Barack Obama vs Steve Jobs: Battle of the Super Presenters

Two big news events happened yesterday: Steve Jobs announced the iPad and Barack Obama presented on the State of the Union.There was a lot of hype leading up to both and I imagine most of the planet was aware of both.

Image via CrunchBase

Both men are excellent presenters who command attention when they speak, but with two very different styles. There was a lot of global attention on both men and both had some high expectations to live up to.

No matter what you may personally think of either man, I think we can all agree they were both at peak presentation form yesterday.

I’m no where the level of Jobs or Obama. I prefer a more informal conversational tone but I’m always looking to these two for ways to improve.

Steve Jobs is known for his ability to weave a story and build suspense as he prepares to unveil a new product. Despite the let down most everyone felt about the iPad his presence was was no less disappointing.

Image via Wikipedia

Many have commented that Barack Obama was back to his pre-presidential best yesterday, reminding a nation why he was elected. Obama is no less the story teller that Jobs and I would argue even more so as he often weaves in analogies and diverse, real life stories to make his point. Obama’s only real fault is that he is never without the teleprompter. Which leads to the only criticism that it’s his writers that make him look so good.

Anyone who doesn’t think that Jobs or any CEO doesn’t have a speech writer has never spent anytime in corporate communications. The fact that Obama has writers and a teleprompter doesn’t detract from his ability to deliver the speech with poise and ability.

All waxing eloquent aside how did they do in the court of public opinion?

Wikio has recently released a new Wikio Labs product called Wikio Trends that allows you to compare individual mentions. So I plugged in Barack Obama and Steve Jobs:

While Obama has more mentions over a three month period (as he probably should) Jobs crushed him yesterday. There’s one big reason for this: Blogs are dominated by tech geeks. But I still expected it to be closer, there are, after all, a lot of political bloggers out there.

I imagine the real reason for this is because the State of the Union address was broadcast on every major station, including YouTube (yes I just called YouTube a major station). The Apple event was not live streamed but live blogged, meaning the mentiones pilled up in real time.

Did you watch both presentations? What did you think?