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A brief detour from social media strategies for a moment…. I wanted to update you on something I’ve launched (well, re-launched, really) that I’m pretty excited about.
Back in 2006, I had one of the most popular podcasts on the Internet — the How To Do Stuff podcast. I always tried to make it a quirky, entertaining, and informative how-to series on all sorts of random things. Things you wouldn’t hear or read about on any of the many how-to sites out there.
The podcast came to an abrupt halt in September 2006 when I became ill. Well, I figured, now is the time to re-start it! And so HowToDoStuffPodcast.com is back up and running! New episodes will come every few days. So far, here’s what’s on the site:
I hope you’ll visit, listen to a few, and share the word about it. If you have a Twitter account, you can use something like this:
Tod Maffin’s quirky, entertaining, informative podcast is back! http://HowToDoStuffPodcast.com
If you’d like to receive an email each time a new episode/post is published, you can sign up here.
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by Tod on July 04th, 2010 
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All of these are available for pickup in the greater Vancouver area. I’d prefer to not ship.
SOLD Nikon 70-300mm (f/4-5.6G) auto-focus lens — $70
This is a great lens to have in your kit. I’m selling my great Nikon 70-300mm (f/4-5.6G) auto-focus lens. It’s in fantastic condition. Only selling it because I’m using a 18-200mm lens a lot more these days. This is a superb lens for shooting portrait/single faces from a distance to get beautiful depth-of-field behind them.
This is one of the lightest distance lenses you’ll ever have. Comes with mount cap, lens cap (with tether), and lens hood. $70 firm. You can pick it up any time and start using it right away! 
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Nikon 52mm Prime Lens — $40
52mm prime lens takes outstanding shots with soft depth-of-field. This is a manual lens, giving you fast and complete control over the focus — no need to wait for the auto-focus to spin and whir until it locks in. Super light-weight and small. You’ll never notice it in your camera bag. Easily fits in your pants pockets for quick change. Comes with mount cap, lens cap (with tether), and UV filter which protects the lens glass. $40 firm.
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SOLD Nikon SB-600 Speedlight/External Flash — $150
Best price you’ll find on a SB-600 flash. ONLY USED ONCE! Sells new for twice as much [see Bestbuy price]. Uses regular AA batteries, so you can replace on the fly without waiting hours for a lithium ion battery to charge. This can be used as a slave remote flash to extend your lighting area. $150 firm. Pick it up any time and start using it right away.
BONUSES:
– Comes with small, light-weight stand.
– Comes with light diffuser.
– Comes with batteries.
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by Tod on July 02nd, 2010 View Comments
UPDATE: The Vancouver Sun agreed and corrected the headline in its second edition. See below for the update.
Let’s see if I have this straight:
- Sensational Headline: Bi-polar patients can become violent.
- Actual story: Bi-polar patients probably won’t become violent.
Come on. A little factual headline writing would be nice. In j-school, you’d get a failing mark for crap writing like this.
It’s this kind of sensationalism that continues to perpetuate the stigma behind mental health issues.
Email sent to Patricia Graham, Vancouver Sun’s Editor-in-Chief:
Hi Patricia,
I was disturbed to see your paper’s recent headline:
“Bi-polar patients can become violent, prof says.”
What disturbed me was not the headline, but that the article, just three paragraphs in, counters the headline:
“Often there is stubbornness and inability to cooperate, but that doesn’t mean the patient will become violent.”
Which is the truth? Clearly, the latter.
People skimming headlines — as is increasingly the case in a digital news world — will come away with an inaccurate sense of the reality here.
Will the Vancouver Sun publish a correction?
Tod
Her response (which was refreshingly quick):
I agree with you about this headline. It appeared in our first (early) edition only, and was caught and corrected for the second edition. The revised headline says:
“Bipolar patients rarely become violent, prof says”.
This was an unfortunate error; the second edition goes to the majority of our readers, but Vancouver Island and rural areas would have got the first edition.
Patricia
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by Tod on June 29th, 2010 View Comments
Last week, I posted “Ten Things I Wish I Knew When I Started As a Professional Speaker.” Truth is, there are eleven things I wish I knew when I started, and the eleventh was that I wish I’d started using an organizational system from day one.
I used to keep my speech resources (contracts, notes from client calls, links to web resources, research, slides, etc.) in a bunch of different folders on my hard disk. Then, I’d change the system mid-way through the year because I thought I’d come up with a better way. Inevitably, I’d lose important stuff along the way.
I switched over to eSpeakers [free trial link here] several years ago and won’t ever go back.
eSpeakers is a powerful database made especially for professional speakers. It manages everything from travel details (hooks into Tripit.com via API), scheduling, details on your topic, number of attendees, contact info, package tracking (if you’re shipping books), expenses reporting, and tonnes more. If you have a number of common jokes or stories you tend to use in many of your gigs, this can even keep track of which ones you’ve told!
Here is a screen-by-screen walkthrough of the program.
This is the main screen, which contains the barebones information. The Status pulldown menu contains Lead, Hold, and Confirmed. Once you’ve put a date on hold, a secondary pulldown menu appears, letting you indicate how strong a hold is — a nice touch, if you have several potential clients interested in the same date.
The Bureau pulldown menu contains hundreds of speakers’ bureaus, and the list grows all the time. If you get presentations from a number of agencies, this will help you keep track of which ones give you the most business.
The Notes section below automatically references every change you make in the database, and you can also add notes manually, like each contact you have with the client.
The Contacts page is pretty straight-forward. You can have it automatically populate the field from your computer’s existing address book, and there’s a place for the details of your pre-event client call.
The Travel tab is very detailed, letting you input both air and ground transportation details. One very nice touch is that if you use TripIt.com for your business travel, eSpeakers will automatically import all your details in from that site. Very handy indeed.
The Action list is, essentially, a to-do list for the event. You can create different action lists for each stage of the pipeline. For instance, when a date is listed as a “Lead” in my database, my action list is pretty small — contact the prospect, forward their contact info to my agent, then follow up periodically. When you convert an engagement from Hold to Confirmed, different actions are required. eSpeakers comes with a set of pretty standard actions, but they are easily customizable (as I have done, above).
When an action becomes due, you get an email that morning.
The lists generate action dates based on the event date itself. So rather than entering due dates automatically, it will set them based on proximity to the event date — for instance, one week prior to the event, my system will prompt me to email my bio to the person introducing me. Two months after the event, I double-check to be sure I’ve been paid.
Unfortunately, for now the action list only lives in the database and can’t update any of the popular online task managers like Toodeloo or Remember The Milk.
There is, of course, a place to track the fee, the agency commission, and taxes. If you sell books, CDs, or other products at the event, there’s a place for you to record how many sales you made, and a spot for you to track the shipment of those items to the venue.
If you speak a lot and sell a lot of products, you could export this data to an Excel spreadsheet, then run any kind of calculations, such as which bureaus book you at events which generate the most number of product sales. Lots of number-crunching possibilities here.
The Custom tab comes pretty much empty, with ten short (one-line) fields and four longer entry fields. You can customize the field names to your own needs. This is how I’ve customized mine: The name of the agent who booked the event, the contract number, and so on.
I like to track the industry name (e.g., Human Resources) to be able to provide me with a simple year-end look at revenues generated from each industry. This can help me know which areas industries it might be more profitable for me to focus on in the future.
It’s also helpful for me to know who the keynote sponsor is so that if it’s Microsoft, I can avoid telling Bill Gates jokes. 
The Library tab is where your documents live. In the top section, you can upload the contract, notes, conference graphic images, or really any small document. (Unless your slide deck is pretty small, I’ve found those files to be a little too large to be handled in this area.) Like the rest of the data, this lives online in eSpeakers’ database.
The real power, though, lies in the bottom templates section. You create a mail-merge Word document and it will fill in all the information it needs from the fields in your database — even your customized short and long fields from the Custom tab.
As you can see above, I have a Word template for the first time I contact them (“I’m glad to hear we’ll be working together…” then a few other templates. When you click “Merge For This Event,” Microsoft Word (and, sadly, only Word for now) opens and fills in the details. I then just copy the letter to my clipboard and paste it into an email. (Kind of wish it could open up in a simple text editor, since Word is overkill for an email.)
Finally, the Misc tab contains the name of the presentation, how you should dress, audience size, whether the general public can attend, and whether this presentation would qualify for your Certified Speaking Professional designation.
My favourite section in the whole database, though, lives at the bottom of the Misc. tab. If there are certain stories or jokes or case studies you tend to re-use in different presentations, this will let you tick those off to indicate you used it. That way, when you’re invited back to speak three years later, you’ll know not to repeat the same material!
eSpeakers is a great program which has totally helped me keep my speaking engagements organized. It’s not cheap, coming in at $74.95 per month (or $809 annually), but for many professional speakers, this is a fraction of a single event and more than pays itself off in the long run.
You can get more information from the site by signing up for a free 30-day trial account.
* Disclosure: The link above will give you a special discounted rate and me an affiliate commission.
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by Tod on June 22nd, 2010 View Comments
I’ve been lucky to have been speaking professionally since 1997 (when I was nearly chased off stage by the audience of teachers for suggesting the model of classrooms segregated by ages was outdated). Along the way, I’ve made my share of mistakes on the circuit.
Here are ten things that I wish I had known when starting out:
Attend as much of the conference as possible.
If your schedule permits it, be there for as much of the event as you can. Even if you have to cover hotel and other costs on your own dime. Clients really appreciate it when you’re up to speed on what’s been presented earlier, so you can tailor your comments to make the day feel more seamless for attendees.
Though it doesn’t happen often, occasionally a speaker before you will use similar material — you’ll want to remove or change that material in your own presentation. By total fluke once, a speaker after me happened to select the same case study I presented and for five minutes basically duplicated what I’d already said. I guess the event organizer thought it would be too awkward for someone to let him know, so he continued and pretty much lost the audience for the remaining hour he had after that.
I also like to stay after my presentation as well. This is prime time to connect individually with attendees who may have been too shy to ask a question in session.
Really, there’s no downside to attending the whole event if you can.
Ask to speak to groups in the same city.
If you’re looking to promote yourself and get more gigs, when you have your first conversation with the organizer ask them if there are any local business groups who they’re connected to that you might be able to speak to (without fee) when you’re in the city. Often there’s a marketing association, Rotary group, or Chamber of Commerce that would be more than happy to host you to present one of your prepared keynotes to their group. They get great value, and more times than not there’s someone there who is connected to a group that has a budget for pro speakers. If nothing else, you can collect business cards to add to your newsletter.
Record your pre-event client calls.
Of course, it goes without saying to always have at least one pre-event call with the event organizer. In that call you’ll confirm details like the time they want you there for an A/V check, how long they want you to speak for, expected attire, and so on. I spend a lot of time with them learning about specifically who’ll be in the audience — main age groupings, gender split, and what their jobs are.
I used to do the calls while trying to take notes, but I’m just not that skilled at it. I always insist on placing the call (as opposed to them calling me) so that I can call with Skype and use the great Call Recorder app to record the conversation. And I do not take notes during the call — I just focus on the conversation. The goal is to extract as much information as you think you’ll need down the road when putting the presentation together.
Don’t hand out copies of your slides.
Almost always, someone will ask for a copy of your slides. I almost never give them out. This is for two main reasons:
- Most of my slides are images, not text. A copy of the slides would be meaningless without the commentary.
- I use a lot of licenced stock photography and video in my slides. I’ve licenced them for presenting it to a group, not for distributing them to others.
Don’t forget that sometimes people want your PowerPoint/Keynote slides so they can basically give your presentation back at their company. Wouldn’t you rather they hire you to give the presentation, instead of giving them part of what they’d need to do your job?
If they insist on getting a copy, don’t put the slides up on your site. Instead, collect their business card and, when you email them the deck, ask them if they’d like to join your newsletter.
Give them something in exchange for their email address.
Though I don’t usually give out my slide decks, I do prepare a PDF document with some notes on what I presented. It’s often about four or five pages long, contains a summary of some highlights, links to things I presented, and so on.
At the end of my speech, I’ll invite them to drop their business card off on a table near me and will email this document to them and add them to my newsletter mailing list. (Always be sure to disclose that they’ll be signed up to your list in exchange for getting the summary, but that they can unsubscribe with a single click at any time.)
Keep a separate copy of each slide deck.
I used to have one basic deck of slides for each presentation, and I’d customize it and save it as the latest version. But this meant that I couldn’t go back years later and see the exact slides I presented to a client. If you have a main deck, open it then save it as a separate file for that client alone.
Record every single presentation you give.
Though most of my clients and audiences don’t realize it, I record the audio of every presentation I give. That way, if I ever need to go back and hear something, I can.
Besides helpful for listening back to yourself so you can improve, it may also help resolve more difficult situations. One time, a client complained, saying an audience member was offended because she heard me use the racially charged “n”-word; I was able to go back and reassure her I’d actually mumbled the word “figure.”
You don’t need any fancy equipment or hookups to the room’s sound system for this. Just start an audio recording going (I use QuickTime) in the background when you leave your computer on the lectern and let it capture whatever it hears through the mic. Even if you don’t speak at the lectern, it picks up the sound system fine. Then convert it to MP3, put it in that event’s folder, and forget about it until you need it.
Backup, Backup, Backup!
This goes without saying, but it surprises me how few speakers have redundant backups. Just last month, I was keynoting a conference and had to go on stage early because the presenter before me couldn’t boot her computer and she had no accessible backup.
Here are the backup methods I use and recommend:
- Turn on auto-backups in your presentation software, that way you always have two copies of your slides; in case your computer crashes while saving it, you’ll always have the most recent uncorrupted version.
- Sign up to Backblaze — it’ll back up everything on your hard disk automatically without you prompting it. It’s only $5 a month. Backblaze is the only system like this I found which can restore a Mac file to a PC and vice versa, if that’s important to you.
- Before leaving, upload the slides to Dropbox.com or something similar.
- Finally, if you’re on a Mac, tell Keynote to also save an additional copy as a PowerPoint presentation and upload that to Dropbox.com too.
But backups aren’t just for files — I carry my own backup wireless mic, fresh batteries, and a separate cheap GSM cell phone, so that in the event mine craps out I just have to pop my SIM card into the new phone and I’m back in business again.
Carry a paper introduction at all times.
Every once in a while, the only introduction I get is something like “And now, here’s our next speaker, Tod Maffin.” Ugh.
The introduction you receive prior to taking to the podium is more important than many speakers realize. It’s what establishes credibility in the minds of your audience. A bad introduction can have your audience write you off as a know-nothing before you even utter a single word.
I prepare a separate introduction for each client (the introductions vary and highlight different parts of my career depending on the topic I’m speaking about) and be sure to meet the person giving the introduction. Nowadays, I just give it to them without asking if they already have one. Always better that they use your material than something they’ve come up with on their own.
Have hidden stat and screen-shot slides
Every single one of my slide deck contains slides that almost never see the light of day. They’re charts or stats that back up some point I make in the main presentation, and screen-shots of web sites I mention.
They’re there because every so often, during a Q&A session, someone will want you to elaborate on a point you made. It really blows the audience mind when you can jump to one of these slides to bring up.
It takes some learning in PowerPoint or Keynote to do this, but it’s well worth the effort.
What are some of your lessons learned on the speaking circuit?
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by Tod on June 16th, 2010 View Comments
