How to Tease and Flirt with Your Audience

How to Tease and Flirt with Your Audience
http://www.public-speaking-hong-kong.blogspot.com/

What's the best way to get your audience curious?
How do you get them so curious that they're begging
you to know more?

• Public Speaking Tip: Tease, Don't Tell

Before your audience will value the information you’re giving,
they’ve got to want it. Demand has to come before supply.Most presenters take the audience’s desire for granted,
but that’s a big mistake. Great presentations are mysteries,
not encyclopedia entries.

• Example: The Girl Effect

An online video called “The Girl Effect”  starts by recounting a
list of global problems: AIDS. Hunger. Poverty. War. Then, it asks,
What if there was an unexpected solution to this mess?
Would you even know it if you saw it? The solution isn’t the Internet.
It’s not science. It’s not government. Curious? See, it works.
(Go to girleffect.org for the answer.)

• Even TV Shows Do It!

Curiosity must come before content. Imagine if the TV show Lost had begun with an announcement: “They’re all dead people and the island  is Purgatory. Over the next 4 seasons, we’ll unpack how they got there. At the end we’ll take questions.” We’ve all had the experience of being in the audience as a presenter clicks to a slide with 8 bullet points. As he starts discussing the first bullet point, we quickly read all 8. Now we’re bored. He’s lost us. But what if there had been 8 questions instead? We’d want to stay tuned for the answers.

•  "What's the next question I want them to wrestle with?"

The best presenters don’t structure their presentations
by thinking, “What’s the next point I should make?”
Instead, they decide, “What’s the next question I want them
to wrestle with?”



About the Authors
The above article was by Chip and Dan Heath, authors
of the highly recommended book "Made to Stick". You
can check out their public speaking resources here:
http://heathbrothers.com/

Sticky Messages through Storytelling

Did you hear about the guy who lost over 200 pounds of weight in less than a year? And that he did this by eating only fast food?

In November 1999, an article that appeared in the Men’s Health featured a bizarre story about Jared Foggle. According to the article, Jared Foggle was an overweight student at Indiana University who managed to lose 245 pounds on his “Subway diet” – a diet that consisted of him eating only Subway sandwiches.

When the management at Subway heard about this, they decided to scrap their “7 under 6” campaign (a series of ads which promoted the fact that Subway had 7 sandwiches with under 6 grams of fat) and marketed Jared’s story instead. The result? As soon as ‘Jared the Subway guy’ commercials began running, sales jumped by almost 20%. However, after a few years of Jared’s commercials, Subway began to remove Jared out of their ads. Now, with Jared gone, sales began to go down. Subway decided to bring Jared back.

So, why is it that Jared’s story was such a huge hit? Why was the Jared-story more successful than the “7 under 6” campaign?

The answer lies in the fact that stories are much more persuasive than statistics. Or, as Patricia Fripp (an executive speech coach) put’s it,

“People are trained to resist a sales pitch, but no one can resist a good story”.

It’s easy to resist the “7 Under 6” campaign, but Jared’s story is so inspiring that we cannot help but watch it. We get involved in Jared’s story – as humans, we empathize with his problem of being overweight, even though we may not be overweight ourselves; we get involved in the story because we are curious (“Wow! How did he lose so much weight?”); and we get involved because we can “see” the story – that is, even if you haven’t watched the Jared commercials, you can still mentally picture your own version of a ‘before-Subway’ and ‘after-Subway’ Jared.

The ‘7 Under 6’ campaign, on the other hand, is a statistic which informs us, but fails to involve us because it doesn’t inspire us, it doesn’t make us curious, and we can’t picture what 6 grams of would mean for our body.


Now, this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t use statistics. Statistics certainly have their place in communication, but they are not as powerful as a well-told story. Nevertheless, in future blog posts, you’ll learn how communication-masters such as Obama and Ronald Reagan use statistics to inspire people, to arouse curiosity and to “create a picture in the listeners’ minds”. In other words, how they use statistics to make their messages memorable.

“Statistics inform us, but stories involve us"

Stories are a powerful form of communication. They’re engaging because they involve us emotionally and they are memorable because we can mentally see the story. To be successful in our communication, we must use stories.

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