Last week’s edition of the Influence Factory brings you the latest industry news and lets you hear from Industry Experts! Last week’s Influencer Guest, Michael Angelo Caruso, talks about how he has built his Influence through the use of Events.

When speaking at events, there are certain connections that you make at them. As speakers, we tend to just come in to an event and then leave. There are thousands of opportunities to network with other attendees when you present. You want to find ways to make your material connect to them. We will go through the key points Michael discussed during the webcast here so you can present like an Event Influencing pro!

The Power of Cognitive Speaking

The way we affect our audience during a presentation can be boiled down to a simple science. Cognitive speaking sounds like a new scientific term, but it has always been in the art of presenting. In our webcast, Michael spoke about how Brian Tracey utilized this psychology to understand how leaders and presenters influence others. Cognitive speaking usually involves having a bias. This can be an optimism, pessimism or even confirmation bias. When leaders talk, they can use this to sway an opinion and even sell someone on an idea. You also want to use what you say to show people that you are passionate about your area of knowledge, something that further enhances engagement. Cognitive speaking requires a human approach so make sure you do it!

“When you can show us what you care about, it makes you seem more human.”

 – Michael Angelo Caruso

It’s All in The Details

One way to gain influence when speaking at events is to pay attention to the details (AKA your audience). This seems like an obvious point, but so many people rarely utilize it to its fullest extent. In these days, we are more invested in ourselves than we are with other people. If you want to see how your audience is reacting to your material, Michael said you “should look up at your audience once in a while.” In doing this, you are able to see what they are doing, AND you make your lesson more personalized. This is simple math: Eye contact plus addressing the audience = engagement.

Influencer Marketing Pro Tip: A “ride along” can be helpful when you are doing a presentation. This means that someone watches your presentation and can tell you things that you miss or do not realize that you are doing. We can become too invested in a presentation that we fail to change the way we address things to people. When we are told what we miss, we can be more aware of it so we can adjust the flow of a presentation for our viewers.

Watching your language

There are half a million words in our language and it can be a challenge to find the right words for a response. We may be able to anticipate some things our audience might say but we really need to think on our feet about the words that will create an impactful response. We do this by using word substitution. When you practice, you may find yourself using words that don’t give the presentation impact. By subbing out those words, you can find other words that give your speech a boost.

“While complete perfection is not possible, you can get very close to it when crafting a presentation.”                    

 – Michael Angelo Caruso

Influencer Marketing Pro Tip: You can make speeches more effective during preparation by having a deep vocabulary. There are websites that often do a “Word of The Day.” If you want to deepen your word bank effectively, finding websites that do this can be a HUGE help. Michael recommends Wordsmith.org as a personal favorite.

Build a Good PowerPoint

Unfortunately, PowerPoint has become a bit of a crutch that many people are overusing in presentations. The best presentations will have certain restrictions for PowerPoints. If you are to use one, use it in the middle third of a presentation. The first third should be used to develop a relationship with the audience and the final third should be your “call to action.” A presentation should also use oversized text (limiting how many words are in a slide) and no more than one photo. Remember, people will turn their back to the audience if all their points are in the presentation. You want to make sure your audience is engaged and that cannot happen when you have your back to them.

“The fastest way for leaders and salespeople to excel is to master the art of the presentation.”                                                                                                                        – Michael Angelo Caruso

Knowing The Colors of Personality

While it’s important to dress your best for an event (and try to highlight the colors of your brand in your outfit), you should be MORE aware of the different personalities in the audience. There are four personalities – the thinker, relator, socializer and director. You should get an idea of which of these personality types are in the audience during a presentation.  Once you learn WHO is in the audience, you can then tailor your word choice and presentation to them. This will maximize impact and keep people engaged in what you have to say. You’re using color, but just in an unconventional sense.

Get Feedback and Stay Relevant

This is the most important part of any presentation. The biggest metric of success is seeing what people say about your presentation. You should be asking people about your presentation to see what they got out of it. By learning this feedback, you know what you need to cut out or even add.

“When you want to find out what people think about your presentation, ask them what they took away from your speech.”                             

– Michael Angelo Caruso

On your social media channels, relevance is EXTREMELY important. You want to show your audience that you are up to date on current happenings in the world and your area of expertise. When you post relevant information, it keeps your audience interested in what you have to say.

In Summary

While it seems like a lot to give a successful presentation, these tips are very easy to apply. Remember that using cognitive bias will help you sway your target audience and get them interested in what you have to say.  Once you have done that, you need to be aware of your audience and pay attention to reactions and their personality types. Don’t be too reliant on a PowerPoint as you want to keep eye contact with the audience, NOT give them your back during a presentation.

Influence Factory live episodes air Wednesdays at noon central . Register here.

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We hope to see you on our next Influence Factory!

 

 

 

 

 


Those of you who know me know what my team and I do for a living: we train and coach thousands of people globally on Social Selling through LinkedIn with our Social Jack Academy. We enjoy training enthusiastic professionals from Fortune 500 companies, small businesses and anything in between. What you may not know is that we also teach about Social Selling using FacebookInstagramTwitterSnap Chat and others! We create and share what we call “Power Moves” which generate appointments or referrals — not just activity, and this is key.

Social Selling is not platform-dependent; sure, our friends at LinkedIn made it famous, and we love it in the B2B space, but remember we see your Social Team as people connected to you, not only on LinkedIn. So let’s cover three quick easy power moves, and if you want more we will happily oblige!

  1. Home page scan – or as we love to call it, UNE (Ultimate Network Event).

What does this mean? When you log into any Social Network, we tell you “think of it like you’re at an event” Pretty easy, right? Facebook is a gathering of people who are talking, networking, doing business, sharing personal info, but this is a gathering just the same. When you log in you might see some people you want to talk to and some you don’t; remember, you only need to talk to those you want. If you see a lot of people who annoy you, you chose not to connect to them. You can easily optimize this by either unfriending them (don’t worry, they do not get notified) or quieting them, unfollowing them (you will stay connected, but not their posts), or hiding the post. For me, that’s too much work; I either unfriend or unfollow. And this is just an example, I am not unfollowing my cousin!

Let’s do the Home Page Scan, it’s super easy. Scan your page for an ideal contact, and then simply “Like” or “Comment”; remember, it makes them feel good and counts as a contact with that person. Their network will also see the relationship, so if there are other targets in that network, they will see you, too. Then, if you decide to share with your network, they’ll love you even more. You know this because you know how it makes you feel. The key here is that if you are really working the relationship, then make sure you have the intent to get an appointment after the exchange. We recommend having two social media exchanges and then taking the conversation off-line (call, text, message, etc.). Which takes us to our next cool power move!

2. The Chat Hook – With NEW Facebook AI personal assistant

The ‘chat’ function is on the right side; on Facebook they call it “Messenger”. We like “Chat” because the intent is to be more casual and social, less business-like. The cool thing is that even if the person is not online, they will get notified when they are. What’s more, if they have notifications on their phone turned on, they’ll see it on the phone. You can also use the new messenger AI personal assistant to set reminders for each other; this is a NEW feature to remind people to connect every few days or weeks, for example. Then you both get a reminder to catch up and connect, which has a much more social feel. So remember the ultimate goal is the get the appointment, so jump on it when you have can, keep it casual and social like below.

For more cool power moves like this, remember to head to Social Jack, it’s free at the point of this article, however that will end August 1st, so jump on quick.

Remember if you are new in sales or an expert, there are people on the other side of the click, not bots or icons, these are people, just talk to them and decide when to connect for that meeting, build relationship and jump to the referrals (in our training we show more detail on this). Watch for more blogs on power moves, and of course we have over 200 videos in our Social Jack Resource Center. You can access our Resource Center by signing up for our Basic Social Jack Account, which can be found under the pricing tab on the Social Jack Homepage.

See you online very soon!