Your audience’s attention will fade over time unless you take specific steps to keep them engaged. Here’s a graph showing the attention of university students during a 50 minute lecture – where the lecturer lost his audience (Reference: Hartley J and Davies I “Note taking: A critical review” Programmed Learning and Educational technology, 1978,15, 207-224).

Notice how at 40 minutes the attention seems to go up again (just a little!). I’m guessing that this is the point where the lecturer started his sentence with “In summary…”

And the students perked up their ears again and refocused to get the gist of the lecture. Here’s what happened – the lecturer stumbled upon the audience’s Attention Reset Button. Although our attention span is limited, we do have the ability to refocus on a task. When you push the Attention Reset Button you’re giving your audience that opportunity to refocus.

So that’s what you need to do when you’re losing your audience. Push your audience’s Attention Reset Button. Instead of fading to near zero, your audience’s attention will spring back.

How often should you push the Attention Reset Button

Plan to push the Attention Reset Button about every 10 minutes. This is a practical rule of thumb which seems to work for most audiences. For example, John Medina says in his book Brain Rules:

“I decided that every lecture I’d ever give would come in discrete modules. Since the 10 minute rule had been known for many years, I decided the modules would last only 10 minutes.”

But be aware that your audience’s attention span will vary according to many factors – warmth of the room, time of day, how much sleep they had the night before, how intrinsically interested they are in the topic. Be prepared to adjust to the needs of your audience. For instance in the morning you might plan for intervals of 15 minutes between each Attention Reset. During the potentially sleepy after-lunch slot you might decrease that to 5 minutes.

How to push the Attention Reset Button

1. Tell a story

We’re hardwired to listen to stories. They instantly engage us and require very little effort to stay focused. Even the sleepiest audience-member will perk up when you say “I’ll tell you about a time when this happened to me.”

2. Make them laugh

Nobody can not pay attention when the rest of the audience is laughing. We want to know what’s funny. The critical caveat is that your humor should be relevant to your presentation.

2. Make a transition

In the first graph I showed, the students’ attention rose near the end, and I’ve suggested that that was because the lecturer said “In summary…”

Now, I’m not suggesting that you should say “In summary…” when you’re not planning to summarize, but you can use transition statements as a signal to the audience that they should refocus. They may have got distracted for a couple of minutes and then found it hard to get back on track with what you’re saying. But if you make a transition statement such as:

“So that’s the problem we’re facing, now I’ll go onto my recommendation to address it.”

it gives them an opportunity to get back on board.

3. Break for Q&A

The traditional method of ending your presentation with Q&A is a waste of a great way of re-engaging your audience. A short Q&A session during your presentation is engaging because:

• It’s a change from just you talking
• Audience members can ask you questions about what they are interested in
• There’s a live element to a Q&A session that keeps people hooked.

Build Q&A into your presentation, rather than leaving it till the end.

4. Change something…anything

We pay attention to change. You’re probably not aware of the air conditioning hum running in the background, but as soon as it stops you’ll notice it. Here’s what you can change in a presentation:

• Change the type of visual aid you’re using eg: from PowerPoint to a flipchart or whiteboard
• Change the spot that you’re presenting from eg: stage to floor, part of stage
• Change presenters
• Change where people are sitting in the room
• Change what audience members are doing eg: from sitting down to standing up.

5. Get them to talk

Allowing people to process your ideas by asking them to talk to the person sitting next to them is an excellent way of re-engaging them. For example, you could ask them to share with their neighbour “What are three things you’ve learnt so far in my presentation”.

6. Get them to write

Asking people to reflect by writing is also useful. For example “Write down three things you’ll do differently as a result of my presentation”.

7. Take a microbreak

In a longer session (anything more than 50 minutes) take a 2-3 minute break for people to stretch their legs, use the restroom and refresh their drinks.

Warning: Be Conceptually Relevant

Don’t be one of those people who tries to spice up a deadly dull presentation with cartoons or funny images which are not conceptually relevant. It looks desperate and research by Richard Mayer (the guru of multimedia learning) shows that it harms the ability of the audience to take in your core message.

Use a variety of buttons

Don’t use the same technique every time – or your audience’s graph will look like this:

Instead use a variety of Attention Reset Buttons. If you’re using my Presentation Planner, here’s an example of how the planner might look with the Attention Reset Buttons highlighted:

What ways do you have of pushing your audience’s Attention Reset Button?

Last week I wrote about the challenge of the third era of presenting: the era of the audience.

Kristin Arnold has written a provocative and intensely practical book Boring to Bravo on how to meet that challenge by encouraging audience participation . The philosophy of the book is summed up by this quote from Amanda Gore in the book:

When I say, “Use audience interaction,” I don’t mean that you should ask a question and have them call out. You must go further. I have my audiences look at each other and do stuff! The more they connect, the better they can learn and actually have an experience (other than just listening to you or being entertained).

Here are my favorite audience participation tips from the book:

1. Set the tone for audience participation

You walk into the meeting room at least a half hour before your presentation…You take a good look around the room. Yep. There are tables, chairs, a projector, and a screen. Sigh. Don’t all these meeting rooms look just about the same? Boring.

Don’t be afraid to change it up to send the signal that this talk is not going to be your typical, ho-hum presentation.

Kristin has great tips on how to do this:

• Set up the room so that it will be easy for people to connect with each other and with you.
• Have just enough seats so that people can’t fill up the back rows and leave the front rows empty (have spare chairs stacked at the back of the room so that you have them available if required).
• Leave access lanes so that people can move around easily.
• Tape a welcome sign on the door and have posters with relevant images, icons, phrases and quotes on the wall.
• As people walk in, play music and a slideshow on automatic.

2. Use a flipchart or write on a tablet

The mighty easel chart can spontaneously engage your audience in real time.

PowerPoint tends to make presentations boring because nothing the audience says can make a change to a future slide. The presentation is set and most of the time will continue on its inexorable path regardless of the wishes of the audience. Using an easel chart (I call it a flipchart) changes all that. It immediately signals that there’s room for flexibility and that the audience can play a part in creating your presentation with you. With a larger audience, you can achieve the same thing by writing on a tablet as Dan Roam did at SXSW 2010.

3. Don’t wait till the end to take questions

By the time you get to the end, your audience will have forgotten the burning question they had twenty minutes earlier, they will be ready to take a break and grab another cup of coffee.

Kristin also points out that if you’ve made the audience listen passively for seven-eights of your presentation, it’s difficult to rouse them into asking questions. And when you do ask for questions how about saying:

I welcome you asking me anything about this topic

rather than the traditional “Are there any questions?”

4. When you ask for participation, accept the curmudgeons

Keep in mind there will always be a small percentage of the population that does not want to play with you. I call these folks “curmudgeons” because they typically sit in the back and convey through their body language, “I don’t want no stinking team activities!”

Kristin’s advice is to address their objections ahead of time by saying something like:

I know some of you think these kinds of things are silly, but I promise there is a point, and it will only take a moment.

and then let go of needing them to participate. If they want to just observe that’s fine. Oh, and don’t use the word “role-play” – it’s a turn-off for lots of people. Use the word “activity” instead.

5. Split people up into small groups

The quintessential group interaction is to break the large group into smaller discussion groups. It forces the participants not only to think about your message but also to connect and collaborate with others, and to apply the new information. It also inherently increases the energy level in the room!

Kristin goes through the six-step process for running a small group activity. What I particularly liked were all the ideas for splitting people up. For example:

• A variation on musical chairs. Ask people to walk around while the music plays. When the music stops the person nearest to them is their partner.
• Pre-assign a number, letter or color to each person on their nametag. Ask the As to join together, the Bs etc.

6. Close with an audience commitment

You can have a great speech, but if you haven’t shifted the audience’s perspective, increased their knowledge, or inspired them to do something differently, your words are for naught.

Kristin suggests asking people to commit to an action step, and then to make a public proclamation to increase accountability. You can ask them to share out loud, write it down on a card or worksheet, or share their commitment with an accountability buddy.

Wow! These six tips probably comprise 1% of the tips in this book. I read a lot of presentation and public speaking books (and have done for many years) and this is one that often had me go “that’s good idea” or I hadn’t thought of doing that way before.” So if you want to increase the level of audience participation in your presentations, buy this book.

SXSW is a mega conference/festival for geeks in Austin, Texas, United States. Mega means over 10,000 attendees. I came here to see what’s happening at the geek edge of presenting. To observe the interface between presentations and technology.

But what has been most in my face is that the best presenters I saw care! They don’t care about themselves – they care about their audience, and they care passionately. I’ll talk about each of these three best presentations.

Chris Brogan and Julien Smith

Chris and Julien are co-authors of Trust Agents. I’ve previously admired Chris’s authenticity and his willingness to take risks when speaking. This was my first opportunity to see him live. Chris and Julien’s modus operandi was to have a loose structure and then riff around those themes, bouncing off each other. They’re both quick-witted and funny and it led to some great laughs. They spoke with intensity – like they were underlining each statement. But most important they cared about their message and about us as an audience.

Dan Roam

Dan Roam is author of Back of the Napkin.. This was a presentation he was giving for the first time, based on his new book Vivid Thinking. His caring came through in the depth and rigor of his thinking. Compared to Chris and Julien, He’s quiet and serious – but riveting. In a future post, I’ll talk more about some of the ideas from his talk.

Gary Vaynerchuck

Gary Vaynerchuck is the author of Crush It. Gary greeted  every person who came in and thanked them for coming. Then after 10 minutes of speaking he turned it over to Q&A – this is with an audience of two thousand people. To ask a question you had to line up behind a mike. When a woman was clearly struggling with nerves, he invited her to come up to him and just talk to him quietly and then he repeated the question and answered it to the whole audience. When he didn’t have an answer, he was straight. After the presentation he was there for another 45 minutes answering questions for all those people who hadn’t got to ask him a question earlier. Among them, was a mother and her 8 year old son. She’d taken her son out of school for the day to see Gary speak. The mother asked Gary if he could record a short video to show to her son’s teacher. Gary asked for the teacher’s name and then spoke directly to her on the video. It was sweet and moving.

Gary is known for his passion, but what I saw was his genuine caring for each person in the audience.

So here’s what SXSW reinforced for me. Your style as a presenter doesn’t matter. Whether you’re funny or serious, loud or quiet doesn’t matter. Just care for your audience.

There’s a step by step process you can use to effectively handle a heckler.

1. Manage your own emotional state

This is the first prerequisite to be able to handle a heckler with dignity. You can manage your emotional state by managing your thoughts. If you believe that a person who interrupts you is rude, that if they contradict you they are wrong, and that if they talk for more than 3 seconds they’ve gone on for too long -  that’s going to come through in your response and make it difficult for you to handle a heckler calmly.

It’s easy to deny these thoughts when you’re calmly reading this post on your computer. It can be very different when you’re standing in front of a group stating your opinion and wanting their approval. Anybody who contradicts you in that situation is the enemy! Your brain is telling you “You must make that person shut-up or you’re going to be deadmeat”.

It takes a genuine deep-seated belief that different points of view can be valid to overcome your natural defensive/aggressive reaction to the heckler. Role-playing these situations with colleagues is incredibly useful in training you to override your natural reactions and react calmly.

2. Let the heckler have their say

The first time somebody interrupts let them go for a bit. It will probably feel far too long for you, and you may even see some people in the audience getting restless, but this is the most effective preventative method to stop them continuing to heckle. They will continue to interrupt and heckle if they feel they were shut down. If you interrupt them the first time they try and speak, they’ll be like a jack-in-the-box for the rest of your session. The best way to prevent is to let them go on – just a little bit too long. They’re less likely to interrupt again.

3. Use reflective listening before you respond

Reflect back to the heckler what they said. This means expressing in your own words your understanding of what they’ve said. You may think that this technique looks transparent, but the heckler will most likely be totally oblivious – they will simply feel “you’ve listened to me”. Or if your understanding is wrong, they’ll correct you and then you can have another attempt at reflecting back what they’ve said.

Once again, this is prevention. Responding thoroughly and fairly to the heckler the first time means it’s more likely to be the only time they interrupt.

4. Respond

Respond if it’s appropriate to do so. Address your response to the whole audience, not just the heckler – though don’t avoid eye contact with them either. But, unless you want to continue the conversation with the heckler, don’t end your response by looking at them. This invites them to either agree or disagree with you. So look at a person on the other side of the room as you conclude your response. Then smoothly segue back into your prepared presentation.

5. Subsequent interruptions

If the person keeps interrupting and it’s starting to detract from your presentation, it’s time for the next level. I use an assertiveness formula that I remember with the mnemonic OAR: O stands for Observe, A stands for Affect, and R stands for Request:

Observe

Make a simple statement of what you observe happening. This statement should be devoid of judgement about the person. Just describe their behavior using neutral language. For example:“You’ve made a number of points.”

Affect

State how it’s affecting you. Many people shrink back from doing this, because it makes you feel vulnerable. But that’s precisely why it’s so powerful. Your unexpected vulnerability will shock most people back to seeing you as a human being rather than a speaker to be attacked. Here’s an example: “I’m finding it difficult to progress with my presentation.”

Request

Politely and firmly make a request:“Please could you hold any more comments till the end of the presentation.”

Most reasonable people will respond to this approach, but for those who don’t there’s…

6. The last resort

Ask the audience whether they would prefer you to carry on your presentation or want to hear more from the heckler. Most of the time they’ll say they want you to carry on – they’ll be just as fed up with the heckler as you are. It takes a brave person to carry on heckling against the expressed wishes of the majority of the audience. And in the rare situation that they want to hear from the heckler, accept it and bow out graciously.
At the Presentation Camp in LA last year I facilitated a session on handling a heckler. Lisa Braithwaite’s husband videoed the session, but we didn’t have microphones so the audio is very faint. But you may find it useful, so I’ve included the video below.

Olivia Mitchell on how to handle a heckler from Lisa Braithwaite on Vimeo.

A reader asked me this question about audience attention:

Some of us who are 45+ are finding that younger people text and use computers during presentations to the point of rudeness. This happens even when others in the presentation give great evaluations.  We think we’ll be seen as “old farts” if we ask them to disengage.  How do we bridge this generation gap?

What’s the assumption about audience attention?

The assumption is that people paying attention will be looking at you, the speaker. If they’re not looking at you, or they appear to be doing something else, then they’re not paying attention. But this assumption is not supported by evidence.

How do people pay attention?

Sitting passively listening to someone talking is unnatural. It requires concentration. Many people use secondary tasks to help them stay engaged and focused. At university the only way I could stop my brain going off on a journey of its own during boring lectures, was to discipline myself to take notes.

In a recent experiment, doodlers were able to recall 29% more details from a phone conversation than non-doodlers:

[The] theory is that by using up slightly more mental resources, doodling helps prevent the mind from wandering off the boring primary task into daydream land. This study is part of an emerging recognition in psychology that secondary tasks aren’t always a distraction from primary tasks, but can sometimes actually be beneficial.

The secondary tasks we use to stay focused are becoming more high-tech. People can now take notes on their phones and laptops, or they may have a game on their cellphone which is equivalent to doodling.

So the first point is that people who appear to be fully-engaged with their cellphones and laptops may still be paying attention to you.

But are people who are texting paying attention?

Er no, they’re probably not. But when you’re the speaker you don’t know whether the person is texting, surfing, playing solitaire or taking high-quality notes of your presentation. Therefore don’t make an assumption that they’re not paying attention.

Is it rude?

Rude is in the mind of the beholder. Rude to you, not rude to them. To label a behavior as rude is to make a negative judgement about it, and that judgement will seep through in the way that you come across.

Your audience are adults. If their behavior is not distracting or annoying other people in the audience it’s up to them whether they pay attention or not, and how they pay attention.

So what can you do?

There’s no need to do anything. But, if you think you’ll do a better job if people are looking at you, here are two approaches you could take:

1. Open your presentation and start to establish rapport with your audience, and then say:

“I notice many of you are using your phones and laptops. I’m absolutely fine with that. But I also know that I can do a better job if you are engaging with me and looking at me. So when you’re not using your phones and laptops I’d love it if you can look at me.”

2. Scott Berkun in his book Confessions of a Public Speaker describes an approach he’s taken. He says to his audience:

“Here’s a deal. I’d like you to give me your undivided attention for five minutes. If after five minutes you’re bored, you think I’m an idiot, or you’d rather browse the web than listen, you’re free to do so. In fact, I won’t mind if you get up and leave after five minutes. But for the first 300 seconds, please give me your undivided attention.” Most people close their laptops.

The bottom-line

If you want their attention, be more interesting than their cellphones.

Yesterday I had a skype conversation with Twitter follower Todd (@TJList) on how to include audience participation in a presentation. He’s presenting on getting through the economic downturn to an audience of small business owners. Here was his question:

How can I involve my audience in the presentation? I want the audience to feel like it’s a conversation, not like they are being “talked at” for 45 minutes.

Audience participation is hard to get right. That’s because it’s easy to make these mistakes:

1. Asking for participation before you’ve warmed up the audience
2. Asking trite questions which don’t add value to the presentation
3. Not giving clear instructions
4. Asking unplanned, confusing questions
5. Asking people to answer out loud with no thinking or rehearsal time.

So here are the tips I shared with Todd so that his presentation is a success:

1. First, your audience has to trust you

Rockstars warm up the audience before they ask them to sing along and participate. You need to do the same. Specifically, gain the audience’s trust by showing that you are authentic, confident and competent. Once the audience has got to know you and trust you they will be willing to participate.

2. Only involve the audience where it will add value

Plan your presentation first and then look to see where it would be valuable to have the audience contribute. Look for situations where people can add real value. Audience participation should never be just for the sake of it – people will see right though this and turn-off. Here are three opportunities for audience participation that we identified for Todd’s presentation:

• Sharing with others how the recession is affecting their business
• Sharing ideas they have for their business while listening to Todd
• Identifying one concrete action that they can take after the presentation.

Ideally, you would plan for audience participation exercises to be roughly evenly spaced through the presentation. However, having genuine, as opposed to contrived, exercises is more important.

3. How to get people to participate

Asking a question and simply asking people to respond out loud rarely works well. Many people don’t like speaking in a group situation, so you need to make it easy for them. Your audience participation exercise should include time for them to think about what they want to say and/or an opportunity to rehearse what they want to say.

Here are two ways of doing this before you ask people to share in front of the whole group:

Paired share

This is one of the simplest methods and very effective. Ask people to talk to the person next to them about a specific question or discussion point. Todd thought he might use this method for allowing people to share how the recession was affecting their business.

Continuum

Ask people to stand up and move to a space in the room (you’ll need a cleared space free of tables and chairs). Pace out a line of the floor representing a continuum between two points. For example, Todd could pace out a line with one end representing “My business is doing as well as ever” and the other end representing “My business is severely affected by the recession”. Then ask people to place themselves at any point on the line that represents their experience. Then you can ask people to share with the person nearest to them why they’ve placed themselves in that spot.

Using continuums gets people moving, gives a strong visual sense of where your audience is at on a particular issue, and has the audience mix and talk with more people.

4. Plan your questions carefully

It’s hard to ask clear questions that elicit useful answers that will add value to your presentation. So plan your questions beforehand. To ensure you get the wording right, write them down on a card. Test your questions out on other people before the presentation to make sure that the sorts of answers you get are the sorts of answers you want.

5. Give instructions step-by step

This is incredibly important. If you don’t do this, your attempts at audience participation will end up in chaos, with people asking you at various times “What did you want us to do now?” So be incredibly deliberate about giving instructions. For the paired share, this is how your instructions might go.

In a moment I want you to have chat with the person next to you. Find that person now. [Allow a few moments for everyone to check they have a partner to talk to. Depending on the seating arrangements you may have to involve yourself in pairing people off .]

Now here’s the question I want you to discuss.[pause]

How has the economic downturn affected your business? [you could also have this question on a PowerPoint slide or flipchart].

I’ll give you about 2 minutes. Please start now.

6. Monitor the energy

Once everybody is involved in the conversation, now is not the time for you to have a breather. Your role is to be present and pay attention to the energy in the room. Here’s what will happen to the energy:

When the hubbub starts to ebb is the best time to bring the audience back to you. The time you originally gave to your audience is not important – it was only important to give them a sense of how long they had to chat to each other.

7. How to get the audience back

Getting the audience back to you is an art. You can talk loudly over the conversations – this is possible with a group of say 20-30, but gets difficult with larger groups. Some people use a fun sound-making toy. The most elegant method is to use music. Play music in the background while people are talking. 30 seconds before you want them to stop, start turning the volume up gradually so that they can’t help but become aware of it. Then stop the music abruptly. People will realize something has changed and will start to wrap up their conversations.

Be patient, it may still take a while for the conversations to die down completely. If the conversations keep going, start talking but don’t say anything important. For example you might say:

Please wrap up your conversation and we’ll get going again. In a moment, I’ll find out from you what you thought. etc etc.

As people realize you’re talking again, they’ll gradually stop their conversations and pay attention back to you.

8. Show the value from their participation

Audience participation should in some way contribute to the presentation. So if that isn’t built into the exercise itself, it’s your job to pull the value out of the exercise by debriefing it. If you don’t do this, audience members will feel that their participation didn’t have any point and will feel less enthusiastic to contribute again.

The simplest way to debrief is to ask your audience a question. Once again, you should plan this question beforehand so that it elicits the type of response that you want. The question should be an open question as opposed to a closed question (a closed question only requires a yes or no as an answer). For instance, after a paired share on “How is the recession affecting your business?” Todd could ask:

So what sorts of impacts did you talk about?

Tie the answers you get into what you’re going to be talking about next, and refer back to audience contributions through the rest of your presentation.

9. Participation without speaking

The audience doesn’t have to speak up in order to participate. Here are two exercises which allow people who aren’t great talkers to participate fully.

Post-it exercise

Hand out a little stack of post-its and a pen to each person in your audience. Ask them to write down any ideas that are sparked for them as you’re speaking. One idea per post-it. Then get them to stand up and stick the post-it on a wall, flipchart or whiteboard. Give everybody time to peruse all the post-its representing the combined ideas of the whole group. Todd thought he might use this idea to capture the audience’s ideas for their own business while he was sharing ideas from Dan Pink and Seth Godin.

Written action point

Near the end of your presentation, ask people to write down one action that they will take as a result of your presentation. This is a valuable way of ensuring people in your audience nail down something practical from your talk. Writing it down will increase the chances that they will do it. Todd decided to use this exercise and to create a space on his handout for people to write their action point.

10. Audience participation is unpredictable

Be prepared for your presentation to depart from the tidy route and timeframes you planned. Once you start incorporating audience participation you are ceding some control of your presentation. Once you’ve got people participating, they may not stop contributing once you get back into your presentation. Congratulations  – you’ve got your audience engaged – it’s a conversation.

What audience participation exercises have you used? Have you had any problems with audience participation? Please share in the comments.

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In my last post, I wrote about why it’s worthwhile to spend time preparing a presentation. But it’s also possible to waste time preparing a presentation, by not going about it in the right way. So here are my 7 time-saving tips to help you prepare a presentation efficiently.

1. Always be preparing

Professional public speakers have always advised aspiring speakers to be collectors of stories. But now also collect images, videos etc which could be useful. That way, when you next have to plan a presentation, you’ll have some resources at your fingertips, rather than having to search from scratch.

2. Start immediately

Start planning your presentation as soon as you know you have to give it. That way, you’ll think about your presentation during the cracks in your day. You’ll refine what you want to say and come up with interesting examples. By starting immediately you’ll reduce the total amount of  time you spend planning your presentation.

3. Break the presentation planning process into small steps

Planning a presentation can be a daunting process – and therefore we procrastinate. Break the process up into small steps. Here are my suggestions:

1. Draft the Key Message
2. Choose a three-part structure for the body of your presentation
3. Collect evidence to support the points in your structure
4. Plan the opening of your presentation
5. Design PowerPoint/Keynote slides if required.

For more detail on these steps see my Presentation Planning Guide.

4. Don’t brainstorm

For most presentations it’s not useful to brainstorm material. (Note: I make a distinction between brainstorming and mindmapping. brainstorming is for generating new ideas. Mindmapping maps what you already know).

The art of planning a presentation is choosing just the information your audience needs to know – and no more. You need to cull information, not gather it. If you brainstorm you’re going in the opposite direction.

5. Rehearse before you think you’re ready

Many people waste time preparing far more information than they need. Once you have the basic flow of your presentation sorted, try it out. You’ll find out how much time it takes to deliver. And that way you won’t spend time preparing information that you’ll never have an opportunity to deliver.

If you have willing friend of colleague try it out in front of them and ask them to tell you how “ready ” it is. You may find you don’t have too much more work to do.

6. Pinpoint the research you need to do

Some people waste time by doing general research on their presentation topic. This is a waste of time.

Instead plan the flow of your presentation and then decide where you need to back-up your points with evidence eg: a statistic or a quote from a credible expert. Then go and find that evidence.

7. Let go of perfection

There is no such thing as a perfect presentation. Audiences don’t want a perfect presentation – they want connection, engagement and information that helps them. So let go of trying to attain perfection.

If you have difficulty judging when your presentation is good enough, rehearse it in front of a friend and let them tell you whether it’s good enough.

Note: After I wrote this post, I did a search on my blog for a link  and found that I had written a very similar post to this last year that I had forgotten about. D’oh! But the information is valuable and timeless, so I’ve decided to post this one too. Enjoy!

What tips do you have for saving time when you’re preparing a presentation?

Today, I presented a session remotely at the Presentation Camp at Stanford University, California. My session was on “How to engage your audience with Twitter” and I tried to do exactly that during my presentation.

Here’s what I learnt from my experience:

1. Design your presentation for Twitter

I used two strategies that took into account that my audience would be tweeting. These are the strategies:

1. Break up your presentation into small sections. Use the breaks between sections to pause your presentation and respond to questions or issues raised on Twitter. I had three sections and took a twitter break after each one.
2. Have “tweetbites” scattered during your presentation. Tweetbites are soundbites (under 140 characters of course) that will get picked up and tweeted by your audience.  Repeat your tweetbites so that people can tweet them easily. My most successful one was:

2. Encourage your audience to tweet

Let your audience know you would like them to tweet during your presentation and tell them exactly how. Set up a separate hashtag for the presentation. If your presentation is part of a conference with its own hashtag, I still recommend a separate hashtag for your session. That will ensure you can follow just the tweets for your session.

To set up a hashtag, first follow @hashtags, it will automatically follow you back. Then you simply create your hashtag by typing a hash symbol in front of your chosen tag. You can search the hashtags site to ensure your tag isn’t already in use. We found it took several hours for twitter search to pick up on our hashtag, so I recommend doing this the day before your presentation.

3. Don’t forget the non-tweeters

We did have a couple of people who were not twitter-enabled. During the twitter breaks they were able to ask questions. But it wasn’t an ideal experience for them. I don’t know whether this would be such an issue in a standard conference presentation (the fact that I was a remote presenter and that the presentation was about using twitter in a presentation – made it very tweet-focused). But thinking through how non-tweeters are going to participate is important.

4. Use multiple ways to monitor the Twitterstream

In my presentation, I suggested three ways you could monitor the twitterstream for your presentation:

1. Take twitter breaks to check out the twitterstream and answer any questions.
2. Appoint an audience member to be the Twitter monitor and to let you know when there are issues arising on the Twitterstream that you need to respond to.
3. Display the twitterstream live so that both you and the audience can see it.

I found I needed to use all three of these to try and keep up with the stream of tweets coming through (and even then I didn’t manage to keep up). There were only eight people in the room tweeting (some also tweeting remotely) but they managed to generate over 80 tweets in 40 minutes! Having the twitter monitor was the most useful strategy for me. My partner, Tony, monitored the twitterstream and wrote down the most critical tweets for me to respond to on notepaper and passed them to me.

5. Ask the audience to retweet (RT) the tweets they want you to address

This suggestion came out of a tweet interchange:

6. Let go of the illusion that you might know more than the audience

Twitter allows the audience to offer their expertise. This happened almost immediately in my presentation. We had set up a search for #prescampo at www.search.twitter.com to show the twitterstream. We used a firefox plugin called Reload Every to refresh the page every 10 seconds. Within a couple of minutes of starting @Jeffhurt (who participated remotely from Texas) suggested we use www.tweetchat.com. Wow! That was so much better. It refreshed itself as soon as new tweets came through and has a tweetbox so that you can also tweet from the page and it automatically adds the hashtag.

Thank you so much Jeff for all the expertise that you contributed during the presentation.

7. Tweet the questions you want the audience to respond to

I had planned four specific questions I wanted to ask the audience during my presentation. I had these ready to go, so that I could tweet them at the appropriate time in my presentation. I did this by having four separate twitter tabs open in firefox each with one question ready to tweet. It worked but please do tell me if there’s an easier way of doing this!

8. You don’t have to respond to all the questions during your presentation

That’s part of the beauty of using Twitter. The questions are saved for you. There were a number of questions that I missed and I responded to them after the presentation through Twitter.

This list is just my main learnings from delivering the presentation. There’s heaps more value that you can get by reviewing the twitterstream which summarizes my main points and includes the expertise of the audience. I’ve created a pdf of the twitterstream that you can download here:  twitterstream-prescampo. For those who would like the substance of my presentation, you can find it in two guest posts I wrote last week:

How to present while people are twittering

7 ways to use Twitter to engage your audience

I’ve recently written two guest posts on Twitter and presenting. On Laura Fitton’s Touchbase blog, I looked at the benefits for the audience and the speaker of people twittering while you speak and how to manage it.

On Chris Spagnuolo’s Edgehopper blog, I went to the next step and explored how you can use Twitter to engage your audience.

Both posts have generated a lot of buzz on Twitter and there’s a ton of comments on the TouchBase blog. There’s many useful points in the comments and I have summarized the main issues below:

Is Twitter a good thing while you’re presenting?

I actually didn’t cover this issue in my blog post on Touchbase because I thought that the debate about whether people should Twitter while people  were presenting had been had. And that most people had accepted that although they might not like it as presenters it was now a reality of presenting at technology-enabled conferences. I was wrong.

Is it rude to tweet while someone is presenting?

Some people feel vehemently that people should not tweet while there’s a presenter on stage. Here are some of the comments:

@HughBriss I still hate it when people don’t look at me when I’m talking. It seems rude, no matter what the reason. If I was an instructor I’d expect people to be taking notes but that’s a lot different than people tweeting about me or asking each other questions while I’m talking.

Mike Ashworth: Personally I believe that to constantly twitter (or talk, or text, or whisper) during a presentation (or meeting for that case) is rude. advise at start that you will be monitoring the twitter conversation and asking people to step forward to explain their tweets (pos and neg) to entire audience.

Kevin Baughen: I must be a ‘fuddy duddy’. How about we behave like grown-ups, show some respect to those speaking and try to engage in some real human skills? I’m tired of hearing technological development as the excuse for rude and impersonal behaviours.

Ira Basen: As someone who was never a big fan of passing notes in the back of the class, I see no reason to embrace its digital equivalent .

My response to this, is that rudeness is cultural. And that our perception of what is rude is changing. In the past, it might have been considered rude to interrupt a speaker to ask a question. Now, although the speaker may not like it (interrupts their flow, difficult to get back on track) it’s not seen as rude. Same with tweeting.

But tweeting while someone is speaking can still be rude

But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be used rudely. Conference tweeters need to self-moderate. Ira Basen wrote last week about being “twitter-trashed” during a presentation he gave. Here were some of the tweets:

“You can ask questions without propagating simplistic, misleading stereotypes. Ira Basen fails that test.”

“It would be easy to get angry at the odious caricature of public relations Ira Basen presents. But it is too extreme to be credible.”

They are hard-hitting. I can understand that Ira feels pretty resentful that these comments were made in a forum where he was unable to respond at the time. Would this tweeter have made these comments face-to-face to Ira at the end of the presentation? I think that that is the appropriate test. Don’t tweet anything during a presentation, that you wouldn’t say directly to the speaker.

The illusion of attention

In the past, we may have been able to enjoy the illusion that people were paying attention to us, but they could equally have been thinking about the row that they had with their spouse that morning. I believe that as speakers we need to make a cultural shift and accept that there are different ways for audiences to pay attention to what we’re saying.

Daiv Russell It’s very intriguing how the presenter feels that they “own the show”, and must have 100% visual concentration from the audience, failing to realize that greater back-channel participation is actually greater immersion in the topic at hand. Being one of those wholly-consumed audience member/participants, I’m glad, for one, to see that this perspective is shared by others, and that the benefits of discussing the material live-stream are being recognized.

Speakers embracing Twitter

Many speakers wrote about the benefits of their audience using Twitter:

Tom Collins: I enjoy doing presentations with live internet access, so I can jump to online examples in response to live questions. Can’t wait to add a twitter stream to that mix!

Sacha Chua wrote her own blog post inspired by my post: If you’re talking about the ideas that I’m presenting, fantastic! I’ve engaged you in a much better way than I could ever have if you just sat there passively listening. If you’re looking up examples I’ve quoted and bookmarking them for later reading, hooray! I’ve said something that’s sparked your interest, and you’ll take it from there. If you’re asking or answering questions about what I’m saying, wow! You jumpstart the discussion and save other people from being confused.

Dan Keldsen: Well, as someone who was thrilled to have @Pistachio tweet positively about my co-keynote at the Enterprise 2.0 conference last year, I have to say that Twitter (and things like it) add a whole ‘nother dimension to presenting. Magnifying the conversation OUTSIDE of the venue you’re in has tremendous benefits. I’d take my chances with participation of any kind, whether out loud in public or virtual, rather than just talking heads, any day of the week.

Ed Garay: As a presenter, I like the idea of offering multiple means of communication and avenues of engagement while, at the same time, getting instant feedback and the opportunity for adapting (changing on the fly) one’s talk based of people’s interest, Q&A and meaningful commentary.

Morriss Partee You left out a huge bonus to the presenter: key highlights of your presentation are being sent out to an audience much bigger than those in the room. If you have something truly insightful or newsworthy to say, your message may be retweeted far and wide.

The context of your presentation

Richard Kraneis raised an important issue regarding when tweeting is appropriate:

Presenting to 500 is different than presenting to 50, or 12. At what point do we recognize that a presenter has become a teacher and that his/her mastery/control of the class is important? Trust me, if you’re teaching someone how to use advanced Excel concepts such as pivot tables and someone is working on their laptop on something else, you’ve lost them as students.

In a small group, people can participate out loud. If we were to start using Twitter to participate in small groups it would be like that group of teenagers hanging out together and communicating through texting. The beauty of Twitter is enabling participation in large audiences.

Tweetbites

Here’s fantastic idea that came through in the comments. I’ve christened them “Tweetbites”:

Tara: I’d also suggest making presentations more soundbite heavy- easier for twitters to grab a good quote for their followers that way. I was recently at an education panel and I kept tweeting about only one guy in a seven person panel, because he had the great one-liners that would fit in 140 characters and would be snappy for those reading the tweet out of context.

Beth Kanter: I think that it places a good discipline to listen and boil down ah ha moments into 140 characters.

Ralph Basfeld: People try to put the essence of your message in 140 characters. That encourages them to think through what the core message is. They are being active, instead of passive. This is a good thing.

I connected with @apowerpoint on Twitter:  “I turned the table on people in audience who tweeted to actually give them sound bites”. His entire presentation was tweetbites.

What other comments and great ideas do you have?

Asking questions of your audience is a great way to keep the audience engaged. But asking questions is an art. I asked on Twitter what people found hardest about asking questions that engage your audience:

Lee Potts from Breaking Murphy’s Law “Posing the question in such a way that guarantees someone, anyone, will answer and not leave me hanging.”

Brent Dykes from PowerPoint Ninja “How to recover from a question or series of questions that get crickets (i.e., silence)?”

You ask a question and the audience looks blankly back at you

You may have suffered the same fate. There are many reasons why people won’t answer your questions ranging from lack of clarity of the question to fear of public speaking.

Here are the 10 steps for asking questions in a presentation which will help you avoid being left hanging.

1. Warm up your audience first

Comedians warm-up their audiences – or if they’re stars – they have another comedian do it for them.

You also need to warm up your audience first. They need to get to know you and trust you a little before they’ll venture answering a question.

2. Don’t let them settle into a passive mode

But don’t leave it too long before you start asking questions. If you leave it too long, people will settle into a passive “TV-watching” mode and it will be difficult to rouse them into responding. So once you’ve established rapport (2-5 minutes) start asking questions. The audience will then get that this is an interactive presentation and will stay on their toes rather than settling into that passive mode.

3. Move from easy to more challenging questions through your presentation

Plan your questions so that they move your presentation forward. This matrix will help you plan your questions.

For example, say I was giving a presentation on “Overcoming your fear of public speaking” I could use this matrix to come up with progressively more challenging questions. I would start with questions from the bottom-left corner. These are easy questions which will get me and my audience on a roll. But if I only asked questions like this they would soon become trite and boring. More quiz show than presentation.

So as you move through your presentation move towards the top-right corner and ask more challenging questions which will get your audience thinking. Here’s a resource for asking challenging questions.

At every stage your questions needs to be tightly choreographed with the substance of your presentation. The answers to each question need to move the presentation forward.

You’ll get from this that you need to carefully plan your questions. You can’t just blurt out a question that just popped into your head.  Asking engaging questions that your audience will answer needs careful planning.

4. Signal your question

Sometimes people don’t answer a question because they weren’t listening or they didn’t realize you wanted an answer.  Let your audience know you’re about to ask a question. For example, you might say “Here’s a question I’d like you to answer.”

Avoid mixing rhetorical questions (these are questions you don’t expect your audience to answer) with “real” questions. Your audience will get confused about whether they’re supposed to answer or not.

5. Frame your question so that people know exactly what you want

A major reason people don’t answer questions in a presentation is because they’re not clear on what the questioner really wants. Never underestimate the ability of the audience to misunderstand your question.

The build-up to and the phrasing of your question are both critical to ensuring that people understand the question and are comfortable answering. For example, in my presentation on nervousness, if I simply ask “what symptoms of nervousness do you get?” I might not get many responses and some might be slightly off-topic (eg: I don’t like talking to people I know”).

Here’s how I get the best results. I start by telling my own story of getting ultra-nervous before a presentation. I describe my heart-beating as if it was going to explode out of my chest and the sweat trickling down my sides! Then I ask:

“What bodily symptoms of nervousness do you get?”

The answers come so quick and fast that I have to get someone to help me write them all up on the flipchart. Why does this work so well:

1. I’ve shown them what I want by describing my own physical symptoms.
2. I’ve made them more comfortable about sharing these personal details by sharing first.
3. I’ve made my question ultra-clear by asking for “bodily symptoms”.

Again, planning is critical. Draft your questions and then test them out on your friends and see if you get the type of answers you’re looking for. Then refine and test again.

6. Ask your question slowly and clearly

You want people to understand you the first time. To make sure you get the phrasing right during the presentation, write the question out in full on a small card and read your question from the card if you need to. Quiz show hosts do this and so can you.

You could also write the question on a slide so that people can read it for themselves and ponder on it.

7. Make it easy for people to answer

Many people avoid answering questions because it means speaking in front of a group a.k.a. public speaking. So you need to make it easy for them. There are a number of ways of doing this:

1. Have them talk to their neighbor about their answer to the question. Only then ask for their answers. This is an incredibly effective technique. It gives people a little more time to think in a non-pressurized situation. They get to checkout their answer and get feedback that it’s not totally stupid. And thirdly they get to rehearse answering the question. All of this has them be more comfortable answering out loud in front of the rest of the group.
2. Split your audience into small groups (2-4 people) to discuss the question. Then ask for one person from each group to summarize the answers from that group. The spokesperson is just reporting back so there isn’t the same fear of looking stupid with a wrong answer. Less confident people won’t have to speak in front of the group but will still have been able to take part in the discussion.
3. Hand out post-it notes and ask people to write their answer on the post-it and then come and stick it on the wall.
4. Ask people to write their answer on a flip chart at the front of the room.
5. This next method requires you to have some space in your room. Ask people to stand and move to the space. Create an imaginary line across the space by walking along the line. Let them know you’ll be asking a question and you’ll want them to answer by moving to a spot on the imaginary line. For example, I use this technique for people to see the level of presenting experience in the room. I’ll stand at one end of the line and say “Stand here if you’ve got lots of experience presenting”, then I’ll walk down the line to about the half-way spot and say “Stand here if you’ve got some experience” and then down to the other end and say “Stand here if you’ve hardly ever done it before.”

8. Wait for answers

If you simply ask a question and want people to volunteer answers in front of the group you need to wait for the answers. Most people won’t answer straight away. They need time to think. Expect this. Wait in a relaxed but expectant stance. Look softly at different people in your audience. Normally someone will speak. Wait at least 10 seconds. Yes, this will feel like an eternity to you.

If nobody answers you’ve got two options:

1. Repeat the question and ask them to talk to their neighbor about it.
2. Give the answer yourself and move on smoothly with your presentation.

After the presentation, ask for some feedback from individual audience members why the question didn’t work. You’ll learn valuable lessons for next time.

9. Use the answers you get

Incorporate the answers you get into the flow of your presentation. If you don’t do anything with the answers, people will fail to see the point and will stop contributing.

A great tool here is a flip chart. Writing up the answers on the flip chart demonstrates that you value the answers you’re getting. If the answers are coming very fast you may need to have an assistant to help you write them up. Write them up as closely as you can to the way the person said it. If you need to paraphrase check with the person that it accurately reflects what they said.

10. Do not humiliate anyone

You may think that you would never do this, but it’s incredibly easy to do unintentionally. Here’s how to avoid doing it:

1. Acknowledge each answer you get with a warm “Thank you.”
2. Do not gush over one particular answer – others will feel slighted in comparison.
3. If somebody’s answer is totally wrong or misguided take responsibility for it. For example, you might say “Oh! that’s not quite what I was looking for but I can see why you said that. What I meant was….”
4. Do not call on individuals to answer – they will feel put on the spot.

Note that if you humiliate one person it has a ripple effect. Others will feel for them and will want to avoid the same fate.

These 10 steps will help you avoid being left hanging – but they’re not a guarantee – asking questions is an art that requires practice and feedback. What other tips do you have for asking questions that engage your audience?

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