You Don't Have To Be Boring

Now and then you read something that simply says everything you wish you could have said, but only better.  Mike Elgan did that for me and in the last few days, I've been chopping his points into small, easily-digestable pieces while also showing how it all relates to creating content on radio.

The technology and tech culture writer offers these tips for doing what you have to do so often on the air:  provide facts and information that are either in the station's interest or an advertiser's is such a way that it doesn't drive your listener either to change stations or put you on ignore, which is almost as bad.

Here's a much better idea: put as much of the information as possible on your blog, podcast, the station or the client's website.  If you're at a live remote broadcast, have a handout on paper with all the special prices and items the client hopes to move today and use your time on the air talking in entertaining, fun ways about the benefits to the listener of coming by to see you right now.

You'll want to add a bit of that information to your liner or live read, but only to make an impression, not to convey specific facts and figures.

Elgan:  "To understand how this works, deconstruct Apple announcements, for example. They show numbers not so you'll learn the information, but to leave you with impressions. (Fast growth! Big sales! More apps than other phones!)"

The words you say -- should be focused 100% on making people interested in you and your message and on creating a positive impression.

Communicate the nitty-gritty details in a lovely website or social networking page so that people you interest can do get what they need to know.

Don't be boring there either. Add video, or at least pictures. Tell stories with both them and your voice. And sprinkle emotion throughout.

And finally, says Elgan: "Any writer will tell you that words matter."

Follow these basic tips on language to make your talk powerful:

• Use short, basic words. (Isn't that sentence more powerful and memorable than "Utilize diminutive elemental units of language"?)
• Use the active voice when you can. (Passive is the worst. Imperative is the best.)
• Be specific and avoid vagueness. (It's impossible to be too clear.)
• Avoid cliches and jargon. (If you've heard or read a phrase several times before, don't use it. Just talk plainly in your own words.)
• Cut everything you can. (If any picture, point, story or other element isn't absolutely necessary for what you're trying to communicate, get rid of it.)

Most radio personalities are repetitive and sound the same (boring).

But you don't have to be.

Props to scribe Mike Elgan for this week of very useful reminders.

You can grab an audience's attention and build lasting memories by thinking like a writer.

How To Present Like A Writer

Radio personalities too often approach their daypart like it's a transfer of information as Mike Elgan writes on killer presentations in Computerworld : "I have all this information on what (the station is doing) I want you to know, and when I'm done presenting you will now have the information."

This is the worst kind of delusion, because everyone knows it isn't true. People usually retain little more than a general impression.

So if you want to make your bits entertaining and unforgettable, you should learn from people who are good at enjoyable and memorable communication: Writers.

How to present like a writer

A typical backsell breaks down communication into subjects like these:

• Our branding.
• Our music position.
• Title and artist of the song just played.
• Push card.
• Pre-tease what's coming up.

These might be the right categories to discuss if the people in the audience were passionately curious about you and your radio station and what it's selling.

But they're not.

In fact, the reason you're actually THERE is not to satisfy curiosity, but to inspire curiosity. A forced march through your advertisers' "details" will inspire nothing but despair (does anyone want more details in their life than they already have? radio should BAN the word "details").

A good writer is more likely to break down the parts of communication into the categories that reflect how the human brain works, like these:

• Mental images.
• Stories.
• Emotions.
• Facts/info.

Over the next few days as I summarize Elgan's powerful article with radio in mind, let's look at each of these categories and how you can organize your presentation around them.

Lets begin with mental images.

Professional communicators, and especially writers, pay close attention to mental images. When nonfiction writers want readers to imagine something memorable, they use a good visual metaphor.

When politicians want voters to forget something horrible, they avoid mental images and instead use euphemism and jargon -- which is language that has been stripped of visual imagery.

That's how any skillful communicator manipulates an audience: Use visual imagery to create memories; use euphemism and jargon to erase them.

One of the reasons most radio bits are so weak in when measued by listener engagement is that jocks use euphemism and jargon like "nice to have you along on your Tuesday," "the time right now, " "the temperature outside," "before that," "we started off with," "the latest from," etc because they think it sounds "professional."

It doesn't. It's amateur-hour communication.

You are emulating the verbiage of a personality you probably admired a decade or two ago when you first wanted to be in radio.  You aren't even talking like "you," you're imitating everyone else.

A good metaphor is effective because it imparts a strong mental image that faithfully communicates an idea and makes it memorable.

You can tell people that a particular cow is yours, but nobody will forget the fact that you own the cow if you sink a smoking, orange-hot branding iron into the animal's flesh.

It would be easy to forget the abstract idea of metaphors being memorable. But you won't forget the mental picture you now have of that cow being branded.

Writers use metaphors. But as a radio talent, you never have to use them. Until now.

When you want to create a mental picture in the minds of your audience, show them the picture!

Elgan writes:  "The best business presentation I ever saw used slides that didn't have a single word on them. Every slide was a photograph. When the speaker talked about the growth of his company in the '90s, he showed a striking picture of a race car as he talked. When he moved to the post-recession decline, he showed a picture of a car on fire.  Ten years later, I still remember his presentation."

Seth Godin did that at CRS 2009.  One of his messages was for radio to make it easy for listeners to create a "tribe" and recruit their own "followers" for you.  I remember that four years later because he painted pictures in my mind with his presentational approach, which just seemed like conversation which the Power Point slides amplified, but he almost totally ignored, unlike most Power Point presenters.

I have never done a presentation for my client stations or other speaking engagements 'the old way' since!

Yet, most of the radio people in the room seem to still talk habitually in the face of his demonstration of how to be memorable and informative.

Word pictures are memorable. Walls of data are forgettable. So if you want to be unforgettable, use more metaphors and similes in your content breaks and far fewer words and numbers.

Deliberately "show" your listener the mental images you want them to remember and associate with your raps.

Very important: Use "real" pictures, not fake ones.

Never use stock verbiage, which stinks of artificiality. If you want to represent happy people using your radio station at work, for example, use names, voices, texts, social media comments of actual people in real workplaces.

Help your listener picture real products, real employees, real users, real problems, real tasks.

Or if you're illustrating a concept for an advertiser, make sure you "show" scenes of real life, rather than staged or faked scenes.

It's more important for your pictures to be real than to be "professional" sounding.

And, you know what?  Magically, each listener will have a different, personal, equally genuine experience customized just to them on the movie screen of their mind.

Pictures For The Ear: Emotions & Stories

In the Computerworld story which inspired this week's thread, writer Mike Elgan cites a striking scene from the AMC TV series Mad Men about a memorable presentation.

In the show, advertising creative director Don Draper convinces Kodak to call its slide projector the "Carousel."

It's a powerful presentation because the whole time Don is talking, he's showing amateurish snapshots of his family, which is so powerful and evocative that one of his colleagues runs out in tears.

The scene was conjured up by writers who understand the overwhelming power of pictures.

1.  Stories

The human mind is hard-wired for stories. We crave them. We need them. We can't resist their appeal.

So tell stories in your "show." In fact, thanks to Facebook, texting, Twitter, Pinterest, email, phones, you have the capacity to constantly be in the moment of listener life right now, inviting her to share her family scenes verbally.

A good story has a beginning, a middle and an end and involves at least one protagonist -- a person that other people can relate to who experiences the events in the story.  In the beginning, there's a balance. In the middle, that balance is disrupted in some way. And at the end, a new balance is established. That's what a story is.  The key to bringing stories into your content consistently is to personalize the information you're already giving. Instead of talking about some big change your station went through, tell a story about the person or people who made that decision that led to the change, and explain what they went through to reach that decision.

            -- Mike Elgan

 2.  Emotions

"People remember and crave images and stories," he continues. "The other thing people remember is emotions. In fact, when your audience leaves the meeting room, your entire presentation will be judged on only one thing: How you made them feel."

Good emotions for radio talent to instill in audiences include happy, shock, makes me feel good, fear, nostalgia, joy and excitement. Use them all.

But most of all, people remember humor.

More Elgin advice:  "Don't do "schtick" or prepared material.  Don't tell jokes. Instead, expose the humor in the material you're presenting.  Instead of trying to go for the big laughs, convey the mildly amusing shared reality you have with your audience.

Keep it real.

Think Like A Writer

Part of me wants to just link to this Mike Elgan Computerworld story and tell you to read it, relate it to radio and go forth, doing killer shows.

However, knowing many readers of my blog are like me and prefer to consume info in bite size, good-tasting pieces, I want to take the next few days to apply the tips directly to you.

"A lot of today's radio is boring, but don't blame consolidation, budget cuts or your General Manager. Instead, learn to communicate the 'write' way."

How can Howard hold a listener's attention for hours at a time with nothing but words?

Want proof?  He has it.

Almost immediately after his first broadcast on January 9, 2006, seven million+ people signed up for paid subscriptions when he left free radio to jump to Sirius Satellite Radio.

Have you wondered how good film and video writers can keep people glued to the screen when the whole Internet beckons?

Over the coming week, thanks to Elgan, I'm going to tell you how to apply skills from the craft of writing to make your broadcasts enjoyable and unforgettable.

But first, let's understand why most radio personalities are so bad.

What's wrong with radio the way so many of us do it today?

What comes out of radio speakers and ear buds usually involves a lot of pretending.

The speaker pretends to be excited.
The audience pretends to be interested.
Everybody is faking it.

Most radio promos, commercials and "breaks" are packed with fake images -- stock verbiage, audio clip art and other inherently false imagery.

The human mind is very good at detecting insincerity and fakeness and is repelled by it.

Most talent fails because they're working on bad assumptions.

• The listener (one person!) cares about you and what you have to say. (They don't.)
• The person you're talking with (not to!) is thinking about what you're saying. (They're not.)
• The individual you hope to engage (never 'an audience'!) can grasp the details of your complex bits on first exposure. ("She" can't, and "he" won't.)