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ED MILIBAND’S CONFERENCE SPEECH DECONSTRUCTED

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Love him or hate him, Labour leader Ed Miliband’s keynote speech to his party’s conference in Manchester this week is an interesting, instructive and, it has to be said, fairly lengthy watch for students of public speaking and presentational skills. If you’ve got one hour, four minutes and 48 seconds to spare you can watch his address here and make up your own mind. But if you haven’t (or as a true blue Tory voter the very thought of spending that long with him makes your skin creep) then read my conference speech guide – not to the politics of it but the mechanics.

I’ve divided his address into the five components that make up any speech from the grandest to the most modest :

1 the speaker
2 the spoken (words)
3 the spoken to (audience)
4 the unspoken (body language)
5 the place spoken (venue)

In this post I’m going to explore the first component – the speaker. Future posts will cover the other four.

Purpose
As a speaker the key to a successful presentation is knowing from the outset exactly what you want that presentation to achieve and never losing sight of your objectives through the planning and delivery phases. As a trainer I recommend speakers distil their purpose into a just few lines as the very first step. Watching Ed Miliband I’d stake my house on his early notes reading something like this: “show the audience I’m an ordinary kind of guy, share with them my vision for Britain and tell them how together we can make that happen.” As a politician he almost certainly couldn’t resist also scribbling “and rubbish the Coalition, especially the Conservative half or it.”

Know thyself
Know thine audience is the phrase most often associated with public speaking. But there should be a second mantra – know thyself. Self knowledge as a speaker is vital. You need to know your strengths and weaknesses. Where the comfort zone ends and the discomfort zone begins. How nervousness manifests itself (and all presenters get nervous however relaxed they may appear). Like top athletes the very best speakers frequently push themselves beyond their normal limits. It’s how they improve. By speaking entirely without notes Miliband was pushing himself to the limits of his endurance. Doing the oratorial equivalent of a Mo Farah (whose name, incidentally, he mentioned in an effort to associate himself with the winning Olympic team). In delivering his address without even the safety net of an auto-cue he was again serving his purpose. He wanted us to think “hey a guy who can do that can run the country.”

As a speaker it’s also vital to know your relationship with the audience. Is your stock, so to speak, high or low? Do they like you or hate you? You’re selling them something – in Miliband’s case a promise to make Britain great again in return for our votes – so you better know how hard a sell you’ve got on your hands. The Labour leader clearly understood his stock was on the low side, not at the conference itself so much as among the wider public audience. Confronted with this tension between themselves and their audience speakers have two options: ignore it and hope it’ll go away; or concede there’s tension and do something to reduce it. Sensibly Miliband chose the second. “I understand why you voted for Cameron,” he declared before moving on to why we should no longer trust the Prime Minister but trust him instead.

You’re havin’ a laugh
Humour is an important part of any speech. Important but not essential. Not essential because some people are uncomfortable with humour – speakers and audiences alike. And some subjects are simply no laughing matter. Done right, however, humour can lift a speech. Give both the audience and the speaker a moment to relax. Act as a delicate counterpoint to a more profound moment. Provide punctuation. Give people a chance to shift buttocks or open a Murray mint without drawing attention to themselves. Done wrong humour can kill a speech stone dead. Alienate an audience. Overdone and it can tend to trivialise a speech and overshadow the content.

By making himself the butt of his jokes Miliband avoided giving offence. And mostly the laughs he got appeared genuine (but then in a hall full of acolytes I’d be surprised if they didn’t) although occasionally there was a momentary disconnect between punch line and laugh which made the smile on the Labour leader’s face a tad strained. My advice is to move on swiftly if the anticipated response isn’t forthcoming.

More importantly his self deprecating humour helped serve his purpose: it was designed to show the audience (especially the overwhelming majority of us beyond the conference walls) that he was our kind of guy. Odd looking perhaps. A bit like the bloke off Wallace and Gromit maybe. But warm and friendly nonetheless. The friendly bit is crucial to politicians. They know we don’t trust them. And because we don’t trust them they know we don’t like them. But they also know that human nature dictates this behavioural formula works the other way round and if we like them we’ll trust them. So politicians work hard to make themselves likeable. Hence the humour and the frequent references to family history in the Miliband speech.

Richard Uridge coaches public speakers and runs presentational skills workshops. He hasn’t trained Ed Miliband. And even if he had he’d be contractually obliged to say he hadn’t (but he really hasn’t)! He’s not a bad speaker himself. Not the best. But then Sir Alex Ferguson wasn’t the best footballer. If you’d like him (Richie that is not Fergie) to train you or your colleagues or give a speech then you can get in touch by sending him an email richard@acmtraining.co.uk

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BILLY NO MATES

What do you have to do to get likes on Facebook? It’s a question I’m often asked on my social media training workshops. And the answer I give is simple: be likeable. Just like in the real world if you’re not very nice in the virtual world you’ll end up as Billy No Mates.

There is another way of getting likes – paying for them. It works out around 14p per like which may not sound very much but that’s £140 per thousand and unless you get your money back by converting those likes onto something tangible you’re unlikely to see any kind of return on that investment. The BBC’s technology reporter wrote recently on this very subject  And in any case again like the real world you can buy friends but are they proper friends? Quite.

So we’re back to winning friends/likes by being nice. “Nice” in social media terms means offering something of value to your target audience. It might be funny, profound, insightful, thought provoking, creative…the list of content possibilities is long. It might be words, audio, video, a picture. It might be long. Or short. All your own work. Or a comment on somebody else’s.

Good content attracts visitors to your Facebook page or other social media sites. Consistently good content wins you friends, followers and likes.

That’s why content creation is the single most important part of your social media strategy. And the most time consuming.

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CUT THE RED TAPE

When I first started working for the BBC I was handed an inch-thick folder labelled “Producer Guidelines.” Small confession: I never read them or certainly not cover to cover as demanded. Be honest have you  read every word of your company’s staff guidelines? Of course you haven’t. Life’s too short.

I’m not saying that organisations shouldn’t have or don’t need rules and regulations. But if they’re over long there’s no point in having them in the first place because they wont get read. The same goes for social media guidelines – the rules of engagement if you like – that dictate staff use of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Blogs (like this one) and all the other platforms too numerous to mention. Social media works best for organisations when those doing it have at least a modicum of fun. Over regulation threatens to make it unfun (if there isn’t such a word then there should be). And who in their right mind would want to spend a significant chunk of their lives doing unfun stuff? Not me.

So keep your own social media guidelines short, sharp and to the point. At ACM Training ours run to just a few lines:

Always remember why you’re doing it.
Try not to say anything really daft.
Really try not to say anything that will bring you or us into disrepute.
Use your common sense.
Re-read everything at least once before you hit the send button.
Have fun.
And remember if you really mess up you’re fired!

This article is an abridged extract from the social media training manual that accompanies my social media training workshop. If you’d like to read a sample chapter click here or if you’d like to book a place for just £99 on one ACM’s social media training courses click here.

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Using social media to kick racism out of soccer

Twitter and other social media platforms were implicated by the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, in his press conference after the soccer summit at 10 Downing Street aimed at tackling racism in football. Hunt and the FA chairman David Bernstein said, in effect, that while overt racism was now much less a problem inside grounds, outside people were still making racist and homophobic remarks. And while in the past their audience may have numbered just a handful of tiny-minded idiots and those unfortunate enough to overhear the bile spilling out of their twisted mouths, they now have a much wider audience – online.

But legislating against them would be both difficult and, in my view, contrary to the open spirit of the social web. Even trying to outlaw them risks drawing far too much attention to odious individuals who haven’t the courage to make their foul remarks to someone’s face and hide behind the relative anonymity afforded by social network pseudonyms. And with a billion plus social network accounts to monitor we shouldn’t expect the networks themselves to do anything but passive monitoring. We might occasionally persuade the networks and the Internet Service Providers to deactivate the accounts and cut the connections of the worst offenders, but those offenders would soon set up new accounts from new IP addresses.

Better, surely, to simply ignore them. Don’t follow them on Twitter. Don’t retweet their posts – even if only to mock their narrow-mindedness from our lofty, liberal perches. Certainly don’t dignify their comments with comments of our own. Make them social network lepers. Deny them the oxygen of publicity, as we might have said in the old media days.

So here’s my social network manifesto…

Black footballers do a Joey Barton. Gay footballers come out of the closet and start Tweeting so we can follow you and show by simple force of numbers that the overwhelming majority of us – football lovers or not – are decent human beings. Stephen Fry has more than a million followers on Twitter and is a national treasure.

Don’t just let your footballing feet do the talking. Let your tweets do the talking too.

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Sorry seems to be the hardest word

Forgive the crass comparison but not since Neville Chamberlain shook hands with Adolf Hitler has a handshake (or rather a non-handshake) been so forensically dissected. Of course the rivalry between Liverpool and Manchester United in 2012 may not match that of Britain and Nazi Germany in 1938 but there doesn’t seem to be much prospect of “peace in our time” between Louis Suarez and Patrice Evra. And the tardy apology issued by the Uruguayan and his boss Kenny Dalglish has been about as passifying as the piece of paper the Prime Minister famously waved on his return from Godesberg.

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So what went wrong? The problem can’t have been quantitative – these days the public relations squad at major football clubs is almost as big as the playing squad. Perhaps, then, it was qualitative – poor advice. I suspect it was neither; that the guidance given was both abundant and accurate but simply ignored.

Players and managers paid £100k plus per week are unlikely to value the wisdom of those lucky to see half that much in a year. The solution? Either put PR staff on the same salary as footballers (owners like John Henry and the Glazer family please note) or make following professional advice a contractual obligation.

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Rule number one in crisis communications: apologise immediately.

Rule number two: make sure the images the public see convey the same, contrite message.

Liverpool and Suarez broke both.

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Richard Uridge does Skomer

OC_SkomerAn experimental trailer for BBC Radio 4’s Open Country programme shot and edited entirely on location by the presenter using only an iPhone4 and iMovie.

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HACKS WITH NO BALLS

No surprise that a certain be-knighted football club manager should try to ban the reporter with the temerity to ask a question about Rhino. But deeply disturbing that the 199 or so other hacks at the news conference agreed to abide by some PR lackey’s arbitrary rule not to ask the very questions on everyone’s lips. Asking awkward questions – however unwelcome – is at the very heart of being a journalist and once that right is abdicated one becomes a sychophant and a cipher. A sad and sorry example of just how neutered the modern so-called reporter has become. Evidently the swarthy-faced footballer has more balls than a roomful of sheepskin-clad yes men. That starlet, whose name is not dissimilar to the glass of Sanatogen I am sipping as I write this, is clearly a lucky duck. (Note to subs: yes duck).

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A FUNGI TO BE WITH – eating wild mushrooms for the BBC

Sometimes you have to suffer for your art. Take tomorrow’s Open Country programme on BBC Radio 4. There I am scrunching through the leaf litter in the  New Forest looking for wild mushrooms when my guide, the mycologist John Wright (off Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage show), says to me “go on try that one.” So I do. With interesting consequences. Listen out for the sound of spitting tomorrow, Saturday, morning just after six or the following Thursday lunchtime.

And if you can’t catch it on the wireless then you can listen here once it’s been broadcast.

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POURING TROUBLE ON OILED WATER – part two

So at last Tony Hayward has admitted BP was ‘not prepared’ for the Gulf oil spill. In an interview for the BBC’s Money programme – his first since the disaster – the former oil company boss said BP wasn’t ready to deal with the fallout of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and the media “feeding frenzy” that followed it. Hayward said as the face of BP he had been “demonised and vilified”, but he understood why.

“If I had done a degree at Rada [The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art] rather than a degree in geology, I may have done better, but I’m not certain it would’ve changed the outcome,” he said before adding “But certainly the perception of myself may have been different.”

Tony you could have saved yourself the time and expense of a degree in dramatic art and simply booked a couple of ACM Training’s media, crisis communications and emergency planning courses. They’d have set you back £99 per person or £999 per workshop but think how much you might have saved? The debacle is estimated to have cost BP £30 billion – of which a significant chunk was knocked off the company’s share price simply because of the spectacularly bad PR.

In just one day we could have helped you gaze at the “disaster horizon” and see (without yet another degree – this one in clairvoyance) which direction the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse might be coming from. Then armed with the certain knowledge that if you drill for oil one day that oil is going to get spilt we’d have helped you draw up a very simple media plan complete with a number of straightforward, credible and punchy key messages that even a geologist could deliver.

Sorry for the sarcastic tone Tone but I still cannot quite grasp the fact that a company the size of BP should have been so useless in PR and media terms. There are small business across Britain bp than BP (better prepared than BP).

So if you’re reading this Tony give me a call or drop me a line and avoid another costly mistake in future. And if you’re not Tony Hayward but would like to know how we can help you and your organisation deal with the media in a crisis then why not come along to one of our public crisis communications workshops or book us to deliver crisis comms training in-house? [product sku=”wpid=38″]

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IS NAD BAD OR MAD?

So Nadine Dorries, the Conservative MP for Mid Bedfordshire, admits her blog is 70% fiction 30% fact. See the BBC’s website for details. Does that make her refreshingly honest, worryingly dishonest or just plain stupid? I know which gets my vote. Decide for yourself at http://blog.dorries.org/