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All the world’s a stage, which means Twitter is a stage too, a stage that is new to me, and new to most of us. I’ve been told that I need to tweet for marketing purposes. That I should talk about what I’m doing in my business.

But I’m in conflict. Tweeting feels phoney to me. I have a hugely complicated relationship with what I feel is my hugely complicated job running a public speaking and presenting consultancy. I often feel overwhelmed, understaffed, and out of control.

Then I step onto the Twitter Stage, and I have 140 characters to market myself and my company, to capture a moment, and then another, and another and another, in order tell a story that makes me look good.  It feels one-sided to talk only about the good stuff.  What about the rotten stuff?  The client that postponed the big engagement.  The client who bargained me down to the nub.  The brochure that can’t seem to get itself to the printer.  

Everyone’s trying to make themselves look good.  How refreshing, I think to myself, to actually be honest and talk about the bad stuff.  But then I argue with myself that being negative is not positive.  I think maybe I should follow the advice of my marketing guru, and paint a picture of Sims Wyeth & Co. as a fabulously successful company.  Dish out little bits of information that will make the competition jealous.   

I think my conflict about Twitter comes from the medium itself.   It’s strobe-lit story-telling…in slow motion, like submitting to a publishing house every tenth page of a novel you’ve written. 

Or better, when I’m on the Twitter Stage, I feel like an actor who has been working on his lines backstage behind a curtain, and yet just beyond the curtain is a large audience waiting to catch a glimpse of me.  

When I’m ready, I signal to the stage manager.  He nods, counts down from five, and lifts the curtain.  I feel the heat of the spot light.  I sense  the audience out there in the dark.  I open my mouth to speak my lines in my most positive tone of  voice.  I make the gestures I’ve rehearsed.  I try to end with a dramatic flourish before the spotlight goes dark–careful not to go over the time limit.  And then it’s dark.  The spot light is off.  The stage manager lowers the curtain.

The audience does not respond or applaud, but I feel that I have surgically implanted an image and a thought into their minds.    I have sent them a little snapshot of myself and my business in the hope that it will be interesting or helpful. 

And then I return to my work backstage:  blogging, selling, researching, developing new products, until the thought occurs that I must step onto the Twitter Stage again, to create another strobe-lit pose that will dovetail with the narrative flow I weave for world.

I recently sat down to interview myself on the subject of speaker evaluation forms. Here’s the transcript of the interview.

What’s the use of a speaker evaluation form? First of all, I prefer the term assessment to evaluation. It sounds to me less clinical–less distant.

Sorry. What’s the purpose of a speaker assessment form? To help speakers get better. However, let’s distinguish between the uses of a speaker assessment form at a training course, and one passed out at the end of a live presentation.

What are the differences? A training course assessment form will be more detailed and analytical–more process oriented, more focused on the mechanics of speaking. A form meant to be filled out by audience members after a talk should be short and sweet, focused on what audience members took away from the experience and any suggestions they might have for improvement.

In what areas do speakers need to get better? In messaging, use of PowerPoint, and personal impact.

How should messaging be evaluated? The message of a good presentation should:

• be audience-centric
• define a business problem from the perspective of the audience
• pose a valid question about that problem
• answer that question satisfactorily in a clear and vivid manner
• compare the speaker’s answer to alternative answers
• argue why the presenter’s answer is better
• end by reminding the audience of the problem and asserting the need to think, feel, or do as the speaker suggests.

How should PowerPoints be evaluated? They should follow the principles of cognitive guidance, which are:

1. The Multimedia Principle; we learn better from spoken words and pictures than from spoken words alone.

2. The Coherence Principle; we learn better when extraneous material is excluded rather than included.

3. The Contiguity Principle; we learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented at the same time or next to each other on the screen.

4. The Modality Principle; we learn better from pictures with spoken text than pictures with printed text.

5. The Signaling Principle; we learn better when the material is organized with clear outlines and headings.

6. The Personalization Principle; we learn more from a conversational style than a formal style.

This adds up a few simple rules.

• Headlines of slides should be short, assertive sentences that summarize the information on the slide.
• The body of the slide should be a visual–a photo, drawing, graph, scheme, etc.
• Bullet points should be kept to an absolute minimum.
• Put the details, or the speaker’s points, in the Notes section of the PowerPoint and hand the document out after the event.
• The speaker should introduce the next slide while the old one is still on the screen.

And finally, how should a presenter’s personal impact be evaluated? That’s a harder question. The simplest answer is she should be evaluated based on what she causes her audience to feel, know, or do. She should be judged by outcomes, not process.

How can presenters take control of the way they make listeners feel? By making a serious, sustained effort to understand how they are coming across and what they can do to improve. For instance, evidence suggests that tone of voice, image, body language, and clothing and grooming play a significant role in our impact on others.

But what role does intention play? You said earlier that messages should be listener-centric. Our intentions are important. We should align them with the interests of our audience. But we often have goals for a talk that are both overt and covert. For instance, ever since President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law, the Republicans have been successful in winning the votes of working class white southerners. Since then, the overt goals of Republican speakers has been to convince those voters that the Republican platform is in their economic self-interest. The covert goal has been to play on their historical racial bias.

So what should A Really Useful Speaker Evaluation Form look like? It should be:

• On one page
• As simple as possible
• Be designed for a specific purpose
• Address messaging, PowerPoint, and personal impact
• Use a few specific criteria for each of those categories
• Leave room for subjective comments and suggestions
• Attempt to measure outcomes

Can you give us an example? Yes, here are two that I find useful. Neither is perfect. One is clearly for training purposes, the other is meant to be completed by audience members after a talk.

Training Assessment Form

And here’s a Speaker Assessment form meant to be filled out by an audience member after a talk. It was created by Cliff Atkinson of Sociable Media.

Sims Wyeth is a speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in presentation skills and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.

Many of us are familiar with the work of Dr. Albert Mehrabian of Stanford University, who demonstrated in his research that 85% of emotion is communicated through voice tone and body language.

Many of us have read Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, who reported the work of Nalini Ambady of Tufts University, who discovered that some doctors who make serious medical errors are not sued, while some who make no errors are sued.  The cause for both these surprising findings comes down to voice tone: Ambady recorded all her subjects.

Error-free doctors who get sued have authoritative (non-empathetic) tones, while error-prone doctors who do not get sued have empathetic voices.  Perhaps the empathetic tone innoculates the less than competent physician by making patients less willing to damage his career.  (Patients might be thinking, ”He’s such a nice man.”) And likewise, the authoritative tone of doctors without medical errors may annoy patients, who will look for something to get upset about.

Now comes a study testing whether members of a native tribe in Ecuador, who know no English, can understand what English-speaking mothers mean when speaking to fellow adults, and then to their babies.

The answer is mostly yes.  When listening to recordings of the mothers, they identified the correct meaning of the speech to adults 64 percent of the time.  But when the English-speaking mothers talked to babies, they succeeded in grasping the meaning of the speech 75 percent of the time.  The report appears in the August issue of Psychological Science.

Those of us in business seeking to influence and lead others–what can we take away from this?  Most simply, that we might be able to improve the power of our spoken communication (to tribesmen and to our colleagues and customers) with greater expressiveness in our voice tone.

In my experience, some of us are reluctant to explore this aspect of effective communication.  We put more faith in mastering our content and organizing it in a logical manner.

I can only say what many have said before me:  expertise is necessary but not sufficient.   Logic may be the language of reason, but style adds to it life, sentiment, and shading.

The tone of a human voice is often more powerful than the words being spoken.   Ask the doctors whose insurance premiums have gone up.

Tags: Body Language, communication skills, logic and style, public speech training, speech coach, speech training, Tone of voice, vocal instruction, vocal tone, voice coach, voice coach nj, voice coach ny, voice teacher, voice training
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