I was listening to an awkward moment from a Dan Kennedy seminar this morning.
First, a bit of background is in order:
If you don’t know much about Dan, he is a marketer who has influenced more marketers than anybody else.
Dan got his big break back in the 90s, going around the US as part of the Peter Lowe Success Tour.
That was a bunch of famous and influential people — former US presidents, Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks, Suze Orman — giving motivational speeches to an audience of tens of thousands, in a different city every night.
At the end of each night, after the famous and influential people had finished their speeches, Dan would get up on stage as the last speaker. He would then deliver a blistering 60-minute standup routine that sold you on buying his Magnetic Marketing product.
If you’ve never listened to Dan’s speech, it’s fantastic. It’s worth searching around the Internet to dig it up.
The thing I listened to this morning was something else – a recording of a $12k/head seminar that Dan gave many years later, to a small group of select customers and proteges.
Dan was talking about the audience for the Peter Lowe Success Tour, and how politically conservative they were. So conservative that when Mario Cuomo, the liberal New York ex-governor, joined the Tour, the audience booed.
So far, so good. At least for Dan’s story.
And then, Dan, who is practiced at selling through humor, shifts into an exasperated tone of voice:
“… Mario Cuomo comes out, and everybody’s booing! By the time he’s done, I’m booing too, cause the schmuck’s thirty five minutes over, and people are streaming out in droves, you know???”
Beat.
Nobody in Dan’s seminar reacts. On the seminar recording, there’s a pause. You can hear Dan swallow hard and then move on to the next bit of his educational material.
That’s an illustration of something I just read in a book called Comedy Writing Secrets. “Humor in front of a small audience is very hard to bring off because each individual is afraid to laugh for fear of being conspicuous.”
Sitting at home and listening to Dan’s presentation, the image of him booing put a smile on my face.
In a large 10,000 person arena, the same bit would almost certainly draw laughs, and maybe loud laughs.
But in a small seminar, made up of 12 or 15 people, all it drew was a moment of awkward silence, and a gulp from Dan Kennedy.
That’s something to keep in mind if you’re ever trying to give a humorous speech.
But the bigger point is that the response you draw is not only a function of your message… of the audience you are talking to… or even your relationship to that audience.
There’s an extra thing, and that’s the context in which you are delivering your message.
Big room, small room, medium room… seminar stage, webinar, bus.
Maybe that idea seems super obvious to you. But the only thing that’s super obvious is that even masters of influence, people like Dan Kennedy, will forget about this crucial element to their own embarrassment and loss.
But enough about embarrassment and loss. Let’s talk about gain instead.
Specifically, my Most Valuable Email training, and some most valuable Dan Kennedy ideas.
In the Most Valuable Email training, I pull back the curtain on my Most Valuable Email trick.
And then, at the end of the training, I give you 10 riddles to ponder. These are valuable and interesting marketing ideas, each of which you can use as a prompt for creating your own Most Valuable Email, and applying the Most Valuable Email trick.
Two of those ideas come from Dan Kennedy. And in typical DK style, they are both very ugly truths, but also very insightful and practical…
You know???
To find out more about MVE:
https://bejakovic.com/mve
