When I was a new salesman, I was scheduled to give a product presentation to my branch about a new product our company had. I had given presentations to customers about it before and I had above normal knowledge of it and was comfortable with it.

The night before my talk, I partied with my group and had a really good time. So, the next day, I started my presentation and had a complete case of memory block. I could not remember basic facts and information about the product that I knew so much about. I looked stupid and incompetent. It was the first time I realized that having a hangover could affect my ability to function.

The next year I gave a talk on a different product. I hit the presentation with belief that showed and presented the facts and figures without a hangover. I won the branch prize for the best talk. I went on to give a lot of product presentations nationally.

This last Thursday and Friday, I attended a presentation skills training class given by Anne Warfield, CEO of Impression Management Professionals. Anne is a nationally recognized speaker and author. She is friends with many nationally known speakers and (to me this is awesome)is a friend of Vince Flynn who is a New York Times best seller every time he writes a book and admired by former presidents like Bill Clinton and George Bush.

Anne’s training held my attention for two whole days and with me being an Internet marketer that isn’t easy. I’m convinced that IMers develop ADD as a side effect of our business. But Anne held it completely because she knows how to teach and she knows how to speak to an audience or in our case a class.

Full Disclosure: Anne is a client of mine for Internet Marketing but, if I didn’t believe what I am writing here, I wouldn’t write it at all. This is unsolicited and she won’t know I’ve written it until after it has been published. I only share what I think will be helpful to my readers.

Anne showed us new ways to approach and begin our talks like telling stories that others can relate to. She went over personality types and how they think about things and how we should present to them. She taught us about their hot buttons and how they receive what we are saying. Basically, she taught us how to give a presentation from the audience perspective.

One of Anne’s abilities is being able to drop into role playing so that you can picture a message she is teaching you happening before your eyes. Its an incredible experience and the learning happens at the subconscious level which is more effective than learning at the conscious level. That is also important because learning from Anne is like drinking out a fire hose. There is so much information that it will take time to soak in and germinate. but when you need the information it will be there to pull out. And, in case I need to review the information, I left with a binder of notes and other materials Anne provided.

While I have given quite a few presentations over the years and had various levels of training, I have never had training that is so (and I hate to use this word) transformational.

In case you are wondering how this all relates to Internet Marketing, well, IM is connecting with your customers at a level they can relate to and learn from. The best copywriters are doing this all the time even if they don’t know it. That is also what makes Social Marketing so successful.

Now back to my original story, I hope I never have to give a presentation again after partying too much the night before, but if I do, I think Anne gave me the tools to get through it just fine.

If you want to know more about Anne’s training go to http://www.impressionmanagement.com.

Compete.com has just come out with a study that says Twitter growth may be reaching a state of fatigue. Eventually there has to be a law of diminishing returns effect but with the continued growth of social networks I’m guessing that this may be an aberration. But, of course, if I was prescient, I’d spend every day at the track and bet on the ponies.

We’ll have to wait and see. I’ll keep you posted.

I was reading Matt Cutts Blog about the Google Searchology Conference. Matt is a spokesman for Google to the SEO world. He blogs and does a lot of Google info videos. Looking through the presentation I came across a couple of slides that both amazed me and gave me a bit of concern.

If they aren’t doing it already, Google intends to know where you and your mobile phone are at any given point in time. They do this now with your IP address but a search engine company being able to locate you without the hassle of court orders like the Government would have to have is amazing. The technology they are working on is facinating. The potential for invasion of privacy is for smart people other than me to decide.

The slides where posted by a brilliant young student named Yvo Schaap from the Netherlands.

I think I discovered something I haven’t seen discussed before. I’ve been researching CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) on Twitter and what I’ve discovered is most of them follow only a few people and when followed rarely follow back. This brings up some questions that may embarrass them.

Why are they even using Twitter? After all, if they are a Chief Marketing Officer, shouldn’t they be listening to what their market has to say? Isn’t that Marketing 101?

Here are some possible answers I have come up with and I don’t like the implications of any of them:

1. They don’t give a damn.

2. They are on Twitter to stroke their own egos.

3. They think they are Oracles and everyone is holding their breath waiting for their next insightful statement.

4. They have someone on their staff Tweeting for them.

5. The most benign - they don’t get Social Marketing. This one can be fixed.

If anyone can give me a better answer or insight, please let me know because I’d like to understand and maybe even communicate with them. I sure would like to know.

Google just made life more difficult for websites hoping to rank high on Google. They announced several changes to the way they present searches to the user.

As an example, Google uses a person looking for forum discussions about a specific product, but she is most interested in ones that have taken place more recently. With the new Search Options she can search for the product’s name, apply the option to filter out anything but forum sites, and then apply an option to only see results from the past week.

The Search Options “panel” also gives you the ability to view your results in new ways. Google says, “One view gives you more information about each result, including images as well as text, while others let you explore and iterate your search in different ways.”

Google has also begun implementing a process to help people by providing better information than you are used to seeing in the preview text. They call this information “rich snippets.” They give an example “… if you are thinking of trying out a new restaurant and are searching for reviews, rich snippets could include things like the average review score, the number of reviews, and the restaurant’s price range:

In this example, you can quickly see that the Drooling Dog Bar B Q has gotten lots of positive reviews, and if you want to see what other people have said about the restaurant, clicking this result is a good choice.”

Google says it provide these snippets on its own, so they are hoping that web publishers will help them by adopting microformats or RDFa standards to mark up their HTML and bring this structured data to the surface. This will help people better understand the information you have on your page so they can spend more time there and less on Google. They have in the past talked about “time on site” being a part of their search algorithm.

Google plans to roll out more changes soon so there is much to stay on top of if you want to “stay on top of” the first page of Google.