I’ve found that my best presentation skills actually come from my experience acting and as a ballerina. Yes, that was in high school and university, but that practice in front of an audience has been invaluable to me. Plus I see these core presentation skills in my friends and colleagues, in particular Tod Maffin whether he’s podcasting or presenting—you can hear his years of radio experience—and Darren Barefoot when he’s presenting on anything has a certain stage presence that comes from his theatre background.
People who’ve had acting experience know how to perform for an audience. This is something that Darren and I have discussed at length. There’s a certain understanding of storytelling and performance that goes into a good presentation. So my 1 minute marketing tip for professional speakers—or sales and marketing people like me—is to take an acting class. There are always community centres, dedicated schools and continuing ed courses in acting, which is that step beyond Toastmasters or other classes in public speaking. Acting classes reinforce the performance aspect as well as the improvisation skills that make so many great presenters appear natural and comfortable on stage.
So if you’re interested in upping your game as a professional speaker, or even if you’re frequently doing client presentations, guest speaking or other sales and marketing presentations, I highly recommend taking a theatre or acting class.
If you’re in the Vancouver area, one of our clients, ContinuingEd.ca, is offering an 8-session course staring April 17 called Acting for the Fun of It.
Regardless of where you live, find a class that works for you, and have fun!
Despite the persistent reports of book publishing as a failing (or flailing) industry, publishers’ best-kept secret is that there is no nail in the coffin.
I know you don’t believe me.
But maybe the people publishing those inspirational business books you like so much actually understand something about running a business.
I know they do because between the publishing clients and the tech clients, it’s not the publishers I’m worried about.
The lessons I see tech startups learning today are ones that the publishing industry imparted to me as early as 1997 when I had my first publishing job as the graphics editor for an online literary magazine called Treeline. (That was 1 year before Google launched.)
In 15 years of working in, or consulting for, the publishing industry, I have watched book publishers leverage technology to do what they have always done, which is to transform themselves and their products to meet consumer demand. Surely an industry designed to disseminate knowledge has wisdom to impart.
Here are 25 lessons I’ve learned—from publishers—about the continuity and survival of technology-enabled businesses:
Basing your business on government grants is not a revenue model.
Asking the marketing person/publicist to “see what you can do with this” after the product has been in the market and failed does not lead to success for anyone.
If you don’t have a core business, spending time on the “latest thing” is not going to improve the situation.
If you don’t pay your staff, they leave. (More important, money is not a motivating factor, rather reward and opportunity are the reasons behind why people choose to stay.)
It is smart and prudent to build supporters fast and early.
People connect to people, not to faceless corporate voices. Get your best personalities out in front of people.
Measure, learn, improve. Fast and frequently.
Belly-button gazing—or listening only to your peers who are in the same situation—does not lead to a plan of action. It feels good to bond, but you can do that in the employment line. Run with the winners. Look beyond your industry.
Being busy is ok. Being busy with the right things makes you money.
Get people to pay upfront. Use preorders to determine how much to produce and to experiment with what will stick.
Manage expectations—yours and the customers. The percentage difference between good and great sometimes only matters to you. Overachieve but don’t overextend.
Word of mouth & permission-based marketing. Sales are driven by other people talking about your stuff. Build your contacts. Reward those contacts. Make sure those contacts are the people who buy your stuff.
There’s no 4-hour work week. There is just hard work.
Needing better technology is never the root problem.
Stay hungry, but make sure you are feeding yourself.
If you don’t know who your audience is, they won’t find you.
SEO = discoverability. You need it.
If you don’t set specific, measurable goals, you won’t know if you’re winning or losing. Cost per acquisition and rate of sales growth are important metrics. Know what your growth curve looks like and how to influence it.
Know what you’re trying to achieve before picking the tools.
P&L. Break even point. Do the math. Always.
Understand the micro actions that influence the macro actions. Marketing indirectly affects sales. Know the common multi-funnel channels that lead to conversions.
If people won’t pay for your product, produce complimentary things you can sell and give the product away for free, or close to free.
Price wars are a race to the bottom. Have a plan for selective discounting that rewards your most valuable customers.
The long tail—it’s not so great if all your products are in the tail.
There are people willing to do stuff for free, you just need to tap into their motivations for doing so.
Clay Shirky stopped by the TED offices to chat about “Why SOPA is a bad idea.” 100% totally worth watching. Shirky offers a great explanation, with metaphors that help SOPA and PIPA make sense, and a quick history of how we got into this copyright infringement debate with rights holders anyway.
SOPA and PIPA Blackouts are planned across the web tomorrow in protest of the two acts before the US House of Representatives and the US Senate. The web is going on strike as a protest to legislation that tampers with the participatory culture of the web for the sake of large corporate and government interests.
What is SOPA? What is PIPA?
Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) aim to prevent online piracy of films and other forms of media by giving the US government and copyright holders the right to seek court orders against sites they believe infringe copyright or enable infringement.
Sites affected include search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing, social media sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, ecommerce sites like eBay, and participatory sites like Wikipedia and Reddit. Really, every site is affected but these are the big players opposing SOPA and PIPA. Other opponents include Reporters without Borders, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch and tech-news sites like Boing Boing.
So what’s the big deal? Copyright infringement is wrong.
Copyright infringement seems to be at the heart of this legislation, but the real opposition is that the legislation introduces censorship and abuse by larger powers while not stopping piracy. People who want to pirate media will always find a way around censorship. In this particular case, downloaders will simply enter the IP address for the site vs the domain name. For example, http://198.171.79.36/ is the IP address for http://www.whois.net/.
The legislation does not stop piracy but if passed, gives the US government and rights holders the ability to get a site censored. On top of that, US-based internet service providers, payment processors and advertisers would be prohibited from doing business with alleged infringers. SOPA, in particular, could force search engines to remove infringing sites from their results.
Opponents to SOPA and PIPA say the legislation is destructive, unconstitutional, an extraordinary measure and that it endangers free speech and has an impact on users beyond the US.
1. Both bills would allow the blocking of entire websites, even though the site may contain a large percentage of perfectly legal speech.
2. Sites can be shut down whether or not they’ve done something wrong. Enabling or facilitating copyright infringement could be flagged due to a commenter linking to a site that uses a copyrighted image inappropriately. The site with the comment is liable to the full extent of the broad enforcement powers.
This is a big deal for social media sites and participatory sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, Reddit, and any site with comments open.
3. SOPA doesn’t stop real pirates (not the cap and eye-patch kind but the real infringers) but it does mean that an ordinary user who posts copyrighted work could go to jail for five years. If you post on YouTube or Facebook a link to your cat dancing to a copyright song, that means you could face prison.
4. SOPA affects how domain names and registrations are handled, which may open security loopholes and give hackers easier access to websites.
5. It will cost $47 million tax dollars a year for a bandaid that doesn’t stick to the right injury.
At all points of transition in cultural and entertainment history, we see panic from the establishment and energy wasted seeking bans to protect the old ways. The first recorded music freaked out musicians. TV freaked the movie makers. The written word upset the orators. Go further back, electricity upset candlemakers. The printing press upset the scribes. It’s all so misguided.
Here’s a nice bit of content that infringes in the best way to explain SOPA.
“You don’t destroy the internet because it doesn’t fit your business model.”
In October, Monique Trottier became Monique Sherrett. And the crazy thing is that she loves the team of James & Monique Sherrett enough to not care that Google is going to be confused about what to display in results for Monique Trottier, or that people on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ will wonder where is Monique Trottier and who is Monique Sherrett. But that’s life in a digital age, and love comes before work so here I am, Monique Sherrett.
Step 2: Send me an email or post in the comments the link to your avatar.
Step 3: We will return the avatar with an appropriate mustache. Or as we like to spell it here in the office, moustache, with the proper elongation of “moooo-stash” if spoken verbally.
Disclaimer: Not all moustaches are guaranteed to look as stylish as mine.
Secondary claim: Mustache generators are ok, but we’re doing custom, original Moustaches, which is why your ‘stache is going to look awesome.
The second BookCamp Vancouver is this Friday, October 1. BookCamp is a conference that brings together 250 members from the technology and publishing industries to talk about digital aspects of book publishing and how online media is changing the game.
The early days of the internet brought to publishing:
Credit card payments
Shipping trackers
Inventory counts
Reviews
Buy and recommendation engines
Communities and tribes
Sharing, collaboration, organization and knowledge exchange were reinforced through easy tools, search and recommendation engines such as those available through YouTube, Amazon, Facebook, iTunes and Twitter.
With the social web, fresh insights into the community are possible. A publisher can:
Listen and learn: identify influencers; build up reputation and leadership
Build awareness: create compelling campaigns and, more important, movements
Facilitate participation: Contribute to the community, provide tools that empower others to speak on their behalf, and create connections
Support purchasing: Accommodate individuality (customizations), provide service on-demand and support multiple payment methods
Re-engage and empower: provide social rewards for positive behaviours that support the community and, with permission, encourage repeat behaviour
Ebook readers bring new insights to reading preferences, as well as a shift in reading from a linear model to an interactive one.
Big questions are forming. How long will we be in a transition from printed books to digital works? Will publishing houses continue to exist as they do today or will light-weight publishing condos develop instead (where a core group handles finding, making and marketing)? Will price points reflect more points along the demand curve? How will people behave in a market of infinite choice? What will they want to pay for, who will make money and how do we finance publishing new works?
Seth Godin says that publishers have done an excellent job for 100+ years. As curators, they pick the winners. As producers, they create and manufacture the works. As financial risk takers, they make the initial investment. As distributors, they manage inventory and shelf space. And as promoters, they disseminate press releases, earn publicity and buy advertising space.
His challenge to the industry is to focus on curation, leadership and connection.
This Friday, we’ll do just that. We’ll look at digital sales to libraries, ecatalogues, ebook production and the reading practices. We’ll explore how literary communities are supporting new works and the discovery of amazing authors. We’ll talk strategy, tools and tactics for fostering community and dialogue within and between online tribes.
All of this happens daily on the web, but BookCamp is a chance for us to have an in-person literary salon where innovators and problem-solvers in the technology space interact with risk takers and trendspotters in publishing to explore how digital technology continues to amplify and extend the discovery, production and delivery of new works of fiction and non-fiction, whether they be in tree format or pixels and bits.
Monthly Newsletter
Conferences & Events
What we’re talking about 
Project Highlights
Did you know?
Vancouver internet marketing strategists 
Looking for the bee? 
Subscribe to our blog.