The evening surpassed every expectation I had. Each of the presenters spoke with passion and often with real courage; the stories they shared were sometimes painful but always inspiring – and tremendously valuable.

The organizers have been posting each presentation on YouTube. Each one clocks in at around five or six minutes, and they’re well worth watching. (The first three and a trailer are up already, and I’ll be adding new ones to this playlist as they’re posted.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

A big, big thanks to Catherine Ducharme for inviting me. One last lesson I took from the evening: I have to go to more IABC/BC events, because this one was terrific.

P.S. – As the final speaker after a series of powerful talks, I was facing a classic hard-act-to-follow dilemma. I’ll tell you how I tackled it in a separate post, once my talk’s online.

What a coincidence — I was about to send you an unsolicited email suggesting you outsource your email marketing activities to us! I figured you’re probably pretty frustrated with your current provider, since they’ve been ignoring our repeated replies that we aren’t in the market for your services, and to please take us off your list.

True, we aren’t skilled in the use of great buzzword like “product DNA,” and I don’t think we could use the phrase “technology patents” the same way you do without grinding my molars to dust.

But we do know how to protect your company’s reputation from the kind of practices that make you look like self-aggrandizing ignorant spammers. And for a modest $100,000 retainer for the coming six months, we’d be happy to do that simply by shutting down your entire email marketing program.

Honestly, I think it’s money well spent. From my perspective, anyway.

Alternately, please remove us from your mailing list.

Cheers,
–rob

(In case you’re wondering.)

Think of it as a spur to conversation: something that people will share and talk about online. (Jyri Engeström first coined the term, but cartoonist Hugh Macleod has done a lot to put it into practical terms.) For your speech, that social object could take many forms: A great clip of the key moment from your speech. An infographic illustrating and supporting your argument. A striking and relevant image, captioned with a text quotation from your speech.

Or it could take the form of graphic recording: an increasingly popular way of capturing the essence of speeches and conversations as illustrations, usually drawn live and in the moment.

Innovative workshop facilitators have been using graphic recording now for years. (Here’s Nancy White doing her marvellous graphic take on my Northern Voice talk from 2009.) And now it’s hitting the mainstream with everything from RSA’s now-famous whiteboard animations to sketchnotes at events like SXSW and (cough) the Nonprofit Technology Conference.

The folks at Duarte Design created a series of illustrations from last month’s TED 2013 talks – garnering more than 100,000 views on Slideshare. Here’s how one of them, capturing seven different talks, came together:

You don’t have to be nearly as ambitious in scope and scale, of course. But even a few simple sketches along with explanatory text can help your message spread – and inspire conversations that can lead to connection, action and impact.

And those sketches don’t require any special artistic training or cartooning skill. Books like The Sketchnote Handbook and The Back of the Napkin set out simple techniques you (or someone in your organization) can use to illustrate a message with clarity and power, even if you haven’t dared to doodle since grade school. And the Sketchnote Army website offers inspiration on demand, with tons of examples to learn from.

Add some identifying information — the speaker’s name, the event and date, an URL and a Twitter ID — and you’re ready to release your sketchnote into the wild as a social object. There are countless ways to do it:

• post the image to your blog
• post the image to Flickr
• tweet it out after the speech
• add it to the slide deck you post on Slideshare
• turn it into a Prezi
• animate it a little and post it to YouTube

Whichever way you share it (and any other social object you create), follow and join the conversations it triggers, and engage with the networks it helps you build.

P.S. – I’m convinced the current popularity of hand-drawn live notes owes no small debt to the impact of Common Craft‘s fantastic explanatory videos. So it’s no accident that I’ll also heartily recommend Lee LeFever’s The Art of Explanation, which is great on images and can help you add sound and video to the mix.

1

For whatever reason – not enough food with the wine at dinner, a coup d’état in the brain where the amygdala seizes control, or just a moment of weakness – someone in a position of prominence and authority posts a Dumb Tweet.

2

Others read the Dumb Tweet and retweet it – often with a brief annotation, such as “OMFG” or “#fail” or “Can’t believe this jackass!!!” or “OMFG #jackassfail”

3

The tweet becomes a trending topic locally, and a journalist notices it.

4

The author of the Dumb Tweet gets a panicked call from their press office.

5

The author shrugs it off, either as a joke or a normal part of the cut-and-thrust of conversation.

6

The author discovers that the cut-and-thrust of conversation is a lot less fun when that reaction fuels a whirlwind of criticism.

7

The author issues a half-hearted non-apology.

8

The whirlwind becomes a firestorm.

9

Someone in the organization stages an intervention and conveys to the author that something more apology-esque is in order.

10

The author delivers a grovelling, if not entirely sincere, apology.

11

The author carries a lingering sense of resentment that plants the seeds for the next Dumb Tweet. And the circle of life continues.

• There are no television shows entitled “Real Housewives of Busytown” or “CSI: Sesame Street.”
• The latest season of “Curious George” did not end on a cliffhanger episode in which George contracts rabies and barricades himself in the cottage with a terrified Allie, concluding with a grief-stricken Man in the Yellow Hat quietly telling Wint Quint to “take the shot.”
• Martin Kratt did not lick a cane toad. Nor did he activate a creature power suit using Kodiak bear DNA, black out for half an hour, and then come to only to discover Chris missing and the Tortuga awash in gore.
• The Super Readers are a group of friends and not an elite paramilitary strike team, and there is no impending coup d’état in Storybrook Village. We categorically disavow the opinion that “the power to help” is “a sop thrown to the sheeple to distract them from Whyatt’s naked New World Order ambitions.”
• Poko‘s ability to create things out of thin air by drawing them with his finger may be viewed as either magic or the product of his vivid child-like imagination. It does not to the best of our knowledge denote affiliation with Satan.
• There is no “hidden feature on every school bus” that will summon Ms. Frizzle and activate its Magic School Bus capabilities if the emergency exit is opened while the bus is moving at 45 MPH or faster.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

(For more accurate guidance on kids’ TV and other children’s media, may we recommend Common Sense Media?)

This guy (the dad of one of Bad Machinery‘s main characters, a circle of kids who solve mysteries) has to con a room full of people into believing a cock-and-bull story (rather than the truth, which is that his son helped to save the city from a walnut-shaped hope-eating monster). His allies: a 287-slide PowerPoint deck and a thermostat.

The sad truth, of course, is that he isn’t the first to deploy this strategy. Dense, impenetrable thickets of text; charts and graphs whose meaning seems to reverse if you so much as shift in your chair – these are proven methods of failing to communicate while appearing to communicate.

A stifling, unventilated room… well, that’s just icing on the cake. (Melted icing, if it’s been in that room for any time at all.)

I’ve sat through presentations where it dawned on me at the 10-minute mark that the speaker was trying to snow me. And then sometimes, at the 20-minute mark, I’d realize they were also fooling themselves. Bad slides can help provide cover for sloppy, muddled or faulty thinking – from the speaker as well as the audience.

via Bad Machinery – March 12, 2013.

Filed under: Presentation Design

In moving ceremony, Lieutenant Governor formally adds “Embattled” to Christy Clark’s title of “Premier”. #bcpoli

— Rob Cottingham (@RobCottingham) March 2, 2013

Today, I give you the second sentence of this Gary Mason interview.

There may be something to this. I spent four years around weapons that ranged from a nine-millimetre pistol to hand grenades to the Carl Gustav recoilless rifle during my time in the Canadian Forces Land Reserve.

I don’t want to exaggerate the experience. It’s not like we were performing nightly patrols through the war-torn streets of Beacon Hill South — this was a summers-and-some-weekends-and-weeknights engagement, at least for me. And since I belonged to a medical platoon, proficiency with guns and rifles took a back seat to how quickly you could apply a field dressing or erect modular tentage for a field medical inspection room.

In my case, that was fortunate. Firing a C1 rifle, I only once managed a twelve-inch grouping at 100 yards from a prone position — and that on the target next to mine. And for about five years after I left the reserves, I had a lump of scar tissue over my right cheekbone from holding that same rifle improperly. (It had quite the kick.)

No question, though: I became familiar with guns, and they don’t hold much sense of mystique for me.

The damage they can do, though… that still preys on me.

A decade before I joined the reserves, my family lived in a tiny Southern Ontario town. There weren’t too many kids near our house, but I often played with the boy my age across the street.

That changed one evening.

My memories of that night aren’t clear or especially reliable. A lot of it I’ve had to reconstruct, and my parents told me more about it years later.

I don’t remember hearing a shot. I can remember someone banging on the fron door, my parents answering, my mom rushing me to my room as my dad bolted into the night. Him coming home later, hands bloodied; me again being rushed to my room.

And then the explanations from my mom in simple, reassuring sentences: my friend’s younger brother had taken his father’s rifle from the closet. My friend took it from his brother, pointed it at the wall to be safe. It went off, and somehow his father had been in the line of fire. My dad had gone over to help. My dad was okay. Don’t worry. Everything was fine.

My next memory is that my friend was at our house, white-faced, shaking. I was clinging to how everything was fine, and wanted him to feel the same way – so I joked about it. I can’t remember how he reacted, only that I realized as I soon as I’d spoken that something was much more desperately wrong than I knew.

That’s the last memory I have of my friend: an unwittingly, unspeakably cruel joke at the worst moment of his life. I can only hope he was too dazed to take it in, but that’s a pretty faint hope.

The reality was that his father had died on the floor while mine was doing his best to resuscitate him. I never saw my friend again. His family quickly moved out of town, and not long after, so did mine — hundreds of miles away.

So I don’t have a fear of guns’ mystical powers. But their real capacity to inflict terrible damage, instantly, irrevocably; to give poisonous delusions an outlet for carnage; to implicate a little boy in his father’s sudden death? That, at 150 yards or across the intimate distance of a living room, is still legitimately frightening.

But my immediate reaction to the proposal in Ontario to ban marketing junk food to kids is pretty unambiguous: go for it.

Here’s where I should run through the public health evidence supporting such a ban (for instance, after a similar ban in Quebec, fast-food purchases fell 13%). And where I should acknowledge the need for a broader set of policies in addition to legislation.

But instead, I’m just going to tell you that I have an overwhelming bias on this score: a deep-seated, unshakeable hatred for candy stands at checkout counters. Specifically, the candy stands that sit – in store after store after store after store – at kids’-eye level.

There’s a lot that the world of marketing does that I loathe, but there isn’t much that’s such a naked act of aggression against a parent’s ability to promote their child’s health. (Once you get past the breakfast cereal industry, anyway.) It’s no accident that the candy’s where it is, and no accident that kids encounter it while their parents’ attention is diverted by the checkout process.

And yes, parents should be able to say “no” and kids should listen. Parents should also be well-rested, store visits should be swift and efficient way to buy your necessities, and children should be happily singing “The Lonely Goatherd” in three-part harmony.

But that’s not how it works, is it? When you’re buying groceries at the end of a long day with kids in tow, everyone’s temper’s frazzled. The daily frustrations of work and school, the 50 or so times you said “no” back in the freezer section, the cereal section, the cookie section, the bakery, the end-of-the-aisle Cap’n Crunch ambush display, the potato chips section, the soda pop section…

…and then as you fumble for your bank card, driver’s license and loyalty card with one hand, wallet tucked under the arm attached to the other hand which is trying to hold a wailing toddler back from bolting out past the sliding doors and into the parking lot…

…trying not to think about how you’re not 100% sure your card’s not going to get declined…

…the clever marketing minds at Safeway and Shoppers Drug Mart have figured out you might be a little more vulnerable than usual. Or a lot. And that you may be willing to give in, and buy some peace and quiet, or a little forgiveness for the horrible things you said while you were prying your kids out of the Popsicle freezer.

And if that means sabotaging your efforts at a healthier diet for your kids – or yourself – well, that’s a price they’re willing to pay. Especially since they aren’t paying it. (And in the case of Shoppers Drug Mart, because with repeated success it means future customers for their weight-loss supplements, insulin, cardiac and blood-pressure meds and, ultimately, condolence cards. That’s probably a little harsh, but then again these are the same fine folks who fight every restriction on retail tobacco marketing tooth and nail.)

Is legislation the answer? Until I hear a solid argument otherwise, I’ll be a supporter. In the meantime, in provinces that aren’t yet considering it, I’d love to see a parents’ movement come together around convincing retailers to remove those displays.

It doesn’t even have to be about morality or public policy. It can be about this: every kids’-eye-level checkout candy display makes my job as a parent that much harder. You want to earn my consumer loyalty? Get rid of the damn things.

President Barack Obama and Jon Favreau, head speechwriter, edit a speech on health care in the Oval Office, Sept. 9, 2009, in preparation for the president’s address to a joint session of Congress. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza – via Flickr)

Presidential communications are seamless, hermetic; they betray no sign they were ever anything other than fully polished.

Usually.

But now and then, we get a glimpse like this, and we get a hint of the furious activity going on just below the surface: the endless cycles of revision and comment that ultimately turn out the glowing words scrolling up a teleprompter screen. In this case, it looks like a long night is in the cards for Jon Favreau.

Maybe it won’t be that bad. There have been times when I would have killed to have a client whose handwriting was as meticulous as Obama’s looks in this photo. If his directions are as clear as his penmanship, Mr. Favreau’s an even luckier man than I’d thought.

Filed under: Speechwriting Tagged: jon favreau, obama

(I’m a bit of an edge case: my desk has an external monitor, an external USB keyboard and a Bluetooth trackpad. And when I plug in my laptop, it’s on top of a stand that makes it a pain to use the MacBook’s trackpad to turn on Bluetooth so it will recognize the external trackpad. Yeah, first-world problem… but it’s my first-world problem.)

Keyboard Maestro lets you trigger all sorts of things from the keyboard, but turning Bluetooth on and off isn’t one of them. (There are lots of other utilities to do this, of course. Quicksilver is a popular free one.) My next stop would normally be AppleScript… but it doesn’t seem to be able to throw the switch on Bluetooth, either.

Open-source software to the rescue, in the person of Frederik Seiffert. He has written a dandy little command-line utility called blueutil that can do one of three things, depending on how you type the command: query Bluetooth’s status (on or off), turn it on, or turn it off.

Unfortunately, unless I’m misreading the documentation, Keyboard Maestro isn’t up to the task of issuing Terminal commands and parsing their results. But AppleScript is.

So having installed blueutil, I wrote this little script to toggle Bluetooth on and off:

tell application “Terminal”
do shell script “/usr/local/bin/blueutil status”
set _Result tothe result
if _Result is “Status: on” then
do shell script “/usr/local/bin/blueutil off”
endif
if _Result is “Status: off” then
do shell script “/usr/local/bin/blueutil on”
endif
endtell

I saved the script, and then created a Keyboard Maestro macro using cmd-shift-option-B to execute it. Voila: a keyboard shortcut that turns Bluetooth on and off.

“And now, the report from our pollster, entitled ‘Just how frakked are we?’”

“I really do think the tragedy of our society is actually not there are so many atheists — because atheists often express themselves as generously as non-atheists — it’s the fact people don’t go to a place of worship every week and get reminded anymore of how important it is that we care.”

You know, maybe it wouldn’t be a terrible thing if some British Columbians, especially in leadership positions, could go to a special place more often and get reminded of how important it is that we care. But for that to happen, it would have to be open a little more than 19 full days in nearly a year.

Possibly the leading speechwriting trainer out there (with two decades under his belt!), he has a lot of insight and knowledge to share. And he’s done just that for countless students through his intensive annual two-day workshop at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University.

You can also take Colin’s course online, running six weeks but with the same hands-on practical assignments, individual attention and focus on the business as well as the craft of speechwriting.

Both workshops start in March, but with Colin’s reputation, I’d sign up now. The on-site workshop takes place all day Friday March 1 and March 8 at SFU’s downtown campus. And the online course begins on March 15, with an early-bird discount available now.

Filed under: Speechwriting, Vendors and Products Tagged: Colin Moorhouse, course, sfu, teaching, training, vancouver, workshop

I enjoyed Eric Bergman‘s book 5 Steps to Conquer ‘Death by PowerPoint’: Changing the World One Conversation At a Time, once I got over my initial disappointment that it isn’t about using PowerPoint to conquer death*. (I’d missed those all-important quotation marks.)

So, like me, you’re still going to die. But if you’d rather not do it behind a microphone – or in an audience – then you might like to check out Eric’s book. My review is in the January issue of IABC/BC’s Connect:

Somewhere in the world right now, someone is facing an audience with a remote in their hand, notes on their lectern, and a failed presentation in their immediate future.

Within the next 15 minutes, most of the audience members will have checked out: losing focus, interest, or – in extreme but not entirely rare cases – consciousness.

That scene’s going to play out around the planet today with thousands of groups from training seminars to team meetings to pitch sessions. A staggering number of PowerPoint decks will be shown today to an even more staggering number of people — with staggeringly little benefit.

That’s what Eric Bergman is trying to change. In 5 Steps to Conquer ‘Death by PowerPoint’: Changing the World One Conversation at a Time, the Toronto-based communication consultant argues that the vast majority of PowerPoint slides aren’t just being created in vain: they’re actively undermining our ability to communicate.

Let me know what you think!

* This will come as a relief to the Microsoft Office development team, who would see that as some serious scope creep.

Filed under: Uncategorized

NRA chief reveals another valuable social purpose of speeches: They force leaders to say their position with a straight face. And we get to see what they look like when they say it. And that’s worth a hell of a lot.

That’s a critical point to remember about the power of public speaking. A news release, Facebook update or tweet can say the most absurd things in the world, and the text will look as straightforward and po-faced as if it was an announcement that toast is made out of bread.

But no matter how much time a communications team spends editing and fine-tuning a speech, a human being ultimately has to say these things in real time. (Such as “This is the beginning of a serious conversation. We won’t be taking questions today.”) At that point, we associate those things with a person and a face… and the speaker knows that’s exactly what we’re doing.

And that doesn’t just apply while we’re listening. In the era of online video, there’s a good chance that same human being will be held accountable at some point in the future if what they say turns out to be inaccurate, misleading or – in the cold light of day – absolutely awful.

There are speakers out there who are so delusional or unethical that this makes no difference to their delivery. But I’ve seen a number of speeches, news conferences and interviews where it quickly became obvious that the speaker had no confidence in what they were saying. Instead of just spinning, they were spinning out of control.

Thanks to YouTube and low- or no-cost video editing software, one incident like that can happen over and over again. With Autotune. And a backing track.

With any luck, that may provide a little added incentive for the otherwise-ethical when the temptation arises to defend the indefensible.

Filed under: Social Speech Tagged: news conference, nra, wayne lapierre

1. practicing
2. knowing your space (really important, and so often overlooked)
3. knowing your audience
4. finding the balance between self-promotion and the content people came to hear
5. breathing – which is to say, relax.

I’m going to suggest two more:

Know what you want: What do you want the audience to do as a direct result of your speech? Maybe it’s to march on the capitol. Or to adopt a new open standard in public health inspections. Or to stop using “perpetuate” when they mean “perpetrate”.   Build your speech toward that, and then ask them directly to do it.

Know your story: If you know the spine of your story, if you can trace the unbroken logical flow of narrative in your sleep, then no matter what else happens on stage – speaking notes catching fire, mic melting into slag, PowerPoint inexplicably replaced with porn, Involuntary Sudden Onset Yodelling – you’ll be able to recover.

Filed under: Speaking

Or you click the “About us” link on an organization’s web site… and you’re taken to a rambling, vague philosophical essay. Or you search online on three keywords, click a promising result, and discover the page has nothing, nothing to do with your search terms. Or you tap a link to “Read more” on a mobile web page, and a 30-megabyte PDF begins to download slow-w-w-ly onto your smartphone, sucking the life out of your data plan.

Been there? Me, too — all in the past week — and it left me fuming.

What happened in every case wasn’t just a little wasted time, or a frustrated search, or a dent in my data plan. What happened was a little tiny betrayal.

Because a link isn’t just an URL or a little HTML code. A link is a promise.

On a web page, it’s a promise that if you click or tap here, you’ll go to the page, document or resource that the text inside the anchor tag describes. In a Twitter feed or on a Facebook page, it’s a promise that this link will be worth your while – that it was worth sharing because it’s worth reading.

Breaking that promise means breaking faith with readers and visitors. And the ways people do just that are depressingly numerous:

• Letdowns: Site navigation that leads to “Coming soon!” pages.
• Surprise downloads: Links that lead without warning to Word documents, PowerPoint files and anything else that doesn’t load seamlessly in a user’s browser.
• Hype: Claims that the content at the other end of the link is far more controversial, significant, useful, factual or hi-LAR-ious than it really is.
• Lockouts: Links to walled gardens that many users won’t be able to enter: paywall-protected news stories, for instance, or any service that requires you to create an account to see the content.
• Lies: Outright deception about what’s at the other end. (No matter what the motivation is – whether it’s rickrolling, black-hat SEO tactics or something else – you’re making a withdrawal from your trustworthiness account.)

The result? Some pretty upset people:

http://storify.com/robcottingham/i-hate-it-when-i-click-a-link-and-it-leads-to" >View the story "I hate it when I click a link and it leads to..." on Storify]

The flip side? When someone clicks a link of yours and gets exactly what you promised, it builds trust – the same way that keeping any other promise does. Trust helps to build relationships, and relationships… well, they’re what social networks are built on.

Here are five ways you can be sure you’re keeping those promises:

• Open doors: Avoid linking to content behind paywalls or registration barriers. And before you pass on a link to something someone’s posted on Facebook or Google+, check the sharing settings on it to be sure it’s public.
• Fair warning: Let people know when you’ve linked to something other than a web page or an image. Label your link with the file format and, if it’s a hefty one, add the file size: Interview with Nancy Duarte (MP3, 5.5 MB)
• Working links: The web is a living thing, which means bits of it die sometimes – bits you may have linked to. From time to time, give your site a check for broken links. (Looking through your analytics for common 404 errors is a start.)
• Unvarnished truth: Sharing your honest excitement along with the link? Great. Puffing up mediocre content as life-shatteringly awesome? Less so.
• Due diligence: Twitter and Facebook make it awfully easy to repost someone’s link if they’ve made it sound appealing. But have a look first – so you know what you’re sharing when you pass a link along.

Sharing links can do a lot of good for you and your audiences. Just remember that when you share content, it reflects on your reputation – for better or worse.

Posted via email from Rob Cottingham’s posterous

]]> http://robcottingham.ca/2012/12/goodbye-gerry-anderson/feed/ 0 http://robcottingham.ca/2012/12/goodbye-gerry-anderson/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=goodbye-gerry-anderson http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OneDamnThingAfterAnother/~3/agKZV-qAiJ4/ http://robcottingham.ca/2012/12/social-speech-podcast-episode-12-mitchell-beer/#comments Thu, 27 Dec 2012 21:43:10 +0000 Rob Cottingham http://robcottingham.ca/?guid=e3f155fa4e357113630043ea4abc3c0c Mitchell Beer has been a leader in conference communcations for more than a quarter of a century. His firm, The Conference Publishers, reports and repackages conference content – keeping it useful and relevant long after the closing gavel.

How does that change in the social media era? In this episode, Mitchell tells me how conference reporting is evolving to take advantage of everything from YouTube to Twitter. And along the way, we gain some insights into how speakers and speechwriters can help their messages find a prominent place in those reports… and in the ideas participants take home with them.

• Mitchell Beer on Twitter and LinkedIn
• The Conference Publishers on the web and LinkedIn

Education Professor Christine Greenhow, Michigan State University, conducted a study on Twitter as a new form of literacy. Her results showed that adults who tweet during a class and as part of the instruction:

• are more engaged with the course content
• are more engaged with the instructor
• are more engaged with other students
• and have higher grades than the other students.

via Now Proven! Using Twitter At Conferences Increases Attendee Engagement.

So the next time you look up from your speaking notes into a sea of heads bent over laptops, tablets and mobile devices, don’t despair – as long as they’re tweeting and not, say, checking their email, your audience may be more engaged with you than ever.

Filed under: Social Speech, Speaking Tagged: backchannel, twitter

The scariest thing of all? This wasn’t the dumbest thing he said. At all. By a wide margin.

Of course, consider as well the attention to craft and detail – particularly timing – that he devotes to the process. Chances are, many speechwriting clients aren’t so vested in the process that they’ll be willing to give you that kind of running room… not for the whole speech, anyway.

But seeing Seinfeld describe his process is a healthy reminder that you can do yourself and your client a lot of good by giving yourself a lot of space to work on the most critical moments of a speech, and to make them as powerful and memorable as you can.

Filed under: Craft, Speechwriting Tagged: humor, Jerry Seinfeld

Then came the web, and then smart mobile devices, and everything changed. Today’s web-based notebook lives on your laptop, desktop, tablet, smartphone and web browser. And the most successful by far is Evernote.

Synchronizing your notes across your various devices and the web is just the tip of Evernote’s iceberg (or, if you prefer, the flyleaf of the notebook). Evernote does everything from handwriting recognition to photo synchronizing to web clipping… and much more.

Figuring out how to harness all that power, though, can be a little daunting. (Your last paper notebook probably didn’t require help documentation.) To put Evernote’s features to work for you, it really helps to have the guidance of someone who not only knows the software itself, but how to make the most of it.

Enter Alex’s new ebook Work Smarter with Evernote, the first in the Work Smarter with Social Media series from Harvard Business Review Press. It’s available on Amazon, iTunes and HBR.org. (As of right now, it’s topping the time management category for Kindle volumes, and hit the number two spot for Amazon’s time management books.)

Work Smarter with Evernote isn’t a software manual. It’s a guide to using Evernote to make your professional life more effective, productive and satisfying. Alex shows you how to use Evernote to capture notes no matter where you are, and to organize your work and your priorities. And show you how to realize the full potential of Evernote’s social features — the ones that make it a powerful tool for collaboration.

Maybe best of all, you won’t have that long apprenticeship period where you have to patiently learn a tool’s intricacies before it starts being useful. Alex’s 30-minute setup guide can get a beginner up and running — or, if you’ve used it before but never really got it, let you give it a real try.

Alex draws on a wealth of experience and knowledge, both around the app itself — she was one of Evernote’s earliest adopters and evangelists, and is now Evernote’s research ambassador — and around effective online work and collaboration. (You can sample some of that expertise in a few of her recent posts for the Harvard Business Review, Vision Critical and Evernote.)

We hope you’ll check out Working Smarter with Evernote. And let us know what you think!

True, most of us just grumble a little at the inconvenience of a nag screen popping up, then click through without reading. (And who can blame us?) But with a growing awareness of issues ranging from online privacy to usage rights, more and more people give amended user agreements a good hard look.

And when they find something they don’t like, there’s a receptive audience of users ready to spread the word, often on those same platforms. Sometimes those concerns arise from overblown, out-of-context misinterpretations of legal language. Other times, they’re just plain delusional – and if you posted one of those Facebook-is-now-a-publicly-traded-company disclaimers, you probably got an earful from your friends to that effect. (I suspect the issue around Instagram using photos in advertising has less to do with conscripting your next coffee photo as a Starbucks billboard, and more with serving “Rob Cottingham also followed [insert brand here]“-style “social ads”.)

Yet many user agreements really are downright abusive. They’re drafted by the company running the service, and are pretty much always skewed in their favour. Reading them, it’s hard not to think that the company’s legal department drafted them with one mandate: “whatever we can get away with.” The site Terms of Service; Didn’t Read documents the ways a range of services put users at a disadvantage (along with a handful that actually do a pretty good job of balancing conflicting interests).

The issues are real. But when people complain about changes to user agreements, as many are doing about Instagram today (the EFF outlines its concerns here), there’s often a backlash. They’re accused of whining about the free service they’re receiving, trying to prevent the company running it from making a profit, and having way too high an opinion of their content’s value. (If you’re looking for a post that hits the trifecta, with a trollish dollop of sneering, try this one.)

To take the first two arguments on quickly:

• It’s a free service: Yes, a service like Instagram doesn’t charge a fee. You don’t pay in money. Instead, you pay in time, creative effort and attention. And that, in turn, creates the community without which the service would be worth far, far less. (See “Just because there’s no price tag doesn’t mean you aren’t paying for it,” a post I wrote three years ago.)
• Companies need to make money, you commie freak: Of course they do. Even the most co-operatively-owned company needs to bring in enough income to keep the lights on. (Unless it realizes an indirect return for its owners in some other way, an idea we’ll set that aside for another day.) But one-sided exploitation isn’t the only business model out there (and in the participation business, it’s a risky one). Companies and individuals strike mutually advantageous arrangements every day; Flickr’s deal with Getty images treats its users as partners.

But it’s that third “Get over yourself and your crappy pictures of food” argument that I find especially toxic. (This is apart from the objection that, if the content users are generating have no value, why put the rights to use it commercially on the table at all?) The backlash against user advocacy plays into the idea that all that time and creative energy we’re pouring into Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Cheezburger, Flickr and the many other services out there, and all of the images, videos and stories we’re sharing are worthless.

Sure, a lot of the content being shared is frivolous and silly, or executed with little thought and effort. So is a lot of human conversation and activity; we’re playful by nature, and we’ll sometimes dabble at things without ever being good at it. (Also, if you ever have a look at some of the drek that often gets pawned off as children’s entertainment, you’ll look at LOLcats and Twitter memes with a whole new level of respect.)

And all that light conversation keeps the channels open for the more significant stuff. I discover deeply moving personal stories, glimpses of awesome beauty, laugh-out-loud humour and unexpected insights through my social networks every day. They come from people who don’t always have the talent and experience to craft a polished, professional piece, but whose distinctive perspectives and voices outweigh those deficiencies.

One of the most powerful things about the social media revolution has been to give those voices an audience. And whether that audience is a small circle of friends and family or a network of hundreds of thousands, it has opened up the world of creative self-expression to hundreds of millions of people, drastically lowering the barriers to participation.

One barrier remains, of course: creating something and sharing it with the world is still an act of courage, especially with the “so… what do you think?” of a comment field or a Like button. There are still many out there who delight in running down things other people have created, and still plenty of opportunity for a first-time creator to experience shame and embarrassment for caring about what they’ve created. Easier and safer, then, to do that ourselves pre-emptively, to be the first to describe our content as trivial.

But we sell ourselves short, and lie to ourselves, when we dismiss what we’re creating and sharing as worthless – and shrug off our rights as creators as being just as unimportant. Which is why it’s deeply gratifying to see the protests that arise over terms-of-service changes: we’re starting to take our time and self-expression a little more seriously.

And just as important is the way that the platforms themselves are responding. While I was writing this post, Instagram published one of its own, featuring – among other points – an overdue explanation of the most contentious terms-of-service change, governing the use of photos in advertising and promising clearer language on that point.

Instagram’s owners clearly understand and respect that, clever and innovative as their technology may be, it’s the community and the content they create that gives Instagram most of its value. We should show our time and creativity at least as much respect as they do.

For me, it highlights a dilemma – because I’ve always shied away from taking credit for my clients’ speeches. The best speeches are a collaboration; even when the speaker hasn’t participated in crafting the words (rare, in my experience), the act of delivering the speech transforms it through choices such as pace and emphasis, and through the context of the speaker’s reputation. And ultimately, it’s my client who bears the weight of responsibility for the speech’s content.

If someone in the audience who knows your métier nudges you and asks, “Was that line yours?”, how do you answer? Do you go even acknowledge a role in the creation of a speech?

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