When I think about outstanding presenters in our modern era, I think instantly (and so do others) of Apple CEO Steve Jobs. When it comes to innovating and energizing an audience – be it customers, shareholders or employees – he’s the man!

So I did a quick Google search on Steve Jobs and his speaking skills. I quickly found the following “Present Like Steve Jobs” video on BNET. I’ll also review a BusinessWeek article titled “Deliver a Presentation like Steve Jobs” that I found by the same man, Carmine Gallo. He must be a really big fan of Jobs’ speaking capabilities.

Here’s the summary tips for your use in your next presentation and mine.

1. Make your theme clear and consistent
2. Create a headline that sets the direction for your meeting.
3. Provide the outline.
4. Open and close each section with a clear transition
5. Make it easy for your listeners to follow your story.
6. Demonstrate enthusiasm – wow them!
   - use action, positive  and powerful words like: exordinary, unbelievable, amazing, cool, fun, incredible
7. Sell an experience
   - Make statistics meaningful and significant
   - Analogies help connect the dots for your audience
8. Make your presentations visual
   - Allow your words and word choice to paint an image (imagery)
   - Paint a picture that doesn’t overwhelm
9. Give ‘em a show
10. Idenitify your memmorable moment and build up to it
11. Rehearse. Rehearse. Rehearse.
    Committ and spend time rehearsing.
    It only looks smooth, confident and natural because of rehearsing.
12. “One more thing…”
    - give them a little more… a little more value or an encore.

Watch the video. It’s well worth it. Maybe I’ll have the courage to upload a video of my next presentation. Until then, I owe Communications Skills Coach and Author Carmine Gallo the credit for this Steve Jobs video and tips outline. More than 95% of it came from him.

- Jason Mudd, APR
AXIA CEO

According to the survey, 20% of 25-34-year-olds and 19% of those earning $75k-$100k said they follow companies on social networking websites. Younger adults and men are also more likely than average to say they find advertising on social networking sites useful.

Mobile users are not identical to Web users. They have different needs, wants and preferences. Early mobile users were younger, predominantly male, affluent and tech-savvy. But newer user groups include busy white-collar professionals, multitasking parents, business travelers dashing through airports—or just killing time waiting to board a plane or get through the security checkpoint. And of course, millennials scarcely leave home without their mobile devices in hand.

There is a growing demographic of cell-phone-only users, i.e., having no land-line phone service. (Telemarketers everywhere, face your destiny…) These users skew younger (46 percent in this group are 18-29 year-olds), with lower incomes than typical land-line users (but younger adults do tend to earn less than older age groups). Only 16 percent of individuals in this group fall into the $75,000+ income bracket, according to a 2008 Pew Research Center for the People and the Press study. During the recession, cell-phone-only use expanded to include segments of all demographic groups, as consumers recognized cost-savings by switching phone service to their mobile plans.

A Deloitte & Touche study in early 2008 found a growing number of cell-phone-only users increasingly use their handsets as entertainment devices—a 24 percent increase for this use in just one year. This finding aligns with the increased interest of young adult women in casual gaming.

In 2009, with wider adoption of smart phones and the spread of wi-fi access, studies tracked the upsurge in mobile web use. And new demographic groups moved front and center. The heaviest mobile web users are multi-tasking parents, according to Scarborough Research. Working moms are the new “power users,” relying on mobile devices for information, organization, communications, networking and shopping.

Another group to watch is seniors (aged 65 and older). According to Nielsen, mobile web use among seniors increased 67 percent between July 2008 and July 2009. And Forrester Research reported that mobile access of social networking sites doubled in the past six months. Increased usage is attributed to more smart phones, better user experience and increased social interaction. Mobile is meeting our demand for immediacy in online interactions, tapping into our need for “right now.”

Currently, social identities are fragmented; users have multiple profiles across multiple networks. In the future, “universal social IDs will enable a portable identity that will empower consumers. And that is when the mobile phone will become the hub of social computing activities—the glue that holds the social graph together,” says Dan Butcher of MobileMarketer.com.

Mobile sites need to offer content that satisfies both the immediate needs of mobile users—current, right-this-minute news and information and trusted resources from known brands—and sometimes, a desire for something fun and amusing that they can play, read or interact with for a few minutes.

Useful, functional apps, and strategies aimed at providing positive user experiences will be most successful. Marketers who rely on gimmicks—ringtones, wallpaper, irrelevant text alerts, and poorly targeted and timed coupon offers—will fall by the wayside as mobile users become more sophisticated.

Current successful mobile campaigns integrate with and add interest to other media, broadening the user experience and more effectively drawing users into the brand interaction. Mobile users should be invited to participate; push marketing is just mobile spam.

Chris Quick, mobile media analyst at The Nielsen Company, suggested marketers can use mobile to “reach consumers at each step in the marketing funnel—awareness, trial, persuasion and loyalty—to deliver brand affinity and drive sales.”

Is social media a fad? Or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? Welcome to the World of Socialnomics.

• Is social media a fad or the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution?
• By 2010, Generation Y will outnumber Baby Boomers and 96% of them will have joined a social network.
• Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web.
• 1 out of 8 married couples met in the U.S. last year via social media.
• Years to reach 50 million users: Radio 38, TV 13, Web 4, iPod 3. Facebook100 million in 9 month. iPod applications: 1 billion in 9 months.
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s four largest, with China being 1st, India being 2nd and the U.S. being 3rd.
• China’s ‘QZone’ has over 300 million using their services.
• US Depart of Education: On average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction.
• 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum.
• The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females.
• Ashton Kutcher and Ellen DeGeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire population of Ireland, Norway and Panama.
• 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices. People update anywhere, anytime. Imagine what that means for bad customer experiences
• Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé. Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshman.
• YouTube is world’s 2nd largest search engine with over 100 videos.
• Wikipedia has over 13 million articles. Studies show it’s more accurate than Britannica. 78% of these articles are non-English
• If you were paid $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia, you would earn $156.23 per hour.
• There are over 200,000 blogs. 54% of bloggers post content or tweet daily.
• 25% of search results for the world’s top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content.
• 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands. Do you like what they’re saying about your brand?
• People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them.
• 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations. Only 14% trust advertisements.
• Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do.
• Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009.
• 70% of 18 to 34-year-olds have watched TV on the Web. Only 33% have ever viewed a show on DVR or TiVo.
• 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video on their phone.
• 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle.
• 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation.
• In the near future, we will no longer search for products and services. They will find us via social media.
• Social media isn’t a fad; it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.
• More than 1.5 million pieces of content such as web links, news stories, blogs, notes, & photos, are shared on Facebook daily.
• Successful companies in social media listen first, and sell second.
• Successful companies in social media act like party planners, aggregators, & content providers than traditional advertisers.