Imagine you find yourself at a huge trade conference with back-to-back speakers all day long for three days. Select a morning or afternoon when the all of the speakers are focused on issues that are not crucial to your career. Next, sit on the second row of the auditorium. Only instead of listening to the speakers, I want you to put on an I-pod or a Walk-Man and listen to music. But I want you to watch, really watch, each speaker carefully.
For anyone who works in a publicly-traded company or is a Wall Street trader of publicly-traded companies, there must be an awareness that the spotlight is always on. If you are a CEO, then every speech, pronouncement, webcast and conference call is caught on tape and part of your permanent record. If you are a trader, there is an audio recording of every dirty joke you ever uttered to your colleague on the phone in another office.
Conventional wisdom says that the need for traditional public speaking skills will decrease because of the following trends:
1. More people will work at home so information will be passed along though email and phone calls, not formal presentations.
2. With a rise in terrorism and fuel prices, business people will travel less to professional conferences; therefore there will be fewer speaking opportunities.
3. More and more of the business world is migrating more of its functions to the Internet. And, as we all know, the web is made up mostly of pages of text.
After Rosie O’Donnell appeared on her last episode of ABC’s “The View,†many people though she’d be denied a platform, at least until she got her own show again… not so. Only a few days after her last appearance in May of 2007, Rosie made a home webcam video and posted it on her website, www.rosie.com.
The video was crude, amateurish, had bad lighting, and Rosie appeared to be in need of makeup. It was a far cry from the multimillion dollar studio where she had been broadcasting at ABC.
Speaking skills are like stomach muscles and old wooden houses—they atrophy, they decay—even when you take good care of them sometimes. For example, clients of mine who were great while speaking on TV three years ago because they moved their heads, moved their bodies, moved their hands and smiled a lot find that they slip back into old, bad habits. This means they sit still, stiff, frozen, head cocked to one side, and with no smile on their face. Sure, these experts still have great content and answer questions well, but they no longer look like pros on TV, and that’s a big problem.