The Power of Speech: The Efficiency Nova Scotia tour

My speaking tour for Efficiency Nova Scotia Corporation is entering the homestretch — and it's been a great success.  Before Christmas, the tour visited Truro, Stellarton and Sydney; in January we were in Amherst, Caledonia, Bridgewater and Wolfville. Still to come are Yarmouth on February 1 (at the Yarmouth Arts Council theatre, 76 Parade Street) , and Halifax on February 7 (at the Keshen-Goodman Library on Lacewood.) 

In the course of the tour I've met a lot of great people, and we've had some excellent (and often quite wide-ranging) discussions not only of energy efficiency, but of many other environmental and economic topics. We've had a lot of media coverage, and we've evidently roused a bit of envy among other communities, several of which have made inquiries about extending the tour to include them. 

All of this testifies to the power of a real live flesh-and-blood public speaker — a form of communication that's often overlooked these days, when so much communication comes through the media, and particularly through the internet, and even more specifically through social media. Social media do a lot of things extremely well — but a direct encounter with an actual person has a different kind of power, and makes a different impact. 

I wanted to explore this question of the power of an actual speaker further, so I wrote a guest blog post for Speakers Spotlight, a large Toronto speakers bureau. If you'd like to see it, it's here: http://blog.speakers.ca/2012/01/hey-youre-going-to-love-this/