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Why I Love Public Speaking | Thinking Out Loud

Wellington Young Professionals Image

For some people it’s what they fear most. For me, it’s where some of my best thinking occurs.

Yesterday I spoke to 30 young professionals on social media and personal branding—an attempt to advocate for using social to build pedigree which sustains and moves with them.

My speaking preparation style is counter to most (don’t practise or have a script or write out bullet points) although it works for me and manifests two very important things:

  • the talk becomes more of a ‘conversation’ not a rehearsed lecture;
  • forces me to construct improvised value based on the audiences needs with the stories being shared.

In this loose and open approach, new concepts are created and interesting ways of presenting or mashing up old ideas occur. Some, are remembered which then form new blog posts or strategic leads. Others are luckily recorded by the tweets of those in attendance (here are just three of my favourite takeaways from the session):

"Blogs are great for metacognition: even if no one reads them, think of them as training your brain to contribute meaningfully" @justadandak

— Shadoe Stone (@shadoesuzanna) November 18, 2014

Damn, that’s a pearl!

So many folks want popular blogs and a readership which validates their effort although in the beginning the process of finding a true authentic voice is far more important than that.

"The currency of online is attention, not clicks" – I like that. Thanks @justadandak and @WellingtonYP for the social media tips!

— Katie Kenny (@kennykatie) November 18, 2014

I like it also.

So much so I added it to the image above (image credit).

Building credible and deep relationships should be the aim not the figures (see Social Media Is Dead | The Marketeers / Advertisers Are Taking Over).

"We are our own gate keepers, we now choose what media we consume, so we must be our own curators" #WYPseries with @justadandak

— WYP (@WellingtonYP) November 18, 2014

Ah the importance of curation as an emerging skillset as a way to combat the saturation and dilution of the signal.

It’s a shame there’s such a small event and speaking scene here in New Zealand. Although come the end of February I’ll be revisiting North America for several opportunities to get back on that stage to think out loud.


Huge thanks to the Wellington Young Professionals for the opportunity to speak:

A huge thank you to DK for his engaging and thought-provoking workshop yesterday. Not only did he open our minds, challenge our understanding and perceptions of social, and dare us to be digital curators, but we’re all heading out to make moleskin pen holders, and feature them on our new blogs!
Behold the new wave of social media users.

Alexis Trevethan, Vice President, Wellington Young Professionals

Other talks
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Social Media Day Presentation | #HootupWLG

Challenging a community to go ‘beyond social media marketing.’

Decided on a different tact for this International Mashable Social Media Day Wellington meet up / hootup presentation (sponsored by Hootsuite).

Seems like my accent is still creating some happy accidents though:

darwin nuts tweet

Thanks to Katherine, Kalista, Jo, Vanisa, HootsuiteAPAC , BizDojo for inviting me to speak and for making the evening happening—humbled reference / respect also to my fellow speakers: Pete, Jo and Matty.

Thoughts?

YouTube version
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Two Gigs, One University | Massey

Massey Uni Logo

Two speaking gigs testimonials from last month:

DK was invited to speak at Massey University’s College of Creative Arts fourth year Creative Futures class about the power of digital social interactions. The course explores social and business enterprise, starting a business, ideas for non-profit organisations and developing a strategic positioning proposal. The students enjoyed DK’s presentation, which generated a number of interesting discussions and provided much food for through around what ‘socialising’ can do for start-ups.

Anna Brown, Director at Open Lab, College of Creative Arts

DK spoke to a group of PR and communication students at Massey University and he blew their minds. It’s not often that a speaker can resonate with an audience who already think they know all about the subject, but DK’s experience, coupled with a killer presentation, demonstrated to them that social media is more than just Facebook.

I have already recommended DK to people who need better insight and direction with their social strategies. The man knows his stuff!

Kane Hopkins, Lecturer at School of Communication, Journalism & Marketing

What an honour to speak to students—want to do more and explore opportunities to do project work with these hungry minds. If anyone thinks I can offer value in this area please get in touch.

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The Future Of Now | Designing Social

dowa session

“Let’s just forget about the future, And get on with the past” Sting

Imagine designing a classroom. A place for learning and the cultivation of curiosity.

Four walls. Ceiling and a floor. Some windows and a door. Other elements like power sockets, furniture, projector, whiteboards, light switches. Focus on that light switch. It could be a dimmer or maybe a couple of configurations laid out as buttons in a vertical line. It’s usually just on or off.

Replace it with a camera. Now with existing gestural technology and software the users of the room have the potential to wave their hand or hold up a certain amount of fingers to make it work.

What if the camera was ‘broken’. Left open for the students to decide how it will function and better still to learn how to programme to make it work. Maybe they replace it with a microphone as they want voice commands (and it changes to recognise different languages for what is being taught that day in class). Or the camera recognises colour which in turn light the room the same way.

Now, not only is the classroom designed as a place to learn but also a space to learn how to use.


‘The Future Of Now’ was the title of a talk / workshop developed and delivered to the wonderful souls at DOWA-IBI Group Architects, Portland, Oregon (during my stateside trip in July).

The above was a response I gave when one of the architects asked for a very specific application to some of the social media / technologies in their future designs.

The official line:

DK was engaging, informative and thoughtful. He challenged us to think differently. The take away was: what is has already become what was and we should consider what will be with the opportunities available today.

For a firm like us we welcome that challenge.
John Weekes, Co-Founder, DOWA-IBI Group Architects

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Crossing The Chasm | Small Numbers Matter

Diffusion_of_ideas

How the diffusion of ideas can be used in creating socially literate University departments.

The above idea originally was developed regarding how technology is adopted into a culture through consumerism. Within the graph there exists a ‘chasm that needs to be crossed‘ between the innovators / early adopters and the early majority (Simon Sinek does a great job at dissecting and detailing this). Knowing and focussing on this tipping point ensures a piece of technology (and subsequently, an idea) could take hold and become part of the global consciousness.

I recently used this model with the client below regarding creating an internal culture (rather strategy) of social media use.

Ensuring the innovators / early adopters become joined by the early majority sometimes means literally a handful of people rather than the larger department as a whole. Inspiring three or four souls can shift groups into a transitional point and simply thinking about it in this way (a few rather than a whole) makes the task immediately more achievable.


I have had 9 separate emails, 4 passer-by comments, and 5 texts this evening from people who attended the ‘general’ session. All comments were thanking, and praising of you, your talents, your gifts and your style.

You absolutely and undeniably rocked our world today…!!! In Maori we would say:

E kore e mimiti te puna mihi ki a koe e te tautohito, e te pou whirinaki!

(a metaphorical spring of acknowledgement and tribute that would never diminish / dry up… i.e. forever grateful for your expertise….you as a pillar of support (dependable, reliant) and adept / experienced and skilled).

Dee Reid, Te Toi Tupu – Kaihautu (Programme Leader), Institute of Professional Learning, The University of Waikato


In this session we focussed on how we can inspire a small number of people to curate content of interest, celebrate success, acknowledge their growing ambassadorial role, as well as mentoring champions coming through. Remember, we’re only talking three or four people here to create this bigger change.

How are you crossing the chasm?

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Social Media Club Wellington Presentation | Warhol: Immortal

Had the recent honour of collaborating with Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa—those lovely folks at Social Media Club Wellington invited me to share.

The blurb from the event:

DK will speak about Te Papa’s Warhol Immortal exhibition and its interactive social and digital media campaign to generate excitement around the exhibit, and get people actively participating and interacting with the campaign, which also rewarded and celebrated those active on social media channels.

He will also touch on the ins and outs of freelance social media, and being hyper aware of governance procedures when working with other organisations.

DK is a bit of veteran SMCWgtn-er, speaking at one of our events last year about getting back to the basics of social media, as well as being the awesome person who brought us TEDxTeAro!

Attribution (in order of appearance):
notjake13, lazyhour, 94324017@N00, artexpo, eschipul, world9-1, tomsaint.

Hire me.

YouTube version
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National Digital Forum (NDF) 2012 | Beyond Social

Time to ask some different questions—here’s the programme description:

If social (media) is no longer the new shiny set of tools that everyone gasps at then what are the next set of questions? In this fast-paced session, DK will balance his presentation with overarching cross-sector ‘big picture’ strategies right through to platform-specific tools and techniques which deliver.

Here’s the critical question in my piece:

If I asked how many of you [in the audience] have a social media strategy or are developing one, then half would probably raise their hands. If I asked how many has a social media culture [in their organisations] then I would wager there would be very few?

Have a think about this for you and your organisation / company…

Client testimonial:

“It’s all about the intersections” pretty much turned into the unofficial tagline for NDF2012 after DK’s spell-binding talk in the opening morning’s plenary session. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard people talk about his presentation and the idea that collectively we need to stop thinking about our collections, websites and work as destinations and start seeing them as intersections—places that our audience find new ways to move between all our stuff. It was a wake up call—one we needed and are heeding. Truly inspiring stuff, thanks DK!
Matthew Oliver, NDF2012 Conference Organiser


Thanks to the National Digital Forum for giving me permission to put up online this screen recording and remix (originally recorded November 20, 2012—they are still waiting for the folks who did the filming to send them the raw video files).

If you have the time, check out the other sessions from this really good conference.

Related post: Strategies vs Culture | Influencing Excellence
YouTube version
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Humanising Wisdom | An Exploratory Presentation

Introducing a new idea.

This is raw. Thoughts in flux. A developing concept and a growing passion:

Humanising Wisdom is an attempt to explore / activate / apply the latent wisdom in organisations, brands and individuals.

Presented at The 16th International Conference on Thinking yesterday.

NOTES

Would love to hear your thoughts on this. What does ‘humanising wisdom’ mean to you? Do I make sense? What didn’t work? What did? Hit me up in the comments…

YouTube video version
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Speaking With Purpose | Kick-ass Presenting

A presentation on presenting like a pro (or something like that).

Today I delivered an intimate public speaking seminar through Chalkle : Six Degrees Of Education.

My foundation came via this Top Ten Speaking Tips blog post written a couple of years ago (which still holds up today).

Was a great experience to not only share some of the insights gained over my short speaking career, but as ever, deconstructing something you do with the purpose of sharing that knowledge, enriches your learning so much more.

Other things discussed:

  • Compfight—clean image search with creative commons options (my preference over the Flickr Attribution directory, although they do pretty much the same job)
  • Salling Clicker—what I use to control my presentations (ensures stable connection, timing options, non-touchscreen so no accidental ‘clicks’ plus haven’t failed me in 6/7 years)
  • transitions—less is more. Advice extended to presenting software like Prezi which can be overused at times when a simple dissolve would be far more effective

…there were many more.

The attendees also had the opportunity to present for a couple of minutes and together we positively critiqued their work.

So what do you think on the advice shared above? Do you have any tips / tricks to share? Do you disagree? Dare you to leave a comment… go on, double dare ya!

YouTube Version
Image Credits: Animal, Woodrow, Guru, Wayne’s World, Talk, Practice, Don’t, No, Control, Look, Attention, Scary, Gospel, Questions, Next
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Libraries As Interfaces, Extending The Possibilities | LIANZA 2012 Keynote

My keynote presentation at this years professional organisation for the New Zealand library and information management profession (LIANZA).

My abstract: The opportunities to connect to audiences and markets are vastly changing due to the social layer the web and new technologies now offer. How can libraries leverage this rich source of interaction to aid their focus, deepen existing relationships plus help generate new ideas and solutions?

Thank you to the amazing (nearly 500 strong) crowd, the organisers, the tech staff etc

Here’s the humbling testimonial:

DK was an outstanding presenter — fast-paced, dynamic, fun and the audience just loved him! They loved his content too — challenging and ‘mind-melting’ but also with plenty of takeaway messages. His keynote was perfect as it delivered oodles of inspiration, and his workshop demonstrated how fast and easy it is to create exciting content in the social media world. He was very professional too, cool and calm during a few technical hitches, and great to deal with.

Linda Palmer
LIANZA 2012 conference convenor

How did I do?

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