It’s tough, it’s scary, it’s intimidating … but we’ve all got to speak in public at least once in our lives. And whether you’re in front of five people or 500, it can still be extremely nerve-wracking. It’s not for nothing that public speaking is the number one fear of Americans.

Here are some tips for keeping your cool while speaking in public:

1. Use appropriate body language. Make eye contact, walk around the room if possible. Use visual aids if you can. Don’t simply read from a script. I know this seems like common sense but it’s easy to fall into this trap when you’re nervous.

2. Be prepared to adjust your speech based on your audiences’ needs and questions. If your audience becomes visibly bored, you may have to switch up your game a bit. Don’t be intimidated.

3. Take pauses. Don’t obliviously keep talking without pausing for air. Natural pauses allow your audience time to absorb information. And they allow you, the speaker, some time to mentally collect yourself.

4. Use humor (if appropriate). Humor and lighthearted jokes interject a sense of human-ness to your presentation and lightens the mood just a bit.

5. Visualize yourself giving the speech. Be clear, be loud (but not too loud), be confident.

6. Remember – the audience doesn’t want you to fail. They want you to succeed. They want to be informed, they want to learn. No one wants to see you stutter, get sick or whatever your greatest fear of public speaking is. Everyone’s got your back.

7. Practice, practice, practice. Practice may not always make perfect, but the only way you’ll ever improve at public speaking is if you continue to practice it.

8. Know when to stop talking. No one likes a long-winded presentation.

I wrapped up Beyond the Big Three, our series exploring social media outposts other than Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, last week, but we wanted to give everyone a tangible, printable resource to have on hand. Therefore, we’ve compiled all 12 installments into one handy PDF document available for download here!

The 12-part series covered 13 awesome sites:

1. Flickr
2. Delicious
3. Tumblr
4. Posterous
5. YouTube
6. Ning
7. SlideShare
8. Digg
9. Blogs
10. Good Reads
11. UStream
12. FourSquare
13. FriendFeed

In addition to summaries of each outpost, each installment includes some real-life examples of how other associations are using the services.

Download the PDF here, and thanks for reading!

It’s that time of week — I’ve been scouring the leading social media, association and nonprofit blogs and now I’m sharing the goods with you. If you subscribe to or read any of these great blogs, you may have read them already, but I’m picking out the key points and takeaways from each post. Read on!

Getting Your Colleagues in the Game by Amber Naslund at Altitude Branding. Amber implores people to sit down with their colleagues to discuss how to use social media. It should be in the short- and long-term plans for basically all companies or organizations, so members should be educated. Also, everyone will have different ideas to how to best portray the organization. Take everyone’s thoughts into account — and don’t ever expect a social media plan to be perfect.

The 4C’s Social Media Framework, a guest post on Beth’s Blog. Content, Collaboration, Community and Collective Intelligence — all aspects of a nonprofit’s presence online. Guarav Mishra outlined four great underlying themes to social media and how nonprofits can use each one.

Are online communities a threat to associations? by Deirdre Reid. “We get news, education and access to experts online. We develop and deepen relationships with peers via online communities. Some question the value of their association membership as they now receive more of these critical benefits freely online than from associations. Are our members experiencing the same?”

God Bless Our Competition by Kevin Holland. If you think your association doesn’t have any competition, you’re probably wrong. You have to know what the competition is doing — and your association has to want to do it better itself. Your competition might not be obvious or traditional, but it’s there.

Buzz Collaboration Format by Robert Stanwick. During this week’s #assnchat on Twitter (a tweet chat for association leaders), the topic of meeting formats came up. Robert mentioned the buzz format, which several people found intriguing. Here, he outlines the buzz meeting format and how it allows for being social, networking and receiving information.

Hyper-connected or disconnected? by Sonny Gill on Danny Brown‘s blog. Analyzes the evolution of media and if we’re too connected to our smartphones and laptops. Do we spend enough time offline engaging in real life? Some industries require hyperconnectivity, but is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Forrester says advertising is changing forever. What are associations doing to keep up? by Maggie McGary. Maggie’s the social media and community specialist at an association and writes candidly about how associations have to adapt to the changing face of advertising. Job boards and print ads just aren’t enough anymore.

Any more cool links from this week? Let me know!