Marketing Director

Showing posts with label speaking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label speaking. Show all posts

Speaking: The greatest audience is the toughest crowd

I love speaking. To any audience. Whether they love what I am saying or don't get it I learn an amazing amount about myself and about other people everytime I have the opportunity to speak in front of more than a few people. When different groups ask me to speak I am quick to accept which often makes for challenging times; both in regards to the availability of time and the time to prep for your audience.
This summer I was lucky enough to speak to a variety of different groups. Two audiences really stuck out for me this Summer. One was possibly the toughest audience I've spoken to and the other may have been the audience I was most nervous to speak with.

Nufloors and Social Media
View more presentations from Kemp Edmonds
The first was a talk on a Sunday morning at the end of Nufloors Canada's Conference in Courtney on a Golf Course. Perfect setting smart event. I was treated to arguable the most authentic stand up routine in all of Canada. The audience was franchisees of NuFloors flooring stores across Canada.
When I went into speak at the Disability Resources Network BC Conference at the Planetarium I was more nervous because I didn't know what to expect. The group was a bit of mystery to me, but through a few quick questions and a broad, diverse engaging presentation, I was able to deliver a great session. Attendees were given a chance to share their successes and best practices I only wish I had more facilitation power to ensure that everyone got a number of takeaways tailored to the session and not my prep(the presentation).
This is being published late, but I am fired up to deliver Fall highlights in a post soon. Leave me your feedback or queries always up for a good thought.

Sharing Information + Diverse Audiences


more presentations from kemp edmonds

I recently had the pleasure of presenting (slidedeck above) at a one-day conference in Calgary called Social Media Marketing Unplugged. The organizer Jonathan Chow was an awesome organizer and the other speakers were people who I admire personally for the work they do in their areas of focus. It was my lucky day as having recently started working a dream job of sorts with HootSuite, THE social media dashboard, managing their learning program I was invited to fill in for my community wrangler Dave Olson.

It was a joy to present outside of Vancouver and in another Canadian city. It was very different from Vancouver where the use of social media is more prominent. Ask anyone who speaks regularly to audiences about social media and you will find out that the greatest challenge we deal with is the diverse knowledge base of our audiences. Some are 'going to try Twitter soon' while others are tracking website visitors' every move using Custom URL parameters and Google Analytics. If you didn't understand that last part don't worry few do, but it's the kind of technique that is basis for successful online communications. Sharing knowledge is an amazing part of digital culture in fact it lives at the core of our culture.




Kris Krug, Open Everything, Pecha Kucha.


Without sharing knowledge and allowing others to build on it we would not be where we are as a civilization. We would be stuck in the past. I've been inspired on my mission to share the knowledge by two individuals who started out as my heros and long ago became my mentors, my peers and my friends. Kris Krug and Dave Olson speak the gospel of openness.





In this era when multi-national corporations own the intellectual property created by individuals it is more important than ever to share our knowledge to allow our ideas and thoughts to be built upon by others to advance our collective work. Corporations are working against that goal with patents on plants and ownership of rivers that belong to the people of planet not the shareholders of corporations. I love business and it's been an incredibly powerful tool for bringing our world into the 21st century, but like the majority of entities made up of 100s or 1000s of people, self-preservation and control rain supreme while responsibility and accountability are diffused into near nothingness.