What the classroom taught me about public speaking As a B-Corp, Selesti believes in putting people and planet before profit. Our particular focus is UN Social Development Goal (SDG) #4 – quality education – because we believe we can make a direct difference to our clients, our clients’ clients and the local community. And so we have offered our people, their time and their insights to help students at local schools, colleges and the University of East Anglia (UEA). For example, Selesti founder Ollie Blackmore delivered a session on value-based marketing for students at Norwich City College (NCC). Content Marketing Director James Gill has delivered a handful of sessions about content marketing, including those at NCC and UEA. While he has experience of public speaking at marketing events, he had never ‘taught’ in a school before. With the wisdom and guidance of course directors Lorraine Sutherland (NCC) and Nicky Barrell (UEA) he has done some learning of his own. Here he describes what marketing mortals can learn from the pedagogy gods, and employ teaching skills in developing presentations and public speaking. Introduction “As an extrovert, I have always been drawn to public speaking; the allure of the audience you don’t have to fight for and the potential for post-event affirmation. It’s also nice to think that something you know and enjoy can help others. It’s why I also enjoy managing and mentoring. The heartwarming impact of the mutually beneficial. “I didn’t do much public speaking while I worked at music magazines, but since 2012, I have delivered dozens of sessions, from straight presentations and workshops to training and panels. “Recently, I have been volunteering at City College and UEA to deliver sessions for students, hoping to further combine my love of public speaking with training and mentoring and put it to good use. “In so doing, I’ve not only been teaching, I’ve been learning. Working with the amazing course directors and teachers at NCC and UEA, I have been trying to improve my teaching skills. In addition to their own advice, they have directed me to investigate teaching theory generally, to understand the principles behind teaching – what works and why. “Here are some things I’ve learned and that I will carry back to my marketing role: 1. Info-dump “Most presentations that you’ll see in the public sector – from networking events to conferences and summits – will be info dumps. Knowledgeable people and their well-designed Canva decks trying to pump information from their brains into yours. As much as possible in the time available. Everything I know about SEO/GPT/CRM?! There’s so much to say! More slides! Speak faster! “This would be fine if our memories worked like computers: able to perfectly record what’s been said and immediately activate the learning. If we don’t use or revisit that knowledge within 24 hours, most of it will evaporate. By the end of the week, it will all be gone. ‘This is, in part, because presentations make audiences passive, which is not great for learning. 2. Knowledge frameworks ‘Another reason we forget presentations is a lack of schema. Our brains have frameworks – schema – into which facts go which helps us to organise, store, access and synthesise knowledge. Key to this is the interconnectivity of knowledge – understanding how things interrelate, from the internal mechanics of a concept, to how that concept relates to other topics. ‘A presentation will have a topic, maybe even a narrow focus, but if it’s just a list of facts or even a process it will be harder to understand and forgettable if it doesn’t leverage schema. “In a recent presentation, Selesti used the metaphor of the marketing funnel throughout a presentation about marketing for startups, to help explain various aspects of marketing, from strategy and channels to customer service and measurement. Everything we explained sat within the schema – the metaphor, the diagram – of the marketing funnel. 3. Problems and solutions “Most presentations will be about solutions, even actionable advice. But it’s equally important to explain the problem that it solves. This might sound obvious, but it’s amazing how many presentations are just the solution. ‘This is particularly important in a school/college/university setting as it is more likely that what you’re teaching will be theoretical and not a real-world problem for which your solution will be obvious. “Describe the problem. Give real-world examples. Put a person at the heart of the problem. Bring the context to life so that the solution makes more sense. Describe how your presentation aims to solve this problem. 4. Storytelling “Tell stories. This relates to the points about problems/solutions and schema. Stories create a schema that helps people remember content and problems/solutions are a key part of storytelling. “At the most basic level, stories follow this structure:
- Problem/quest
- Journey/obstacles
- Solution/Resolution
“Frame presentations and workshops as stories. Bring the problem to life, explain how you solve the problem and describe the results of the solution. 5. Interaction “Extroverts love to talk, so many presentations are lots and lots of speaking. This is slightly unfair, because many introverts are also keen to convey their ideas and help people solve problems and so cram decks full of facts and stats and data and quotes. It’s simple maths, right? Information is useful, so the more information, the more useful. “However, this means that presentations are passive and passive is bad for learning. “Interactivity improves engagement and aids learning. “Listening is one use of our brain, but this can become tiring (and boring). By introducing interactive elements – questions, tasks – we make audiences use their brains in different ways, which helps learning and maintaining attention. “Many presenters don’t include interactivity. It’s just simply not on the radar. “I wonder how much of this is because of control. As soon as there’s an audience element, it’s beyond our control. I might have an exercise or hypothetical or want to use someone’s business as an example to prove a point, but I don’t know who’s in the room, so I can’t rely on it going well. So I won’t introduce it. As long as it’s just me and my PowerPoint, I can reduce risk and deliver the knowledge successfully. I have certainly tried to do fun little exercises, only to find that no one understands, or there are no good examples of something that I need etc. Brutal. Staring at those blank faces, that are now blank yet also, somehow, communicating that they’re embarrassed for me. 6. Make them do the work “In professional presentations, it is implicit that the presenter will do all of the work: develop the ideas, write the script, design the 40 slides and deliver an hour-long presentation. There might be the odd question: ‘Who here uses SEMrush?’ but it is rare to see a presenter say, ‘Right, get your phones out, Google XYZ and tell me how you would change the metadata’. “The result is a description of the solution to a problem and how to do it. ‘That knowledge coming from outside of me, not yet real, only theoretical, distant’. Mini case study “After delivering a session for her class of media production students at City College, the amazing course director Lorraine Sutherland told me to make the students do the work. My role was to help them discover knowledge: show them the map, don’t deliver the treasure. “This is a real challenge. Think of what you do for a living, instinctively, every day. How might you create a session in which a group of people work out how to do what you do, or follow the steps you’ve described to discover for themselves how a process or method works? It’s hard. “I was to deliver a session on audiences: how to know who they are, what they need and how you can reach them. I could have just described what I do and given some examples. However, I was determined to take Lorraine’s advice and develop something that meant they would discover how it worked and what they needed to do. “I created an exercise in which half of the students were audience personas and half were digital marketers (DMs). The DMs had to define a piece of content and a channel on which to publish to promote their course project. The DMs would interview the ‘personas’ to find out what they cared about, what media they consumed and so on. The ‘personas’ would get in role and answer the DMs’ questions. And off they went. “I felt out of control: like ‘simply telling them how to do it would be more effective’. But I was wrong. “They took a minute to get going. I was worried that the whole thing was fatally flawed and wouldn’t work. They had good questions about what they needed to do, how they might do it and what sorts of things they might ask. But after only a couple of minutes, the DMs were working their way round the personas and asking about hobbies and families and social media channels. “When they’d finished, they described their projects and then the piece of content they would create and what they would do with it. Importantly, they described where the insights came from that informed their decisions. It was great to hear. They’d nailed it. They had discovered for themselves that they needed to understand what their audience cared about and had developed their own questions to explore that. They had understood that they needed to understand how people used their phones and watched TV and had asked questions to probe that. They had then joined those two things together to form a little campaign idea that would perfectly resonate with and reach their desired audience. “Much of the knowledge they now have, has come from them. As such it is more likely that they have internalised the knowledge and are more able to activate it in the real world. I also hope that they will remember it, because it’s no longer a set of facts, but a live process that they can expand on and apply. “Making others do the work is one of the hardest elements to introduce into public speaking. Sod’s law it’s also one of the most powerful for transmitting knowledge. A promise “As well as doing some guest lecturing, I am on my own learning journey: expanding my understanding of pedagogical theories and seeing them at work (I didn’t know what that was two months ago). “I am committed to bringing my learnings from the classroom and injecting them into the corporate world. I have since been at events where some brainbox has delivered a 30-minute fact-splosion and wondered how much better I would have understood and remembered the content if it had been interactive or helped me discover the knowledge, rather than had it fired at me from a PowerPoint. “Next time you’re preparing a presentation for a public speaking engagement, ask yourself: How can I show them the map and get them to find the treasure?” Thank you to Lorraine Sutherland at City College and Nicky Barrell at UEA. Photo Credit: SearchNorwich/Candour
