Pr For Peanuts: Pr Firm Offers Unique Service | PRLog

Pr For Peanuts: Pr Firm Offers Unique Service | PRLog

Eye Contact: Tips for Speakers

Eye contact is essential for the speakers whether you are in a small meeting or addressing a crowd of 1000. Often, failing to use eye contact means you are losing one of the most important tools you have to connect and convince your audience about your message in the speaker audience relationship. Your position as the presenter will establish you as the  leader of the group. Research shows that looking away from your audience may signal avoidance, looking at them signals approach and that audiences rate it highly. Here are a few tips:

• Be sure you look at all sections of the room. Don't ignore one side or the other, or favor those in front without looking to the rear of the room. If you have trouble remembering to do this, write directions to yourself in your speech text. Look rear, look left, look right as reminders to yourself.

• Audiences can sense when you are not connecting with them.  A helpful tip is to make contact with 2 or 3 people in the audience and try to focus on them. Make sure that all 3 are not in the front way but all over the audience. It really does help to be at your workshop prior to the participants so that you will have time to develop a bond with them, introduce yourself and find out a little bit about each of them that you can refer to when presenting.

• Eye contact can also emphasize an important point. Eye contact can be an important tool for visual learners, and can help audiences to remember and retain what you are saying. Use it to emphasize what you want them to recall, to indicate a specific group in the audience or to refer to what a speaker or participant pointed out.

• Remember, it's great to have a mini chat with your workshop or seminar participants  before the training. It helps to address key members of your audience and refer back or to call on them  during your presentation. Looking over the room and at certain individuals really helps to create a bond between you and your audience.

• The most important part of this exercise is to remember to have FUN and to enjoy your presentation.

Social Media Tips: To Use or Not to Use

Social Media is one of the most exciting avenues to not only reaching, but also influencing your target audience.  During my recent training gigs, when organizations were asked if they used some form of social media, they all yelled YES WE DO!  When asked why they used social media the responses took on a whispering of reasons.  Mostly, organizations admitted that they used social media because everyone else seems to be using it. Other answers included:

·      Board told us to start using it

·      To raise money

·      To increase our pool of new supporters

·      To enhance relationships with existing audiences

·      To round out their communication mix of creating awareness

·      A staff member said that we should

Social media links are being used in magazines, attached to articles and advertisements for just about everything. They also said that the news media uses it at the end of their broadcast to let you know that you can follow their news by becoming a fan.

The biggest concern that my workshop participants continue to have is how should I use social media? Most organizations clearly stated that social media was comprised of Facebook, Twitter and You Tube. Please be aware that these are the best known and the largest social media sites today. They were quite familiar with these three machines.  They were rather surprised when I shared many other modes of social media transportation with them, which by the way caused them think even harder about photo and video sharing sites that they have been curious to try out.

This month, the President of the United States announced that he was now using Foursquare to let people know where he is or has been.  So much for the secret service fellows eh? In our workshop we addressed a few video and photo sharing sites and how to upload and embed those videos into your documents. Many were familiar with Shutterfly (http://www.shutterfly.com/) Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/) and Snapfish (http://www.snapfish.com) and Tumblr (http://www.tumblr.com).

In terms of video and photo sharing, my workshop participants were pleased to be able to create You Tube accounts and upload files and videos.However, they were overwhelmed with excitement when they were introduced to Animoto, a site that formats your photos into a beautiful slide show/video with lovely music that is available for your selection. It also allows the user to upload their music. The results were magnificent and participants couldn’t wait to create an account. Check it out when you get a moment at http://www.animoto.com.

Interested in learning more about social media? Check out The New Social Learning: Guide to Transforming Organizations Through Social Media by Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner. Click on the following link to download your very own copy at: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4280888/Social%20Media/TheNewSocialLearning_eBook.pdf.

Check out Dropbox (http://www.dropbox.com/) while you are at it too. A great way to store your documents. If you need an invite, just email me and I will send you an invitation to join.

Next time – Promotions West will be sharing Twitter Tips that will help you with your tweeting. Any ideas out there please leave your comments and they will be greatly appreciated.

Social Tools Increase Employee Interruptions

Collaboration and social tools designed to increase productivity are actually

costing businesses millions of dollars per year in lost productivity, according to a

survey of more than 500 U.S. employees conducted by online market research firm uSamp (United Sample) and commissioned by social email software provider harmon, i.e. Nearly 60% of work interruptions involve email, social networks, text and instant messaging, or switching windows between applications.  According to the report, 45% of employees work just 15 minutes (or less) before getting interrupted.

During the upcoming days and weeks when you are sitting at your desk, make a list of the number of times that you get interrupted by co-workers, phone calls, emails or other types of disturbances.  Ever wonder why it’s so challenging to get through that well designed “To Do” list. Very often I have to transfer my to do items to the next week.

According to USamp collected data, the follow are common workplace distractions listed by activity.  I am sure that the list of activities in our busy lifestyle will continue to increase. Let me know some of your daily distractions.

Distractions	Percentages
Phone calls	28%
Processing emails	23%
Toggling between apps	10%
Talking with Co-workers	10%
Facebook, personal web searches	9%
Instant messaging	6%
Text messaging	5%
Ad hoc meetings	5%
Web searches	3%
Tweets	0%

How Not to Facilitate a Training

This week I had the opportunity to participate in a government training. Initially I was in shock, then in utter horror when I realized that the training presenters were quite serious about their presentation styles.  I don't know if it's a government style of presenting or if it was a rare and unusual moment.  After the 30+ hour training of observing people nod off into deep sleeps during each session, I started to ask everyone for their opinion about the teaching style that has helped me to create this month's blog on things not to do when presenting.

I must admit that all of the presenters were intelligent people interested in sharing their knowledge. For us in the audience, it was a missed opportunity to have fun and to learn at the same time. Here is a list of items that should be avoided at any cost when presenting:

• Dryness of materials presented. Very often as a trainer or facilitator you may not be able to select the materials or topics to be discussed, but it's better to try and make the most of it and make the topic real for the audience. It's extremely important to understand your audience and learn as much as you can about them prior to the training. Even conducting a mini survey asking basic questions may help you to prepare your presentation.

• Fake humor. If you don't have a good sense of humor that can be incorporated into your presentation, then it's better to not fake it. The audience always knows the difference between what's fake and what's real.

• Sharing stories. Before attending this government training, I have always encouraged trainers to share their life stories with their audiences as it can develop a bond between the speaker and the listeners.  However if no one in the room can understand or relate to any of your stories you may want to stop ASAP.

• Ignoring your audience. Too often facilitators will power through their presentation without looking at one single person or face in the audience. When facilitating it's extremely important to be able to read the room for interest and alertness.  It's a clear signal when 1/3  of your audience is yawning, falling asleep or texting. Remember to talk with your audience and not at them. It has been proven to be one of the fastest way to lose your audience.

• Presenting with your back. Everyone knows this, but, yet too many people keep their backs to the audience as they read every single line from the slides as if the audience is too stupid to be able to read the slides for themselves. This is one of the #1 reasons to kill a facilitator without guilt no matter how nice the back side may appear.

• Overcrowded Slides. Slides with too much information on them can be annoying and difficult to read.  As the information increases on each slide, the font gets smaller and smaller, especially when charts are used. Each slide should have no more than 5 lines. The purpose of slides are guide to the facilitator. They are not to used to write out the entire discussion that will only be read or repeated, making it a recipe for a slow death.

• No audience participation. Every good training session should include participants in every step of the way. It provides a reinforcement to lessons uncovered and lessons learned. It's also an opportunity for training participants to exchange information with each other.

• Starting / Ending late. It's important to start the meeting each day on time and to finish on time.  Participants respect a trainer to start on time and will absolutely adore you if you finish 15 minutes early, cutting them a bit of slack.

• Reading from a script. Often trainers who are called in as a last minute replacement will often read from a script without looking at their audience.  Older trainers will often wear reading glasses and keep taking them on and off in order to see the print and to see the audience. This can be quite annoying to training participants.  If you have vision problems, try making the font as large as possible on your script so that it's not laughable. Remember, you want to be taken as a serious presenter.

• Fumbling with the equipment. It pays to check out your training room, equipment and all other logistics ahead of time.  Many presenters will waste valuable time trying to figure out how to make the slides move backwards and forwards. Often facilitators want to include a funny video or a video that may be only funny to them, but they can figure out how to have it as part of the powerpoint presentation and will have to leave the presentation to open a browser and search for the video to show. Again, wasting valuable time and appearing to be less than professional.

Just remember that the best part of facilitating a training is to have fun as the presenter and to make it an enjoyable experience for your audience.  Being prepared and aware of the needs of your audience leads to a very successful training.  There are many great training tools, just remember to use them appropriately.

Have you experienced a training that could have used a kick? Share that information with us at Promotions West.

Handling Team Problems with Finesse

Keep your team on target:

Teams can easily get sidetracked for a variety of reasons. Their sense of direction may weaken as a result of your leadership style, the team's internal working or conflicts that may exist within the team.

Find out what the problem may be:

As soon as you realize there is a problem, deal with it immediately.   The most important piece is to identify the problem.  In many cases the problem could exist for the following reasons:

·      Misunderstood or ill-defined goals

·      Lack of focus on team dynamics

·      Lack of communication among team members

·      Lack of commitment to the team’s performance

·      Gaps in critical skills

·      Unresolved internal conflict

·      External misunderstanding, hostility, or indifference from other groups

Resolving the problem:

Don’t avoid or deny the problem by hoping that it will simply just go away. Problems and issues have a way of hanging around and growing larger and more annoying if ignored.

Often there are simple things that you can do to help a team to get back on track. For example:

·      Lead a discussion the reviews the team’s purpose, approach and performance goals.

·      Establish goals and a course of action to achieving them

·      Share new information and a different perspective.

·      Share outside information and data via benchmarks and case studies.

·      Remember to tell your tell team how much you appreciate their efforts and their work. Often a simple “Thank You” is all that team members may need from their leader or a pat on the back.

The art of leading a team is to persuade a person who is unmotivated ­­– which can range from a community outreach manager, and executive director to an administrative assistant  – to do his or her job. As the team leader, you must always show appreciation. Remember to thank people for the simplest things like opening a door.  How many of us have worked for and with people who never uttered words “Thank You”, but instead focused on what you weren’t doing according their non-verbal expectations of you?

One of the lessons I learned early in my career was that leading a strong and successful team takes an entire team’s effort in constructing a positive relationship.

Facilitator Behavior and Strategies

How you behave as a facilitator can make or break your effectiveness. The more groundwork you do, the better you will become as a facilitator. Here are some suggested parameters for facilitator behavior.

·      Be Informed. Successful facilitators always gather extensive data about their prospective participants in order to fully understand both their business and their needs. They survey and interview participants, read background reports and use prepared questions to build a complete picture of the group’s situation.

·      Be Optimistic. Facilitators do not allow disinterest, antagonism, shyness, cynicism or other negative reactions to throw them off. They try instead to focus on what can be achieved and to draw the best from each participant.

·      Be Consensual. Facilitation is fundamentally a consensus building process. Facilitators always strive to create outcomes that reflect the ideas of all participants equally.

·      Be Flexible. Successful facilitators always have a process plan for all meetings, yet at the same time must always be ready to toss it aside and change direction if that is what is needed.  Really great facilitators bring alternative strategies and possess a good command of process tools.

·      Be Understanding. There are great pressures on employees in today’s workplace.  Facilitators need to understand this and recognize that antagonistic or cynical behaviors are a result of high stress levels.

·      Be Alert. All great facilitators are expert people watchers.  They pay careful attention to group dynamics and notice what is going on at all times.  All process leaders need to train themselves to be watchful of both how people interact and how well they are achieving the task.

·      Be Firm. Good facilitation is not a passive activity.  It often takes a substantial level of assertiveness to keep people and activities on track. Facilitators must be ready to step in and direct the process if the situation calls for it.

·      Be Unobtrusive. The facilitator should do as little talking as possible. The participants should be doing all of the talking.  The facilitator says only enough to give instructions, stop arguments, keep things on track and sum up.  Trying to be the centre of attention or make yourself look important is a misuse of your position.

·      Let the Participants Excel. Facilitating should be an egoless activity. The purpose is to make the group succeed, not to make you look really important and clever.  An effective facilitator will leave a group convinced that “We did it ourselves!”