A poll from Men’s Health magazine on what scares you the most – where public speaking only was third

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The bottom of page 12 in the January – February 2021 issue of Men’s Health magazine presents results from a Twitter poll which had asked What scares you the most? As shown above, based on 3,647 responses the results were 41.4% for failure, 34.6% for death, 19.6% for public speaking, and just 4.4% for flying.

 

Because this is a silly online poll done back in October 2020 (and not from a random sample) we don’t know who answered, where they were, how old they were, etc. It’s just an amusing set of factoids.  

 

How many people went to the Trump presidential campaign rally in Tulsa on June 20th?

Far fewer than you might have expected. It was held in the BOK Center which holds 19,200 people. An article at OAN Newsroom on June 17, 2020 said Vice President Pence: Trump campaign seeking second venue for rally in Tulsa, Okla. based on Trump having proudly tweeted that over 52 times that number had ordered tickets:

“Almost One Million people request tickets for the Saturday Night Rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma!”

But those who requested tickets had to agree with a disclaimer, as Ryan Nobles reported at CNN Politics on June 13, 2020 in an article titled Trump campaign says it can’t be held liable if rally attendees contract coronavirus. At Forbes on June 21, 2020 there was an article by Andrew Solender reporting the Fire Department’s estimate that Turnout at Trump’s Tulsa rally was just under 6,200 – a fraction of the venue’s capacity. (Just a third).The campaign later claimed about 12,000 went through metal detectors.

I looked at a YouTube video and saw that just before Trump came out to begin his speech, as shown above, the upper seats were almost empty. They didn’t need the second venue. A better view of the audience is shown at 0:35 in a video contained in an article from CNN titled Trump's campaign was trolled by TikTok users in Tulsa.  

What had happened? Look at the sharply rising state figures for coronavirus shown above. Did many people come to their senses and decide that being exposed to a virus pandemic was not worth it?

Other powerful social media factors also may have been present. An article by Laura Italiano at the New York Post on June 21, 2020 said that Organized TikTok campaigns jammed up Trump rally tickets by hundreds. Another article by Joshua Bote at USA Today said K-pop stans, teens on TikTok may have inflated expected turnout to Trump’s Tulsa rally. Still another article by Daniel Kreps at Rolling Stone predictably said Trump campaign denies K-pop fans, TikTok users caused sparsely attended Tulsa rally. An article by Richard Wolffe at The Guardian summed things up by saying Don’t call it a comeback: Trump’s Tulsa rally was just another sad farce.

Your presentation and slides need powerful headlines

On April 24, 2019 there was an article by Richard Dean at Enrepreneur titled Own the stage: here’s why your presentation needs a Twitter-friendly headline. It was subtitled by and opened with excellent advice to:

“Boil your presentation down to a single, snappy sentence that would fit into a single tweet.”

One example he gave described how in January 2007 Steve Jobs had introduced the iPhone with just a five-word headline:

“Today Apple reinvents the phone.”

On June 4, 2018 I blogged about how A presentation slide. Presentation, or blog post needs a great headline rather than just a title. The example of an eye-catching tabloid headline I used was a 1985 book title:

“Dwarf rapes nun; flees in UFO.”

The 1955 image of Senator Henry Ashurst buying a newspaper came from the Library of Congress.

Make your PowerPoint charts effective rather than pretty

On October 29 at the Ellen Finkelstein PowerPoint Blog there was a guest post by Yousef Abu Ghaidah titled A simple 4-step guide to beautifully visualize data in your presentations.

His four steps are:

1]  Tell the right story

2]  Add less, not more

3]  Add flair that is relevant

4]  Add creative details

His example began with a table listing the fifty most followed users on Twitter in 2017. Then he showed 28 of them in an abominable pie chart.

For the first step he showed a column chart with all fifty captioned HOW POPULAR IS KATY PERRY ON TWITTER?

For the second step he limited the chart to the top seven. Inside each column he listed the number of followers via a silly vertical label (e.g. 106 M FOLLOWERS for Katy Perry). At the bottom of each column he put a two-line label with the name and hashtag, like Katy Perry, @katyperry.

For the third step he changed the background color, moved the title to the left of the column chart, and spread it over four lines.

Finally, for the fourth step he sensibly switched the layout to a horizontal bar chart, added a small circular image for each person, and put a ladder between Justin Bieber (103 M) and Katy Perry (106M) and a caption to the right noting ONLY 3M FOLLOWERS BEHIND. Here’s his ‘finished’ chart:

It’s pretty, but it’s still not very effective. What needs fixing? The name labels identifying those top seven users are too small to read, and we don’t need to see their hashtags too. Make them bigger, and we won’t need to identify them by their pictures. Make the data number labels bigger too. Also, we don’t need to see the word FOLLOWERS repeated inside all seven columns. A single axis label would work better. Finally, taking up a third of the image width with a four-line title to the left of the chart is pretty silly. Why not make it one line at the top? Here’s my simpler version:

What do you think? And if I was picking what to include, I’d probably have shown the top five users rather than seven.

How not to communicate on Twitter

On May 19th, shortly after of the loss of EgytptAir Flight 804,  Donald J. Trump tweeted:

“Looks like yet another terrorist attack. Airplane departed from Paris. When will we get tough, smart, and vigilant? Great hate and sickness!”

What a pile of self-serving campaign crap from DumbOld Trump! He has been justifiably slammed over it.

But it has been almost fifteen years since the 9/11 attacks. Of course we are tough, smart and vigilant. For example, right now the Idaho Air National Guard has a deployment of their A10 Thunderbolt II ground attack airplanes over in the Middle East.

And, as of today, we still don’t know if the EgyptAir loss was a terrorist attack.

Should presenters be nervous about the Twitter backchannel?

Yes! On November 2nd Drew Neisser blogged at Fast Company about Giving Kick-Ass Presentations in the Age of Social Media. His seven points were:

1. Don’t panic if they aren’t looking at you.

2. Stifle the temptation to ask for a device moratorium.

3. If you aren’t nervous, you should be now.

4. If you don’t speak Twitterese, it’s time to learn it.

5. Congratulations! You may be speaking to millions you can’t see.

6. The reviews are in - in real time.

7. When all else fails, surprise the audience with honesty.

Even before I read his #3, I was inclined to be nervous about something new. After all, Twitter is like giving a heckler a large, digital megaphone. Some people will use it to yell: HEY! LOOK AT ME!

So far I haven’t presented at a conference that displayed a Twitter backchannel. Long ago I used to follow two unmoderated Usenet Newsgroups - sci.materials and sci.engr.metallurgy. The majority of users posting and commenting were intelligent and quite civil, but there also were a few loudmouthed jerks and trolls. I'd expect the same from Twitter.

Imagine what Abe Lincoln might have put up with if Twitter was around during the Gettysburg Address:

DrummerBoy61: 4score n7? Y not 87? LOL!

Kilrain20thMaine: Ha, ha! Stovepipe hat makes Abe look 2 tall.

CopperHead62: 3 minutes iz 2 short 4 an address. WTF!

OhioCpl27: His wife Mary Todd be crazy!

Bruce63: Abe Lincoln once turned to somebody and said, do you ever find yourself talking with the dead?

I’ve seen several blog posts that have discussed living with the backchannel. Ellen Finkelstein recently blogged on how to harness the back channel during your presentations. Last year Denise Graveline blogged about integrating Twitter in your public speaking: 14 ways. Olivia Mitchell blogged about how to manage the Twitter backchannel, and also provided a detailed publication as a 62-page Acrobat file discussing How to present with Twitter (and other backchannels). 

The image of a rowing coach with a megaphone is from here. That last Tweet is the opening line from Bruce Cockburn’s song Postcards from Cambodia.