101 Ways to Open a Speech: How to Hook Your Audience From the Start With an Engaging and Effective Beginning

THE OPENING MOMENTS OF A PRESENTATION ARE CRITICAL TO ITS OVERALL SUCCESS. People form opinions about speakers quickly, and once they do, their first impressions can prove difficult to reverse. A strong beginning gives audiences confidence that you’re going to deliver a message worth hearing, and takes advantage of your presentation’s opening minutes, when listener attention is at its peak. This book will introduce you to a broad range of speech starters, using dozens of real-life examples and original suggestions. You will find opens intended to surprise, persuade, motivate, engage, and amuse your audiences. Some tell a story, others help frame your topic, and a few rely on modern technology. In 101 Ways to Open a Speech, you will learn: - How to captivate your audience from your first words - Why there are actually three opens for every speech - How to select the right open for every occasion - How to connect your open to your speech topic - How not to begin a presentation 101 Ways to Open a Speech is the first and only in-depth book to focus solely on the open itself, and is an indispensable desktop reference for everyone who ever presents to any audience.

Brad Phillips is the president of Phillips Media Relations, a media and presentation training firm with offices in Washington, DC and New York City. Mr. Phillips has trained thousands of media spokespersons, is regularly quoted as an expert by the media, and writes the world’s most-visited media training blog. He has worked with hundreds of top-level executives, including corporate CEOs, presidents of nonprofit organizations and trade associations, and directors of government agencies. Mr. Phillips is the author of The Media Training Bible: 101 Things You Absolutely, Positively Need to Know Before Your Next Interview, an Amazon #1 Public Relations bestseller, and 101 Ways to Open a Speech. He writes the Mr. Media Training Blog, the world’s most-visited media training website. In 2013, Cyber Alert named him one of the 30 most influential bloggers in public relations. He is also a sought-after media expert, having been quoted in (or cited by) The New York Times, The Fox News Channel, USA Today, The Washington Post, WTOP-FM, The Associated Press, The Miami Herald, Politico, The Hill, The New York Observer, Chicago Tribune, The Huffington Post, and The Scientist, among many others. He is a frequent contributor to Ragan’s PR Daily, one of the world’s most popular public relations websites. Mr. Phillips founded Phillips Media Relations in 2004 after working for several years as a broadcast journalist. After beginning his career as an on-air radio announcer, Mr. Phillips worked for ABC’s Nightline with Ted Koppel, where he contributed to broadcasts about everything from the declining national savings rate and school shootings to domestic politics and terrorism. He then moved to CNN, where he helped produce two weekly programs: the media analysis program, Reliable Sources, and the political roundtable, The Capital Gang. He was also a contributing producer to the Sunday public affairs program, Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer.