Episode #350: Personal Branding As A Presenter

The best personal branding is to say something useful and interesting in a compelling, professional way. That is a snap right? Maybe not. What constitutes useful and interesting will vary, depending in who is in the audience. If we pitch the content complexity too high, we may be over the heads of our audience. They will take nothing away, because they are lost and they will hate us for making them feel dumb. If we pitch the complexity too low, they may become insulted. They feel we are purposely speaking down to them, to emphasise our own genius ability.

I have seen this occasionally where a speaker has taken no notice of who is in the audience and gives the talk the speaker wants to give. Ironically, one of those speakers was talking about “personal branding”. Unfortunately, the context for the speaker was her own massive global organisation. She was intent on branding herself to stand out internally in that grandiose world of big egos. If she had looked at the guest list for that speech, she would have realised straight away these were small to medium-sized companies and mainly people not yet very advanced in their company’s echelon. I surmised that her speech was more for bolstering her resume with the title of "public speaker" than providing useful advice on how to create an individual brand for the audience. Her own personal brand was utterly extinguished after forty minutes of her nonsense. The lucky thing for her was that only those gathered in the room put a line straight through her name, to eliminate her as a professional “public speaker” and self-promoting “personal branding expert”.

Regularly check the guest list to see who has signed up and then adjust your talk accordingly. Usually the organisers will share that list with you, but even if they are rather bolshie about it and won’t for so called “privacy reasons”, then get there early and meet people. In Japan, because we all use business cards, it is very easy to find out the rank of the person and the industry they are representing. On the fly, we can alter the complexity of the pitch for our topic and tailor it to the level of the audience.

Useful, valuable, fresh, differentiated, rare information is a big attraction for the speaker. We think that because what we have to say is so valuable, that the information itself will do all the heavy lifting for us and we can get a free pass on the professional delivery bit. Not true. I saw this trotted out recently with some visiting high-powered speakers. I realised later that the talk we received in Tokyo was actually a dry run for them, for a speech they were going to give later in the Kansai region. The ultimate intended audience were experts in the field and so the talk was pitched deep in terms of detail density. The audience assembled in Tokyo, including me, were the great unwashed and not very expert regarding this area of speciality. We needed a different version for us, but the speakers didn’t care about that. They were selfishly giving the talk they wanted to give. We were not their target audience and were just the patsies for their practice run.

What also surprised me was the unprofessional way they presented their information. Obviously, their company’s global headquarter team had prepared the slide deck for them, so it was beautiful, properly fitted out and branded etc. It was also obvious that the slide designers were not public speakers, because the beauty part was there, but the messaging part wasn’t. When you litter a slide with too much unessential text and then add insult to injury by making the text font too small to read easily on the screen, you are killing the messaging.

Their industry is awash with data and so naturally we had to have a lot of graphs to illustrate the numbers. That would be okay if they had observed one simple rule – one graph per slide instead of two or three. The graphs were also drowning in a sea of micro accompanying text vying for our attention. The numbers on the graphs were simply too small to read, so the points were lost on the audience. This is not how a professional presents their information. The speakers were oblivious to all of this, because they thought they were cleverer and much better paid than those in the audience and that we should lift our game to keep up with them.

I am positive they were being better paid than those of us in the room listening, but so what? They were there to impart a brand image for themselves and their company and they failed on both counts. I doubt the Kansai version for the expert audience went any better. All the same flaws we were presented with here in Tokyo, would have been transported by Bullet Train down there and given the same treatment. Their personal brands were diminished and also that of their firm. Remember, we judge the entire company on the quality of the people we meet from the firm. If we meet really capable, smart people we generously apply that idea to everyone down there. If we meet a dud, then we assume they are all duds down there.

Certainly have great information. The key is to make sure the way it is presented is suitable for the audience in attendance. Also, it must be presented in a way which invigorates the message, not emasculates it.