Today is the first day in the three-part webinar series on Carmine Gallo’s The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs. Gallo, principal of Gallo Communications, is an executive speech coach and has worked with many high profile speakers like Steve Jobs (CEO and founder of Apple). His most recent book, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, went on sale earlier this fall.
Gallo’s goal is not to turn people into Steve Jobs, but to teach speakers about the key attributes of really capturing an audience – something Steve Jobs had done very well. He explains, “Someone can have the best idea in the world, but it means nothing if they cannot present it.”
The book’s webinar series is led by Gallo and helps participants explore the book principles further. While the first webinar was today, people can still register for the next two here. In the meantime, consider this underlying point from today’s webinar:
Great presenters do three things:
1. Inform
2. Educate
3. Entertain
Which point(s) do you overlook?
If only just for fun, visit one of the next two webinars to see if and how Gallo practices this point – even through a livestream or video presentation.
Devin Hester with his Berry Chill
Every time the Chicago Bears‘ Devin Hester scores a touchdown, Chicagoans receive a free Hester-combination Berry Chill yogurt the next day. Despite the fact that the Bears were a bit of letdown tonight, we can still celebrate because Hester did, in fact, score a touchdown. According to the Berry Chill blog, his favorite combination is original yogurt with mango, pineapple and gummy bears. While I can personally do without the gummy bears, it still sounds like a pretty sweet deal. Follow @YogiJones on Twitter to stay in the loop on other Berry Chill “Sweet Tweets.” This kind of thing never happens in Roscoe. I love Chicago and Berry Chill.
Also, in case you are an avid Berry Chill visitor and aren’t yet aware, Berry Chill containers are actually recyclable. If you bring in 10 Berry Chill bowls, you receive a free medium mix for free.
According to the Wall Street Journal yesterday, more people worldwide use social media than email to communicate. As of August 2009, there were 301.5 million people using social-networking and community sites, while only 276.9 million people were using email. That is a whole lot of people and a massive amount of conversations made possible.
At first that sounds hard to believe, but if you think about the evolution of message sending, it actually does seem logical. From horse to telegraph to post to email, we have always searched for faster ways to communicate. Social media is the natural progression from email because it is as close to “real time” as it gets. It is faster than email, often easier than email and provides access to mass amounts of searchable information.
This does not mean everyone is going to drop email though. Social media can’t do everything. There are size limits to many social media tools, like the 140 character maximum on Twitter. There is also a lot of clutter and a lot of people out there in those public social media domains. Personally, I like the space for detail and the somewhat private atmosphere that email can still provide.
…But why wait for an email reply when you can receive an answer instantly via AIM or Google Chat? So maybe Facebook is not your preferred mode of communication, and perhaps it isn’t appropriate for all types of communication, but you have to admit: Social media has its benefits too.
“Do we need to be in the social space?” is probably one of the biggest questions facing companies today. Twitter might not be right for all companies (although I wish the Lincoln Park Athletic Club would get on it), but there is something for everyone to gain from social media: The ability to listen.
Before social media, company-customer communication was primarily one-way. Sure, customers could fill out surveys or file complaints, but a dialogue did not exist. In 1995 Netscape went public, essentially giving the Internet life. The cost of communication was virtually free in this new, infinite plane. Less than a decade later social media was born and now customers and companies can have conversations.
Listen to what customers are saying. No matter what business your business is in, it is important to understand what the world is saying about you. The idea of finding this information through the thousands of social media tools out there is daunting, but if you know where to look, the results are easy to find.
While there are do-it-yourself applications like Google Analytics and Yahoo Pipes, companies are actually developing software to trace social space content now. Amber Naslund visited us at Loyola University Chicago yesterday to discuss Radian6’s social media research software. The Chicago-based company’s software not only measures social space mentions down to the minute, but comes equipped to analyze the results as well.
Photo by Ralph Braseth
Amber was a fantastic guest with great insight. If nothing else, she demonstrated that social media is here to stay. While the social media tools will change, the principle of the revolution will not. The ability to listen and connect with customers is an extraordinary advantage that allows companies to respond, build relationships and learn their people.
Filed under: Social Media
Try to remember the first time you ever used Google. I’m pretty sure I was in the school library computer lab in something like 5th or 6th grade. A librarian asked us to search for our small town’s name (Roscoe) at Google.com. We all thought it was a pretty odd sounding name for a website, right?
It is hard to imagine that funny sounding name is now something that every computer user in the world likely knows. Google is even a verb now. According to Alexa.com’s web traffic analysis, enough people “google” that Google is the number one visited website in the United States. Of course, with expansions like Gmail, GooglEarth, Adwords, etc., it really isn’t hard to believe.
What was surprising to me is that Google is on the top 10 list in at least 25 other countries too – and generally high up on those lists too. Google takes the number one spot in three countries (including the U.S.), the number two spot in two countries, and the number three spot in five countries.
Additionally, Google Corporation owns enough other sites that it shows up in country top ten lists more than once. A number of top sites including YouTube.com and Blogger.com are also owned by the Google Corporation.
At about this point on Alexa.com, I started to get the feeling that that Google is probably connected to far, far more than I am aware of – and not just here, but all over the world. While this depiction is probably not entirely up to date, the Google reach of the yellow Google bar in the center is still pretty impressive.
Hats off to founders Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page – not bad for a couple of then-students.
