I should have ended up on Ridiculousness after my most recent presentation.

Ridiculousness on MTV

Do you guys love Ridiculousness?  I do.  I love watching people bite it when they should have known better than to try it.  But then it happened to me.  In a presentation.  Yeah, I bit it.  Big time.

I did a talk before a group of directors for the Center and Institutes at ND.  It didn’t go as well as I hoped but there were a couple of factors that I didn’t foresee.

First, I didn’t plan well on the time. I thought I had more and I hate rushing through a presentation.

Secondly, I focused on social media but I took it from a personal branding perspective and not from a Center / Institute perspective. That

So if I had it to do over, I wouldn’t go into the nuances of Social Media and talk more about Communication Plan and show an example.  A good example is the Stanford Persuasive Lab.

Here’s how you start:

Goals
What does success look like?
Target Audience
Who do you want to communicate with?
Message
What do you want them to know and do?
Tactics
Where do they get their info? How can you be there?
Measurement
Is it working? Should we communicate this way more or less?

Some of the most effective tactics I know. In the order of effectiveness.

  1. Word of Mouth: Face to Face – still the most effective communications
  2. Website / Blog: Central Hub to your digital presence
  3. Brochure: Hand outs via events and direct mail
  4. Email Newsletter: Keeping audience up to date on what you are doing
  5. Public Relations: News stories to keep the public informed
  6. Search Marketing: If you can’t be found via the search engines, you don’t exist to most people.
  7. Social Media: Online word of mouth communications and instant feedback

With the Stanford Persuasive Lab, you can see how BJ Fogg has his central website.  From there he branched out to do a blog, several different websites for different pieces of the work he is doing (he uses all sorts of free online tools like Google Forms) and uses Social Media in form of a Facebook Page for the lab, his own personal Facebook profile and his Twitter profile to communicate and engage his audience.

He seems to be very successful in gaining followers and reaching his audience but you would have to ask him that.  But he is making all the right moves.

If you’d like to check out the PPT, here it is.  I’ve included the other one that I did as well because it’s got a lot of great info but it definitely was the wrong presentation for the wrong audience.

But you know what?  Ridiculousness happens. I hope they enjoyed the show. I always do.


Comments

  1. I was there and enjoyed the show, entitled “When Worlds Collide.” The Stanford Persuasive Lab is an excellent example for this audience and I plan to give it a good look for my own Institute.

    Keep evangelizing, Don. It’s a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it.

  2. I was there and liked the show, entitled “When Worlds Collide.” The Stanford Persuasive Lab is an amazing case for this gathering and I want to give it a great search for my particular Institute.

  3. Some people do get success starting off in social media, but usually those people are very popular or are extremely fascinating. If you don’t have those qualities, it’s better to be demonstrative on what you have, showing off all that you can offer, and put social marketing as one of the further steps in your program.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *