Record your speech to get feedback
Friday, August 6th, 2010
Our friend, T.J. Walker , CEO of Media Training Worldwide and top communications expert, offers practical advice about getting feedback from the home team before you take your speech on the road in front of bigger audiences. He encourages you to try out your speech with a smaller audience – a “free focus group.”
Evoca can help you rehearse and get feedback. Record your speech using your phone, just like a mic, use Skype, or our online recorder. Then email the voice recording right from your Evoca Express account to your inner circle to get feedback. Listen to it yourself, too. Once you’ve perfected it, you can email the entire recording or excerpts to the media in the cities where you are scheduled to deliver it. Need a transcription, too? You can order it online or email it to your in-house transcriber.
Take it away T.J. …
So you have just finished what you think is one of your run-of-the mill presentations, but this time it is to a group twice the normal size in one of your regional offices. After your speech, you are approached by three people.
- Suzy says to you, “Great job on the presentation.”
- Sam says, “Nice speech today!”
- Finally, Jim says (with a big smile), “I won’t forget your speech today, that’s for sure.”
You smile to your colleagues and you smile to yourself. You think, “Darn it, I AM good.” There is only one problem: your speech may have been horrible. How can that be, you may ask, given all of the unsolicited praise? Unfortunately, praise like that is meaningless when it is so general and abstract. Let’s look again at the praise you received.
- Suzy says, “Great job on the presentation.” What she really means is “Please recommend me for that promotion to New York City.”
- Sam says, “Nice speech today!” What he really means is, “I deserve a raise.”
- And when Jim says, “I won’t forget your speech today, that’s for sure.” He really means, “I won’t forget it because you put me to sleep in the first 30 seconds and I never heard it in the first place. Thanks for the time to catch up on my shuteye!”
When you receive praise from audience members immediately after you speak, here is what you should do if you are looking for meaningful feedback.
- Say, “Thank you. What part of the speech stands out for you?” or “What part of the speech was most helpful.”
If the person complimenting you says something like, “Oh, everything about your speech was great,” then you know your speech was a disaster and the person complimenting you is just giving your praise for other reasons, perhaps sympathy.
You should always probe audience members for what they remember in your speech. Which stories stick in their brains? How would they summarize your speech to a colleague tomorrow who was not in attendance? This research is golden for a speaker and it is FREE!
If you try out new material or a new story in a speech and nobody comments on it, maybe it wasn’t so great after all. If everyone tells you after the speech that they loved the story you told (almost as an afterthought) near the end of your speech about the time you went to San Diego and pulled an all-nighter with your team in order to close the sale the next day, then maybe you give that story a more prominent placement in your next presentation, as long as it makes the point you desire.
Great speakers are often great because they use each and every single speech as an opportunity to get a free focus group on how to improve for their next speech. You can to, as long as your probe your audience members after you receive compliments.
Copyright 2010 TJ Walker
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