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- Case Study: Hazel Walker, The Queen of Networking
- Should I Speak in Public?
- No, Seriously
- But I Hate Speaking in Public
- Overcoming Your Fear of Public Speaking
- Finding or Creating Your Own Speaking Niche
- How to Start Your Speaking Career
- Identify Speaking Opportunities
- How Does This Apply to Our Four Heroes?
- Giving Your Talk
- Important Technology Tips for Presenters
- Miscellaneous Tips, 140 Characters or Less
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
How Does This Apply to Our Four Heroes?
Although people generally speak for the same reasons—they're often desperately craving attention and want to make some money on the side—the path they take to get there may be a little different. So how will our four heroes from Chapter 1, "Welcome to the Party," use public speaking to advance in their career path or find a new job?
- Allen (influencer) spent 14 years as an account manager and has a lot of expertise in account management, marketing campaigns, ad creation, and the like. He would be a valuable resource to new marketing managers and coordinators, so speaking about a niche within marketing management would be a good one to pursue. Topics like "Marketing Analytics" and "ROI Measurement" would be good subjects to present to his local chapter of the American Marketing Association. Not only can he share his knowledge, he might be able to make good connections with potential employers there.
- Beth's (climber) goal is to move up the career ladder to a chief marketing officer position in the insurance industry, so she should pursue a speaking plan in one of two directions: She can either speak to the marketing industry, or she can speak to the insurance industry. And she can even do it with the same topic: "Marketing Tactics in a Heavily-Regulated Industry." The talk can be geared toward any regulated industry, like finance, health care, or pharmacy. Or she can gear it back toward her regular industry and retitle it "Marketing Tactics in the Insurance Industry."
- Carla (neophyte) wants to change careers from pharmaceutical sales to nonprofits, she is better off focusing on nonprofit issues rather than pharmaceutical ones. Although it would be easy to focus on a pharmaceutical audience, those aren't the people she wants to work for. Because a lot of nonprofit professionals don't think of themselves as business-people, business topics geared toward nonprofits tend to gather big audiences. Carla should focus on speaking to nonprofit professional organizations (that is, the Kentucky Fundraising Professionals Organization, Planned Giving Professionals of New Hampshire) and teaching people how to take a sales approach to fund-raising. This will not only show her business development expertise, it will put her in contact with people who are either hiring fund-raisers or know about fund-raising positions.
- Darrin (free agent) is a commodity as an IT professional because he "fixes computers." (Sorry, IT folks, that's the way we non-IT folks see it.) Darrin wants to start public speaking to enhance his career and job growth possibilities, so he has two choices. He can try to impress the IT hiring managers by speaking about a particular growing field, like "Walking the Fine Line Between Network Security and Social Media." Or he can do basic presentations to reach C-level hiring managers, like "Basic Computer Security for Office Staff." Either way, Darrin's talks should be geared specifically toward the right audience. And because Darrin usually only transfers laterally based on more money, giving the right kind of talk to the right kind of audience might also get him a bump up the career ladder.