Check Your Hair, Make Sure Your Mic Is On – Know The Lingo

This is a continuing series of posts by Speakers for speakers. If you are currently a speaker and looking to improve, if you are an aspiring speaker and worried about the mistakes that others make this is the series for you. Each Wednesday a speaker who I value will share their thoughts on how speakers can be better, their experiences as a speaker and generally tell you the insider secrets that make it look so easy when they take the stage.

 

 

 

This weeks post is by Lynette Young. Lynette is CEO of Purple Stripe Productions, Lynette Young is one of the first podcasters to have received a six-figure sponsorship just to chat (and that was her first year).  Since then, she has been helping others put their dreams into action as a social media coach, social technology specialist, and a strategist for businesses regarding implementation services.  Her love (besides her family) is Google+.  Ms. Young believes that Google+ is the future for business and, as such, is the founder and curator of The Women of Google+.

Know The Lingo

As a professional speaker, I present within my own industries of social media, women entrepreneurs and technology, but most of the time I speak at events in other industries. While I know the lingo we throw around, I am not always privy to the terminology of other industries. It is imperative that to be a professional speaker you do some research to find out about the people warming the seats. If you don't what matters in their industry or day to day jobs, you will never connect with them with your content from the podium.

I have witnessed probably a hundred spectacular train wreck talks over my twenty years as a speaker (yes, a few were mine). I will give an example to show a point, and to hopefully learn a lesson. I attended a conference for the insurance industry and was waiting in the wings as the speaker before me was on stage. The speaker was from the real estate world, which was a good fit for the content presented that day. Problem? It was obvious that the speaker assumed everyone in the audience understood what he was talking about when he threw around industry-specific terms like CRV (certificate of reasonable value) and PITI (principal, interest, tax, and insurance). Do you know what a cricket sounds like in a room of five hundred people? I do now.

It was obvious to me the speaker had not taken the time to know that the people filling the seats. The attendees had no real understanding of the inner workings of the real estate world. Had the speaker thought to rework his talk a bit to be more 'plain English' the audience could understand and not use his talk as a sleeping aid. The audience wasn't only lost, but made to feel stupid and uninformed. Not one person left their seats when he was finished to get his business card. (Truth be told, he may have just walked straight to the exit door when he was done, but that's an entirely different article.) By taking a glance at the conference agenda and sales sheet it would have been very easy to know that these were not attendees that understood real estate financing. Lesson? Talk to your audience as if they were actual people, and do a bit of research to find out who they are and where they come from.

"Lingo-vomit" is probably the most common screw-up I see along with assuming the audience knows all the things you do, or talking to them like they are idiots. There are the rare gems where I get to see a speaker set themselves on fire by jumping into a talk written for authors when the are really in a crowd of nurses. The location slip-up is the all time personal favorite of mine. A battle cry of 'Go Pats!' when they are really in New York Giants territory is always fun to watch. How a speaker recovers from that is a good judge of their abilities outside the slip up. The correct comeback for that faux pas is "just keeping you on your toes – GO GIANTS!"

"GO EAGLES!" is not.

See last weeks post – Speaking Is About More Than Speaking by Thom Singer

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