These have been rumbling around my head all morning:

1. Present your ideas, NOT your slides.
‘Nuff said.

2. Speak. To people.
Of presenting or speaking, always choose (in your own mind) to speak. Engage humans in your “audience” almost precisely the way you would engage them at a wonderful dinner party. Tell them your best stories. With love, and with interest in their interests.

3. “Which Means That.”
Live by this. Explain your concept/idea/plan/business/offering, and then append the words “which means that ___________,” and fill in the blank. Apply this repeatedly until you get to the core significance of the message and the reason that your ____ needs to exist. There is something meaningful and universally relevant at the core of anything worth doing. Tease it out and then lead with it.

(Though I forward this as a technique to make presentations better, it’s really a way to make whole organizations better. Find the significance. Share it. Always.)

This blog is link in the previous post, but their page on the cyclone is worth its own post, particularly for the map detail (which originated from Mizzima)

Cyclone Nargis « Rule of Lords

So the provocative question that Christopher Penn asked is this, can a boat from India get into any of the ports near the hardest hit areas? Were shipping facilities there also destroyed? How creative can we get?

Regular readers of this blog may understand pretty well just what it is that I do, and how I can make them more effective and profitable by expressing their ideas and value offerings more clearly. I, however, do not always lay out my own value-added as clearly as I’d like. Oh, the irony. Cobbler’s children, and all that.

I help you achieve more when you present. I make presentations easier to prepare, less stressful to deliver and more closely tied to ROI for your business and career. I provide tools, ideas, consulting and support that lets you and your team convey ideas more effectively and memorably.

For some clients, this means training or coaching. I help re-write and re-script the messages themselves, and more specifically target them to the audience. We can work on things you would like to change or I can run diagnostics (I know. like you’re a car) on your existing presentations and suggest areas to strengthen.

But how do you know if this is for you? Try me. Contact me to discuss an introductory analysis of your situation, opportunities and strengths.

One big, brief thought while reading: Psychology | Inside a deal | Economist.com

Can you see the world, or at least *your* message, from the “audience” point of view?

The same perspective-taking and empathy skills that make people more effective in negotiations also make presentations much stronger and more persuasive. After all, a presentation is often the stepping off point towards engaging in negotiation.

Perspective-taking, “the cognitive power to consider the world from someone else’s viewpoint,” is probably the most important part of presenting more effectively.

(Via SigmaXi’s Science in the News.)

I just FAIL at the Inbox Zero concept and related methods for taming the email beast. I know this so well that I’ve never really *tried* hard to get there. A few half-hearted, high-energy assaults on my inbox, adoption of some of the main principles, yes, but never achieved. And the progress I *do* make I never manage to preserve.

The truth is, a LOT of my email just serves as little flags of information that I can take in at a glance with no need to act on. The time it takes to find and delete all of these little flags, if I bothered, would be wasted. It’s enough to have them register in my brain via gmail or blackberry and then flow away in the stream that is my inbox.

What I *really* need isn’t inbox zero, it’s inbox infinity.

Inbox Infinity

I want my optimized inbox to automatically delete all messages on a rolling time frame, x weeks or days after receipt. With that as the default, I would set up rules for certain messages to auto-archive instead of delete. The bulk of messages received fall into the first or second treatment.

Everything else can then be batch processed using an “Inbox Zero” like system, where I respond, convert the message to a task, add an event to my calendar or tag and archive information I will need for later reference.

This in place, I’d only have to give mind and click-share to the messages I need to act on. The rest would just play their parts as messengers and beacons and then drift away on the river without my intervention. It’s a subtle difference, and might not sound like a big time-saver to many of you, but deleting and archiving by hand is actually a substantial (and worthless) part of my inbox maintenance.

What do you think? Are there hackarounds in Gmail that would let me do this?

I am lecturing twice today at Bentley College in Waltham, MA for Professor Mark Frydenberg’s IT101 course: Introduction to Information Technology. Mark is extraordinary in the degree to which he incorporates, teaches and uses web 2.0 tools (wikis, blogging, popfly mashups) in his class.

The morning class was delightful and of course, we live streamed the entire thing on Qik.com/pistachio

I told my Twitter followers to follow this link to remain abreast of the students’ conversations and remarks via Twitter during the class. It is just a www.tweetscan.com search for “pistachio” so that everyone can follow all of the replies together and see the students’ individual introductions. It kept us all on the same page. Fun.

Next class is in a few minutes, I’ll return later to embed the video… Follow us live (if chat doesn’t work, there is probably just a time lag on the upload) at www.Qik.com/pistachio.

Client: “Should I have a PowerPoint?”

Pistachio: “Why?”

Client: “I don’t want them to be bored.”

Pistachio: “Then don’t.”

Pistachio: “Is there anything you need to tell them that you cannot do with your body or your voice?”

Client: “No.”

Pistachio: “There you go.”

Pistachio: “Uh, do you mind if I write this down for a blog post?”

Community, duh, equals people with things in Common. Those things in common are what Hugh McLeod at Gapingvoid has been calling social objects.

Apple’s lack of “social media” efforts have been widely criticized, BUT. Who has arguably the strongest cult, err, community following of any technology company going? Oh yeah. Right.

They did it by creating things people feel so passionate about that the community arose on its own.

If your company is smart enough to value community, what can you learn from this?

Community sin #1 Community without love. iPod is a social object because people have a passionate relationship to it. How does your company stir passion?

OK, stop laughing. Your work matters to someone. There’s a headache you solve or you wouldn’t make money. Take waste management. Passionless. Yawn. Except, someone SURE cares when there’s the lack of it. And the person whose job it is to take care of personal and commercial trash disposal sure as hell cares when the service sucks.

Community sin #2 Trying too hard. I won’t even bother to google for examples, surely you’ll have plenty in the comments. Picture yourself standing in the middle of the playground at recess yelling “hey guys! let’s make an M&M Mars community!” FAIL. Instead, try “hey guys! who wants some M&M’s?”

Communiy sin #3 Community as destination (and to benefit the company only) instead of as means to something mutually interesting. Be useful. Be convenient. People have enough obligations in the circles they currently frequent. Don’t build another damned place for them to go. Build stuff that fits and goes wherever they already are.

The bottom line is that someone already cares or you wouldn’t be in business. That’s your community. Serve them well.

What are your “Community Building” pet peeves? How would you guide a company trying to generate real business value through community?

Next week 2,000 marketers at SAP will convene to learn and share marketing innovations. The Marketing Community Kickoff Meeting will feature:

• Seth Godin
• Ze Frank
• Dennis Howlett
• Zoli Erdos
• Ross Mayfield
• David Armano
• David Meerman Scott
• Laura “Pistachio” Fitton

www.Unisfair.com’s virtual environment will 2,000 SAP marketers for the Marketing Community Kickoff

I’m ecstatic to be in such good company, sharing my ideas about how to communicate and present more effectively. Blogging, answering questions and digging in to share ideas with the other bloggers and interact with the SAP community has already been fun and inspiring.

How SAP is running the event is exciting too. All internal blogging and discussions are on Clearspace collaborative software, and attendees will “meet” in the Unisfair virtual environment, from wherever in the world they work. I love how the event both models and teaches new ways of communication, collaboration and marketing. Can’t wait to see how it goes.

I rely on “shared items” feeds in my RSS reader. I “subscribe” to hundreds more feeds than I can follow and a firehose of ideas pours through every day. Shared items allow friends to highlight the “best of” their reading experiences and stream out little personal “highlight reels” from all the material they happen to read.

When friends share what’s exceptional, the river of incoming information is concentrated into a manageable stream. I miss alot, but I also get more value in less time. Honestly, I *like* how the “social media echo chamber” bounces good stuff to the surface to get shared much more widely.

South by So Much
Crammed with panels, parties and thousands of smart, creative people, South by Southwest Interactive festival (SXSWi for the under-140 crowd) was both wonderful and (for me, almost totally) overwhelming.

Speaking with Clarence (@DYKC), CC Chapman (@cc_chapman), Steve Hall (@adrants) and others at the airport, I kept feeling disappointed about people and things I’d missed.

Shared Items Metaphor for Events
Instead of feeling sad, why not consider storytelling part of the event? What if the videos and blog posts and photos and podcasts and personal recollections now pouring from my friends and contacts are as much a part of attending SXSW as actually showing up at a panel? Nobody can absorb all the best ideas, consume all the content, meet all the people or attend all the parties. Life just doesn’t scale. And to try is to spread ourselves too shallow and thin.

Though I know from stories told that I missed important things, by seeking out what my friends noticed and took away from the experience I’m extending the depth and breadth of being there. Of *course* you can’t do it all yourself. Do your part well. Dive deep, absorb, process and reflect. Then, make it a priority to engage and exchange stories with with others who did theirs.

Your knowledge and experience is not as firsthand that way. The experience is (literally) socially mediated. Stuff will be lost in translation, sure. But tackling a conference like that head on and trying to do it all spills plenty of the good stuff too.

Comments
Tell us what YOU did a great job absorbing/learning/discovering at SXSW. Better yet, give us a link to your blog posts, media and other ideas…

UPDATE
Some gems seen on Twitter:

• SXSW Blogger Beatbox
• SXSW Sketches

As a shortcut for checking out recaps, here are some readymade Google search links:

• SXSW Recap 2008
• SXSW podcasts 2008