking their accountant and their CPA and their tax advisor and their hair stylist and their personal stylist and their dietitian. It's just boring. Doesn't matter what the context is. If somebody dumps a whole lot of data without context, it's not interesting. And that's why I liked the way when Leonardo thanked particular people in his entourage, he said why he was thanking them. That's a lesson that applies to any financial speech, any technical speech, any PowerPoint presentation. Don't mention a person or a fact without placing it into context. Do that. You might not win an Academy Award, you might not be the most tweeted speaker of all time at your industry, but you will be seen as a professional who's given a good presentation.

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From around the web, I like to pull other topics from some of the top professionals I respect in the industry. Someone you've heard me mention before. Jared Breaux. He has his excellent brocast on YouTube and is a public speaking media training expert of long standing. He puts out this question on Twitter and I wanted to share with you my response. He says, how do you keep a CEO from talking too long in a speech? That's a question he poses to the public relations community as well as to members of the Public Relations Society of America. Here's how I would answer that. Chances are he doesn't know he or she's speaking too long. The easiest way to get someone to shorten the speech is to practice it on video, force them to watch it and just ask them what they think. In my experience, that's pretty much Never done if it is done. If you ask the CEO what do you think of your speech and it really is too long, they're probably going to say, gosh, it's kind of boring, kind of dragged there. I thought I was going to fall asleep. And then you can just say, hey, boss, you're smart. If you think it's boring in too long, guess what? It is. Let's figure out what we can leave out now. The biggest problem for most CEOs, CFOs, C level executives, and executives of every stripe is they don't use enough judgment when it comes to what to put the spotlight on in their speech. So they try to cover everything. Not effective. My rule of thumb for CEOs and everyone else I work with is isolate your five most important ideas for this presentation. Give an example, a case study, a story for each, an image for each, and let that be your speech. You should be able to do that in an amount of time that no one thinks is too long, sometimes five minutes, but certainly in a half an hour. And if you find yourself going on for an hour or longer or anything that seems beyond the bounds, chances are you didn't really do that. You didn't do the editing process. So much of being a great speaker, I believe, has nothing to do with the quality of your voice or your eye contact or hands. It has nothing to do even with how much you rehearse. Because if you're rehearsing a bad speech or a data dump speech, it's not going to matter how much you rehearse. So much of being a good speaker is about exercising judgment. And the biggest part of that is exercising the judgment of what to leave out. As Mark Twain used to say, I'm sorry I wrote you a long letter. I didn't have time to write you a short letter. It takes more time to write and create a shorter speech than a longer speech, a longer one. You just tell people everything you've done this quarter or everything you've done this year, everything about the history of your company. It is too much. So for me, the way to get a CEO, I feel sorry for CEOs too, because quite often they're just handed a speech by the speaking department or the speechwriters, and they want to show they're smart, so they write this big long speech. It all stems from the process. You get the CEO not to go too long by getting clarity on what are the handful of ideas that are most important and then building the speech around those handful of ideas and practicing on video and practicing for Lingq. If you don't do that, if you start off with let's gather as many facts, as many complex charts, as many graphs, as many data points from every department, then you're almost guaranteed that the CEO is going to be too long and it's not going to be his fault or her fault. It's going to be the fault. Ultimately it is because they're the ones speaking. But if you want to be a part of the process, you've got to start very early. Get this CEO to figure out what the top priorities are. Work backwards from that. My advice all the other slides, all the other facts, all the other data, email it to people. Hand it out. Don't project it. The other biggest differentiator between CEOs who can present on time and not go on too long and those who go too long is great CEO speakers. Realize I can project one set of slides, I can email and hand out the other. The typical slides with all the data points and numbers and complex graphs. I'm not going to project that and try to talk about all of it. If you get them to realize you can differentiate between the two, that solves the problem most of the time when it comes to CEOs speaking too long. If you have any other questions about public speaking Speaking to the media, please let me know. Post your comments right here on the blog@mediatrainingworldwide.com or if you're watching this or listening to this on Facebook. Or you can post your questions on Twitter. JWalker is the handle. Thanks for joining me. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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