52 Bicycles

The ever-insightful Presentation Zen has a piece up entitled Presentations and Word of Mouth Marketing which encourages marketers to speak to groups - potential customers, peers, local communities, people outside of the target demographic - in order to get two things:

1. Experience speaking to groups, and refining the message and presentation
2. Getting the groups to talk about you and your product.

And in a world ever-more connected, getting others to speak will have measurable feedback effects. Getting a blog mention will boost the google rankings as one obvious benefit online. Certainly I have spoken at a few conferences and organized a few events, and while none of them have been for my firm’s target audiences (lawyers and law firms) all have been beneficial for both the reasons above.   

People talk about people more than they talk about products. Put a face on top, and have that face speak, and you have a more powerful story to tell. So I encourage my fellow entrepreneurs to speak. Speak to each other. Speak to the local community. Speak at my bootstrapper breakfasts.

Speak at BarCamps - this is actually an area where I would like to see an unconference event - people speaking about their own projects to others who have some kind of interest, perhaps with support (where are you Rod Begbie) sessions on presentation skills. A little bit of “Toastmasters for geeks” if you will.

Speak individually, but definitely learn to speak to groups, so that the groups will speak to - and about - you.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 1st, 2006 at 9:18 pm and is filed under Technology Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. Reddit This