It's okay to say 'um' and 'uh' when you're presenting...

When we’re presenting we can easily get caught up in worrying about what we shouldn’t be doing. That white noise of ‘I’m doing X too much’ or ‘I’m pretty sure I read that Y is bad’ gets in the way of our ability to relax, find our words and communicate. And in fact a quick Google tells us there are loads of posts from presentation skills / public speaking experts, warning us how important it is not to use ‘fillers’.

A small selection of articles on the evils of fillers

Filler words - um, erm, like, sort-of, basically - are all words we use often in conversation, but we worry about using them when presenting at an event, addressing a meeting or doing any other sort of public speaking. The interesting thing (to me!) is that filler words are not all bad, and I disagree with the perceived wisdom here.

I believe that outside of the ‘corporate pitch’ world a lot of public speaking advice seems to centre on, it is actually possible to be TOO slick as a presenter. Rough edges have their merits. We don’t want to sound polished to the point of being corporate or blandly robotic, and fillers can make us sound more human - but the key thing is, some of them are more problematic than others. I divide filler words into two groups: sounds, and meanings.

Sound-based fillers

Sounds (um, ah, er, erm etc) serve two important purposes when we're presenting:

1. they give us time to gather our thoughts and construct the next part of our sentence into articulate prose

2. they signal to the listener that the current thought is still in progress and there's more to come

In conversation, these sounds prevent interruptions, and in presentations, they help keep the audience and speaker in sync - this is no small thing. If you find yourself umming and ahing don't worry too much about it! There's value to it, as long as it's not happening several times a sentence.

Meaning-based fillers

Words & phrases such as 'like', 'sort of', and 'basically' are more concerning because they convey specific concepts, which subtly weaken our message.

• 'like' and 'sort' of make statements sound uncertain

• overusing 'basically' can make everything seem overly simplified or reductive

• while 'you know what I mean' can be genuinely useful for encouraging the audience to reflect and look for more nuance in whatever you just said, 'you know' loses any value when overused.

How to reduce filler words

The best way to identify your own filler words is to record yourself public speaking. I use the voice-record feature on my phone to record my conference presentation: I give myself a complete free pass at the time (no self-critiquing during the talk!), and listen back to it on the way home from the event to find ways to improve. You quickly find out which fillers you overuse, and then can work out whether they're relatively harmless 'sounds' words, or potentially undermining 'meaning' words...

There's also some fascinating research on the role body language plays in all this, which deserves a whole future post of its own - I’ve got lost down a bit of a rabbit-hole reading up on this! So for now I'll just address a question I often get asked in Presentation Skills workshops: is it okay if I gesture a lot? And the answer is yes: gesturing is a good thing! If you need to wave your arms about, wave your arms about. It helps you form thoughts and can help the audience interpret your words correctly.

That being said, body-language isn't nearly as important as is often believed. Please be reassured that the idea that '90% of communication is non-verbal' is a complete myth, based on misinterpretations of a 1960s study.

It's your words that really matter.

7 Universal Tips for Better Videos on Any Platform

I organised a video creating / editing workshop for my team this week, delivered by my excellent colleagues Sam Hazeldine and Siobhan Dunlop who run sessions in our Creativity Lab. One of the standout pieces of advice they shared was this: if your subject is moving, keep the camera still. If your subject is stationary, move the camera. 

I realise while I tend to follow this principle instinctively, I’d never articulated it or heard it expressed so clearly before—and it’s brilliant advice. Simple, but incredibly effective. They also shared a few other tips I often include in my own workshops on video marketing, which got me thinking: are there universal tips for shooting and editing videos, regardless of format or platform? Creating a YouTube video is vastly different from making vertical content for Instagram or TikTok, yet some principles apply across the board. Here’s a brief list of those tips—feel free to add your own in the comments.

Filming tips

You don't need incredible gear, but you do need good sound

Whatever phone you’ve got is good enough quality to shoot good video. You don’t need specialist equipment. But the most common reason videos don’t work is poor sound - in short if you don’t have an external microphone, make sure whoever is speaking is close to the phone, or the audio will simply be too quiet. As a bonus, close-shot interviews or talking heads are a good thing anyway, because you can clearly see the subject when you’re watching it on a phone - and the vast majority of your views will be on mobile devices, so do keep that in mind while shooting.

If you’re recording a voice-over in your own kitchen and it sounds echoey, put a duvet over your head. You can also add compression in Audacity (it’s free, open-source and easy to use) which helps by reducing the distance between your quietest and loudest words. If you work in a large organisation, check if your AV department has radio mics you can borrow for recording multiple speakers or capturing voices from farther away.

Record your audio first, and match the video to that 

If you’re making a video with a voice-over, trust me; it’s easier this way around. It’s not really acceptable to speak really fast to fit more in, or add superfluous narration to slow things down, to match the visuals - record the audio first (again I like to use Audacity) and then fit the video to that.

always Shoot more video than you need 

This links directly to the above. Not having enough video to fit the audio is a nightmare - you end up using slow-motion or repeating shots, which reduces the impact of the video. Recording a few extra seconds before and after each scene, and filming additional “b-roll” (background footage of the setting or activity) will allow you to fill any gaps later. Future-you will thank you during the editing process.

Leave a pause at the beginning and end of everything you say 

This is one of the best pieces of advice Sam and Siobhan shared, and yet it’s something I still forget to do. Adding a pause at the start and end of a clip prevents abrupt transitions: while a sense of urgency is good, pauses allow viewers to process what they’ve just watched. This is especially important if you (or your subject) need to retake a line—leave a pause before resuming. Without it, you’ll end up editing around moments where someone launches into their line right after laughing or apologising for a mistake. It causes such a headache. And talking of the edit…

Editing tips

It's easier to edit a landscape video to fit portrait, than the other way around 

The subject of whether to make videos horizontal (YouTube, Facebook) or vertical (Insta, TikTok) is too complicated to explore in detail in this post, but suffice to say sometimes you’ll want a multipurpose video that can be edited and posted to both old-school and new-school video platforms.

If you need a multipurpose video, always shoot landscape. Cropping landscape footage to portrait is manageable as long as the subject stays centered. However, editing a vertical video to work in landscape is next to impossible.

Here’s an example of a video I shot multipurpose: the YouTube version is the ‘official’ virtual tour we have embedded on our website:

…but of course Instagram is where the real reach is, so here’s the vertical version which has 14k more views:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Uni of York Library & Archives (@uoylibrary)

Slow that text down!

Editing video is often a long and finicky process, and you end up seeing your film so many times you become too close to it. As the editor, you’ll naturally read on-screen text faster than your audience, who are seeing it for the first time. Let text linger longer than you think is necessary. This gives viewers enough time to read and process it.

If possible, show your video to someone else before posting—they don’t need to be a video expert to provide helpful feedback on pacing, text timing, and audio clarity.

Don't use 99% of the available tools in a given video editor (or: simple is better) 

Almost every great video is simple. Video editors allow you to do all kinds of fancy stuff, and it is essential you resist temptation here… Those transitions between sections where the picture falls over backwards or rotates or folds up and flys off? They have novelty value, but NO OTHER VALUE! Your audience are not helped by these gimmicks.

In fact, most of the tools and techniques available in video editors shouldn't be used in a typical video. They just get in the way, and the clutter detracts from the story and the message. If you’re going to use animations or visual effects, do so with intent - in other words because they serve the intended audience.

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Finally, remember that video isn’t always the right medium! This is easy to forget because we live in the age of video content, but sometimes a piece of explanatory text on a website, or a caption on an Insta photo, can be more useful for users - as always with any kind of marketing, put yourself in your users’ shoes and ask what you’d find easiest…

If you’d like to book a video marketing course for your organisation, get in touch!

The Public Library Brand: refuge, joy, connection, purpose, and expansion

In my Strategic Marketing training, we conduct an exercise around the library brand. It begins with a key question: what do you want your library's brand to be? What would the ideal sum-total of everyone’s perceptions of your organisation amount to? Or to put it more simply: what do you want people to say about you when you’re not in the room?

From there we explore how to assess your library’s current reputation, and then talk about all the great marketing strategies you can use to influence and shape your brand, steering it closer to that ideal vision. It’s always one of my favourite workshop activities because I love people hearing the sets of words and phrases people come up with.

Some brand aspirations are easy to work with, from a marketing perspective. If your ideal brand is ‘a place of learning and support’ you can quickly come up with a strategy for the kinds of services you’ll promote and the target audiences for those efforts. Other aspirations are more challenging (though no less valuable because of that): for example ‘innovative and exciting’ or ‘inclusive for all’ are NOT going to become your brand on their own. Achieving these requires a deliberate effort to shift perceptions and actively demonstrate in the marketing content how inclusive, welcoming, or innovative your institution truly is.

I’ve never seen such a fabulous brand to aspire to than the one public libraries already have, revealed in some new research by the New York Public Library.

Let’s start with the quote given to Book Riot, which gives this post its title, from Daphna Blatt, the NYPL’s Senior Director of Strategy & Public Impact, who says the research shows that:

“...library usage positively contributes to externally validated measures of well-being. Our research found that patrons experience refuge, joy, connection, purpose, and expansion through their library use.”

— Daphna Blatt

Wow. WOW! It’s just such a fabulous set of terms. And what an exciting challenge to try and build that into a marketing campaign. You could take them together, or work on them one at a time over a period of months - the great thing about it is you’d be building an evidence-based piece of marketing. The research tells us how libraries make people feel, and our job as marketers is to convey that in different ways to different audiences - including, of course, potential new users.

And in fact, those terms are just five of twenty identified by NYPL, across three stages detailed in the full report which you can view here [PDF]. Here’s a screenshot of the page I was most excited about (with as much alt-text as the system allows):

Click the pic to open the full NYPL report in a new tab

It’s a very positive piece of research at a time when positivity can be pretty scarce around public libraries: I’d urge you to read the report, share it with colleagues, and then run with it as a way to inform your library marketing in 2025.

Public Library Social Media in a Post-Twitter World

Last month I went to Kilkenny to present at the Library Association of Ireland’s Public Libraries Conference. The short version of this post is, it was a fantastic conference; libraries in Ireland get a lot more support from their government than British ones and it SHOWS in their confidence and morale and general fabulousness; and I uploaded my presentation to Slideshare if you’d like to see it:

Public library social media in a post-Twitter world from Ned Potter

I was running some training online for Irish public libraries earlier in the year, and I said jokingly (or, half-jokingly…) ‘as great as this is, if anyone would like to invite me back to Ireland I’d love to come!’ and Mary Murphy from the LAI took me at my word! I’m so glad she did because the whole thing was a great experience.

It reminded me of when I ran workshops in Australia - when a nation truly values its libraries, the whole conversation around them is just different. It starts from a place of positivity, and moves forward from there into creativity and inclusivity - the capacity for those things is greater because the librarians aren’t having to be on the defensive and trying to justify their existence. Someone said to me on the coffee break ‘whichever party is in Government, we always get support’ - can you imagine that being said at a British conference? It was lovely to visit such a place and a get a sort of library-serotonin boost…

The other great this about this whole trip was that my wife Alice could come with me, and in fact - for the first time ever - she saw me talk at an event. It was odd to mix these two worlds, and I had to consciously not think about her presence while I was presenting so I didn’t get in my own head. Whenever I do conference talks I always ask the audience to speak to each other about a key part of the topic, around ten minutes in - it turns everyone in the room into active participants and raises the energy levels all round; I love it and whole-heartedly recommend it to presenters. I didn’t warn Alice about it though, so she found herself talking to the librarian in the seat next to her about things she had no context for or interest in - lovely stuff…

On the way home we diverted into the Wicklow Mountains and it was beautiful.

Thanks to Mary and everyone at the LAI who invited me, and to all the conference deletagates I chatted to and who asked great questions during my talk. I loved the whole thing - I hope someone will have me back over in 2025!

The Researcher's Guide to Bluesky

If you’re reading this you probably know the emerging social network Bluesky has had an explosion of popularity. I wanted to set up a profile for my library, but I needed it to be worth it - we needed a critical mass of University of York people there to rebuild our former Twitter network.

With that in mind I decided to adapt a Bluesky guide I’d written on here, to make it a guide for Researchers - the idea being to make it as easy as possible for people to make the switch. In other words, I’ve tried to help catalyse the change I needed in order to justify putting time into Bluesky, and I think overall this approach actually worked!

Because the guide was aimed at academics in particular, I sought input from academics at York who were already on the platform. Would you like to be in a York Starter Pack I asked them, and do you have any tips for your peers? They were all terrifically enthusiastic about the idea for the guide, and gave lots of useful quotes - the researcher perspective was essential, so I’m grateful to them all. I also got permission from the Central Comms Team at the University to do this in the first place, sharing a draft with them and adding some pointers around policy which they wanted included.

1: The Researcher’s Guide to Bluesky

>> Here, then, is the Researcher’s Guide To Bluesky.

It’s published on my library’s blog rather than on here because I wanted it to be seen as an ‘official’ output of the Library & Archives. I promoted it via staff newsletters, asking the Central Comms Team to add it to their Bluesky guidance, and of course going back to each and every York academic I’d spoken to about the platform to share a link with them.

I also used it to launch the library’s Bluesky account. I thought this would be good - you can’t beat being USEFUL to hit the ground running on a new social media platform - but considering we had no followers and Bluesky doesn’t have a centralised algorithm to push content towards people, I’m fairly stunned about how much engagement we got. At the time of writing it is exactly three weeks since we posted a link to the guide (as part of a larger thread outlining its key points) and we’ve had over 600 reposts and 750+ Likes - plus so, so many replies, pins, and messages of thanks.

We've written a Researcher's Guide to Bluesky! It's a bit like all those other useful guides to Bluesky, but with several useful insights from University of York academics about using the platform, and we'd love it if it was reposted far and wide... >> blogs.york.ac.uk/library/2024... 🧵 below

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— University of York Library (@uoylibrary.bsky.social) November 13, 2024 at 12:17 PM

The great thing about the guide doing so well is it exposed us to new followers (including York people who may not otherwise found us), established some credibility for us as an account worth listening to, and literally brought more researchers to the platform which was of course the main driver for writing it in the first place. We now have around five-and-a-half thousand followers after 21 days - on Twitter we had around 7,500 (before Musk took over and everyone left) but that took us 12 years, and engagement was way lower than it is on Bluesky.

As successful as the guide was, the fact is the York blog on which it was posted isn’t well known enough for people to just randomly stumble across it - you need to be sent there via a link in an email or a Bluesky post, realistically. I wanted to reach more researchers through an existing authority with an established network, to get more eyes on the guide - so I pitched a version to the LSE Impact Blog for Social Sciences. You’re probably familiar with this but if you’re not, the key thing to know is it has completely out-stripped the original purpose that gave it its name! The blog has become a sort of academic hub for ideas and practical guides for people across all disciplines in Higher Education.

2: How to get started on Academic bluesky

>> Here, then, is How To Get Started With Academic Bluesky.

The above is a shorter version of the first guide, due to the Impact Blog’s word-count limit - it has the York-policy-specific parts omitted, and is generally leaner. It also benefits from some helpful suggestions given to me by Michael Taser, the Managing Editor (the final paragraph in particular) and in general I prefer this edition of the guide.

This version has also had a great reception and achieved the aim of reaching more people, hopefully bringing more researchers to the platform (which will in turn make it more useful for the York academics, meaning more of THEM will come to the platform, meaning the time WE are putting into it becomes more worthwhile, and so on and so on). Certainly the greater reach of the Impact blog has helped a lot - it’s had probably around 150% of the views of the original guide.

As more and more libraries started to appear on the Bluesky as part of its November popularity surge, it was inevitable that I’d end up writing yet another iteration…

3: The Library Guide to Bluesky

>> Here, then, is the Library Guide to Bluesky.

The edition is published here on this blog because it’s written ‘as me’, rather than as the library itself. This is a culmination of what I’ve learned and applied from writing the other guides, with some advice on actual content thrown in there as well.

Again I’d like to reach a wider audience than I can get to on this blog alone, so I’ve pitched a version to Library Journal and we’ll see what they say. Speaking of pitches…

4: a bluesky guide for academic departments and professional services

>> Here, then, is the University Guide to Bluesky.

I pitched a guide to the Times Higher (for whom I’ve written a couple of pieces previously), again on the grounds that reach will be higher there than here, with my target audience. This version is organisational rather than individual, and very much HE in nature - although much of it could apply across the cultural sector.

And that will be that - no more Bluesky guides from me (almost certainly!) and all bases covered. Taking experiences and chunking them up into (hopefully useful) guidance for others has always been one of my favourite things, so I’ve actually really enjoyed this whole Bluesky business… One reply I got to a Bluesky post sums up why it’s worth the time to write these:

“So appreciated!!! From little tips to engagement and the starter packs. You have no idea how helpful this is when you’re doing this in addition to the ‘day job’ but also trying to inform/advocate for your colleagues/researchers that you support in a newish area of social media! Bravo!!”

— A Researcher Engagement Team