On March 5th, I was invited to moderate a panel discussion organized by Amcham France. This event was part of their recently launched toolkit called « Pitch for Growth » (in which I’m proud to say, I was a social media contributor !).
The main theme of Tuesday night’s panel was how to improve your pitch in any type of situation. Whether you’re a manager pitching a project or an idea to your boss or colleagues or an Entrepreneur pitching to investors or clients, we all need to deliver clear messages about our ideas, projects, companies, and even ourselves !
This brings me to one of my main takeaways of the evening : if we don’t put ourselves out there, we won’t engage others, and we simply will not be visible.
Being visible means taking risks and facing our fears that we’ll be embarassed, judged, or even rejected.
While I was listening to the speakers’ pertinent answers to my questions, I couldnt help but think about the strong connection between the fear of speaking in front of others and the fear of communicating on social media. All the things I’ve heard over the years from our learners kept resonating in my head:
“But I’m afraid people will judge me, or what I write on social media. »
“I don’t have anything interesting to say.”
“What if my boss and colleagues see my post?”
“I’m not an expert!”
“Engaging others on social media takes too long…”
And the list goes on… While I can provide you with answers for every one of these, that is not the point of this article! ? I do however want to address some of these well-founded fears, by simply saying, spread the word.
Let me explain. If you don’t speak up, share your ideas, deliver that pitch, tell people about yourself, your projects, your company…, you’ll be missing a golden opportunity to open a conversation, engage others in dialogue, be visible, and maybe even inspire the people around you. Why would you want to deprive yourself of this?
So, you’re probably thinking, “ok, so how do I do this?” Here are some tips I took away from the great group of speakers on Tuesday night.
When pitching (or communicating on social media):
-Tell a story!
-Be authentic=be yourself ?
-Focus on the audience/target.
-Get to the point quickly and develop later.
-Focus on the why= VALUE!
-Use non-technical language.
-Trust your intuition!
And lastly, if you’re still worried that you’ll be judged or critiqued, remember that if you don’t take a chance, meaning do that pitch, write that social media post, share your ideas, projects, etc,, you’ll never know what could happen.
Spread your word.
Do you or your team have doubts, questions, or fears about being more active on social media? Drop us a line and we’ll find solutions together ?
