Pic courtesy Sheeshoo

Your word for the day is Astroturfing.

It’s using devious means to create the impression of a ‘grassroots’ movement, but on closer inspection, that bright green grass is purely synthetic. There are thousands of ways to do it: fake comments on blogs, fake bloggers paid for by brands, ‘Citizen’s Action’ groups supported by corporate sponsors, the list goes on.

A classic example is Al Gore’s Penguin Army, an ‘amateur’ Youtube satire of An Inconvenient Truth. Nothing wrong with that - nobody should be able to claim immunity from satire.

Then a journalist, following a strong smell of fish, discovered that it wasn’t made by amateurs at all. It came from a Washington PR company whose clients included General Motors and Exxon.

Astroturfing is mostly regarded as highly unethical. PR industry bodies around the world will expel organizations caught doing it.

The web tends to self-police astroturfing. The most common way to get caught is posting complimentary comments about your company on blogs and forums. Many people who do this don’t know that it’s simple to view the IP address of each comment, so it can be tracked right back to your corporate headquarters. Then you’ll be set upon by an on-line lynch mob.

Presentation Astroturfing

But what of presentation astroturfing? Using audience plants to ask sympathetic questions and say nice things about you?

It’s certainly a practice that’s been with us since the dawn of speechmaking. It’s so widespread in government speeches that for nearly a century the Australian parliament has had a special name for it: the Dorothy Dix question. Named after the legendary American advice columnist, the Dorothy Dixer comes from someone in your own party, and goes something like this:

Junior Minister
Does the Prime Minister have any new figures that illustrate the government’s success in pulling Australia out of the Global Financial Crisis faster than any other country on Earth?

Prime Minister
As a matter of fact, I have just received some figures which deliver in terms of a remarkable degree of programmatic specificity our success in…

Questions like these can consume days and days of expensive legislative time, to no particular benefit. But what of regular presentations?

I think it’s best to follow your own ethical compass on this one. There’s nothing wrong with getting someone to ask the first question in Q&A, because it breaks the ice and makes it more comfortable for others to follow.

I’ve also seen some nice presentations where a fake audience member stands up and gives the presenter a brutal dressing down for their stupid opinions. It shakes the audience out of dreamland and adds a thrilling edge of danger to the whole show. As long as they’re revealed as a plant at the end, that’s just creative use of theater.

Where it’s wrong is if you ask someone to talk about a fake positive experience that they’ve had with your product. On a moral level, that’s lying. On a practical level, it’s also almost impossible to do unless your plant has Oscar-worthy acting talent. Having seen a few of these over the years, usually it just comes out sounding embarrassing, a mutant hybrid of real language and marketing-mandatories:

“Yeah, I’ve tried these apps myself, and I’ve found them to be totally cool and edgy. For my complete range of app needs!”

Honesty is always much easier to manage.

Al Gore pic courtesy Alex De Carvalho

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In the last post we discussed the importance of presentation openings.

We’re always amazed at the eternal popularity of the worst speech opening technique ever. It’s a method that torpedoes your speech before it’s even left the dock.

It’s the Apologetic Opener.

It goes something like this.

• “Sorry, I’m not used to public speaking…”
• “Sorry I’m a bit flustered, the traffic was terrible on the way here…”
• “Sorry, I’m a bit hung over, hit it pretty hard last night if you know what I mean…”
• “Sorry, I’m really tired, was up most of last night working on deadlines, no rest for the wicked…”
• “Sorry, I’ll try not to bore you TOO much…”
• “I won’t waste too much of your time…”

The logic behind it is that many people believe they’re a poor speaker. So they figure if they present an apology in advance, preferably for some factor beyond their control, then the audience will cut them some slack.

Regrettably, audience don’t care about your problems. Just over a nasty cold? Been up all night with a crying baby? Forget about it and focus on your speech, because you’re absolutely wasting your breath trying to whip up some sympathy.

Imagine you were in a restaurant and the waiter is doing a terrible job. You ask why he brought the wrong main course, half an hour late. He tells you that he’s had a really tough time lately, just broke up with his girlfriend and he dropped hot platters on on his foot earlier and has a nasty bruise.

Do you care? Do you want to hear about his troubles? Didn’t think so. And neither do audiences.

When you open with an apology, all the audience hears is: “Bad presentation coming up. Stop listening now.”

The Apologetic Opener has a distant cousin, the Self-Deprecating Opener.

This is a much better way to start, because it shows that you’re a normal human and don’t have an over-inflated view of yourself. And that you’re confident enough to risk looking silly.

So, say you’re an international diplomat, presenting on how you once brokered a peace deal between warring nation-states in Eastern Europe. Open by telling them you’re now into the third round of negotiations of the Download Bandwidth Limit Treaty with your teenage children, and have been unable to extract any meaningful concessions so far.

Look at Al Gore’s opening in his Inconvenient Truth speech, where he introduces himself as “I’m Al Gore. I used to be the next President of the United States“.

It got the audience on side from the start, and helped transform the image of a guy who had been renowned for robotic humorlessness.

Self-deprecation can be a fine line to tread. In the wrong hands, it can be fairly nauseating - like almost every Hugh Grant movie you can think of. Test it on some friends for some honest feedback before you take it on the road.