For all the effort that goes into a speech – especially a big one – they’re over surprisingly quickly. You reach a few dozen, a few hundred or (if you have a huge crowd) a few thousand people for a brief while, and then you walk off the stage, and the audience walks out the door.

For a few minutes, you’ve made a significant connection with those people. But all the potential relationships and conversations that could arise from that connection walk out the door with them.

That’s why a growing number of speakers are using social media and online networks to start building those relationships, and expand both their audience and their impact. From Twitter hashtags to YouTube clips, public speaking – the oldest broadcast medium there is – is rapidly embracing the digital realm.

And over the next few weeks, this blog will look at some of the ways you can use social tools to turn those one-speech stands into ongoing relationships.

I can imagine a lot of speakers’ and speechwriters’ hackles going up right now. You’re already going to an incredible amount of effort: writing, reviewing, rehearsing, preparing slides. Why would you add even more work?

Actually, because you’re going to so much effort. You want to see as much of a return as possible on all that hard work. And just as social tools have dramatically increased the potential audience for everyone from writers to photographers to (cough) cartoonists, they can do (and are doing) the same for speakers.

You have an audience far outside the walls of whatever meeting room, banquet hall or conference center you’re in. Why not address them too? And for that matter, the people who are attending your speech are probably going to be interested in what you have to say before and after your speech as well as during those 20 minutes when you’re behind the mic. Why not give them a way to engage with you apart from sitting and passively listening?

And while right now that’s an opportunity to stand out from the crowd, it won’t long before it’s the norm. Audience expectations are changing, as nearly every one-to-many communication channel they use is opening up to many-to-many conversation. It won’t be long before participating in Twitter backchannels is the minimum level of engagement many speakers are expected to offer.

Just what that looks like differs from speaker to speaker. For some, it means expanding their reach by posting clips from their speech on YouTube and Vimeo, and uploading the slides to Slideshare. For others, it means crowdsourcing some of their material by posing questions on LinkedIn and Facebook. And for still others, it means carrying on conversations with their online and face-to-face audiences — via their blogs before and after their speech, and via a hashtag-based chat while they’re on-stage.

All of this can be powerful… but much more so when those individual tools are integrated into an overall strategy to connect, converse and collaborate.

One caveat: there aren’t any guarantees. It’s not like social media magic will turn a dull speech into a viral success (at least, not one you’ll appreciate – a few million views on a YouTube video labelled “Can You Believe How Long This Guy Goes On About Carriage Bolts?” may not be what you’re looking for.)

But when you do have a compelling message (and what other kind of speech is really worth giving?) then your network can magnify it many times over – and help it become a conversation with many of the people you want to reach the most.

1. Early November frost usually wipes out our turkey crops anyway.
2. That’s when the Arctic Pumpkin reaches optimum pie-making suitability.
3. Rapidly run out of reasons to be thankful after mid-October.
4. To be polite. Terribly important to Canadians to be the first ones to say “Thank you.”
5. Gives us that additional month to forgive family members in time for seeing them at the end of December.
6. To mess with you. We’re like that. Same reason we spell “colour” with a “u”.

It was a cold, cold Saturday night by Vancouver standards. I headed toward the Wall Centre in a state of frigid apprehension, my anxiety only partly numbed by the cold, and the knowledge that my trusty sketchbook was in my backpack.

While nearly every objective measure suggested the party I was supporting, Vision Vancouver, was about to win the city’s municipal election, a few recent polls suggested the race had tightened up sharply in the last few days. And they suggested the momentum was with the NPA, Vancouver’s right-wing civic party.

The NPA’s campaign had focused on several targets they evidently considered tempting, including the city’s urban agriculture policies, and new separated bike lanes on a few downtown streets.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been so worried. One of the NPA’s last public events included someone dressed in a chicken suit holding a sign that said “Homeless Chickens.” Here’s a handy rule of thumb: If, a day or two before an election, you find yourself appearing at press events with people dressed as chickens, chances are the Big Mo is with your opponent.

The TV coverage I saw was on Shaw’s Community Channel 4, which (as far as I could tell) had managed to find a panel of four white male commentators. Come on, people, what is this? A tech conference?

For a brief while, Gregor Robertson’s NPA challenger, Suzanne Anton, was ahead by several hundred votes. But then a few more polling stations reported and their positions flipped. Not long after that, it became clear that every Vision candidate was cruising to victory, and the mood at the party switched from Confidently Hopeful to Awfully Damn Happy.

Once the results were more or less clear, Anton delivered her concession speech. It was classy and gracious, and I liked the part toward the end refuting the idea of politics as a thankless job.

Now, classy and gracious are good. But just once, I’d like to see a defeated candidate really cut loose on the voters.

Speaking of speeches – if you’re ever in the position of writing a victory speech (and here’s hoping you are!), you have one big challenge: the crowd is deliriously happy. That means every line for the first five to ten minutes is an applause line.

Every. Line.

(In my defence, a] I never claimed to be a caricaturist, and b] I was standing up and juggling a sketchpad, a beverage and a Sharpie fine-line marker.)

The final results.

I’ve just read another blog post about someone who was accused of arrogance for not following people on Twitter just because they happen to follow him. And it’s driving me crazy – crazy enough to have left a comment on his post, and crazy enough to adapt it below.

There are many people out there who will tell you it’s a hard-and-fast rule of etiquette: if you don’t follow back, you’re a boor. (Some of them have suggested it’s a crime.)

This arbitrary law of mandatory reciprocity actually makes Twitter less useful, because unless you’re incredibly lucky, there are going to be people who follow you who aren’t that interesting to you. Maybe they tweet about their cats all day. Maybe they’re zealots for a religion, a political view or an operating system (cough) that you don’t believe in, share or use. Maybe their entire Twitter feed is devoted to complaints that other people don’t follow them back.

Or maybe they’re following a few dozen people, but you have several thousand following you, and if you follow them all back, then it’s going to flood your feed and you’ll miss some conversations you’d really like to have.

The functional purpose of following someone is because you want to hear what they have to say. That’s why Twitter created the feature; that’s how they suggest you use it.

If you just want to show your appreciation to someone for having followed you, then courtesy already offers a tool for that: the thank-you. It’s been around for millennia, and it has the virtue of being unambiguous. Twitter’s pretty good at delivering it, too.

What’s being invented here with the creation of arbitrary rules like following back isn’t etiquette; it’s a whole bunch of new reasons to take offense at someone else’s behaviour. And when we tell people have to make a tool less useful in the name of being polite (which is what demanding that people use lists to follow the people they’re actually interested in boils down to), all we’re doing is throwing up barriers to genuine connection and conversation.

Isn’t that the opposite of why we have courtesy in the first place?