Mena Trott, together with her husband, founded Six Apart, the company that created TypePad, the blogging platform this blog and many others are carried on.  That makes her the “founding mother of the blog revolution,” as TED.com put it, so she’s a natural person to invite to speak about the importance of blogging.  The importance of blogging?  Come on, blogging has revolutionized communications!  TED can be forgiven for thinking that Mena would be a sure-fire bet. 

And let’s say right away that she’s not a bad speaker.  She’s lively, intelligent, and only a little nervous.  That puts her right on a par with thousands of other speakers.  What went wrong was not her delivery, but rather the speech itself. 

For all that I write about speech delivery, and non-verbal communications, it’s good to remember that the reason we give speeches is to communicate about something.  At the end of the day and the speech, we learn all we can about public speaking because content matters.  We humans need to cajole, persuade, enlighten, lead, threaten, encourage, narrate, testify, reconcile – we need to communicate – with each other.  About a topic, an issue, a subject, a dream we care about. 

And sometimes the content is terrible and the moment is missed.  In this case, Mena’s speech takes an inherently fascinating subject and misses the opportunity by a country mile.  What goes wrong?  Here are the pitfalls that Mena falls into and that the rest of us can avoid, thanks to her horrible example.  Here’s the speech, so you can follow along: http://bit.ly/VGww9. 

1.  She talks about herself too much.  What audiences care about is what’s in it for them, not the speaker’s intimate biography – unless you give us a reason to care.  Mena doesn’t give us a reason beyond telling us that blogs are personal.  In fact, most of the examples she cites are about people doing good things for the world, not sharing personal stories.  Her own personal blog is what gets her into trouble. 

2.  She’s not trying to persuade the audience of anything.  Mena’s speech has no point beyond the idea that blogs are interesting and are changing the world somehow.  But that’s the premise for bringing her to TED, the starting point.  It’s not an idea worthy of a speech.  She needs to ask herself questions like the following:  Why are they changing the world?  Why now?  What’s going to happen to them?  What key trends are you seeing?  And so on.  The announcement that blogs are here and that lots of people read them is not itself sufficient.  The best reason to give a speech is to persuade the audience of something.  Take a point of view! 

3.  The speech has no arc.  When you ask people to follow a speech, you’re asking them to do a lot of mental work.  It’s your job to help them by providing a clear structure – a story in three acts, a problem-solution speech (one of my personal favorites), a chronological account of an issue – there are many ways to structure a speech, but the point is to pick one.  Mena’s speech starts out with a series of funny asides, and then peters out with more asides, that aren’t funny.  The audience stops laughing, it checks out, and the speech dies.  It goes nowhere, and ultimately the audience won’t forgive that.  In the end, Mena wastes everyone’s time because she hasn’t taken the trouble to figure out something real to say, and how to say it in a clear, compelling way.