Alfa Bravo

Updated July 9, 2008
I went to five international conferences during 2007: The Future of Web Apps in London in October, and in November Beyond the Printed Word in Dublin and SIME and Hubbub in Stockholm and LeWeb3 in Paris.

The first two had a conventional setup with a moderator who introduced the speakers, and then let the speakers talk for 20-40 minutes, most of them using Powerpoint to illustrate their talks. I found that the majority of the speakers had interesting things to communicate, but the way they performed their presentation effectively eliminated most of the value for me in the audience.

SIME used a different method, relying on a moderator that held discussions with 1-4 invited speakers on stage. I find this approach much better, as it tends to focus on the issues and not on the speakers and the history of their companies etc. But it of course puts a lot of responsibility on the moderator who must be able to distil the value out of each speaker, but Ola Ahlvarson did a great job of this at SIME. The only thing I missed was visuals, displaying the websites etc as they are discussed. Using a combination of voice, pictures, video and text is always preferable.

Hubbub was a super-low budget but high-value conference, run by a talented group of college students, see my separate blog.Since so many conferences suffer from these problems I felt that I must share my thoughts on how to hone your presentation skills. Comments are welcome, please help me add to this list!

The importance of presentation skills
It is very sad that so many influential, bright minded presenters with a deep expertise in their fields lose their audiences due to their poor presentation skills.It is also question of respect for the audience. People pay a lot of money and travel from far away to attend conferences, so their time should not be wasted. Both the organizers and the presenters need to do everything they can to add value to the delegates

For the professional speaker

Do’s

1. Think carefully before the event: what does this audience want to hear?
2. Hint: they are not interested in hearing how great you or your company are, they want to learn new things that can make THEM more successful.
3. Start by urging the audience not to take notes, say that you will post you presentation online immediately afterwards.
4. Keep an eye contact with the audience, and move around the stage. Use a remote clicker to control your presentation. Remember that 70% of your communication is in your body language!
5. Speak slowly to increase the understanding and respect for what you are saying.
6. Be visual, use pictures and videos that illustrate your points. Read my lips: less text, more visuals!
7. Avoid monotony by using variation and surprises in your slide styles during your presentation.
8. Engage the audience! Ask questions and have them put their hands up. But don’t insult them with silly game play.
9. Focus on 1,2 or maybe 3 things that you want to talk about. Explain the problems you are working with and then tell and visualise the solutions in several ways.
10. Construct your presentation based on classic drama: Start with a Set-up, then Present the problem(s), then proceed to the Confrontation and finally the Resolution. This has worked for thousands of years!
11. Hire a speaker coach that helps you trim you body language and voice.
12. Use a spell checker on all your slides. Takes a minute, improves your image.
13. If you present in another language than your native, consult a language tutor to improve your pronuncation as much as possible. Getting your message out is about being understood and respected.
14. Test your presentation on other people beforehand and videotape yourself. Listen to their feedback and watch yourself: would you understand and appreciate your presentation?
15. End by slowing a slide with your contact details and the link to your documentation on your blog or on an internet service like Slideshare. The documentation should NOT just be your slides from the presentation! Instead post special slides with your highlights explained with relevant post-analysis for the audience. Make sure that all the links to web sites that you have mentioned are active.

Don’ts

1. Don’t read word by word from your script. You will sound like a robot and miss the all-important eye contact with the audience. Instead use stiff cue cards with key words and starter sentences.
2. Don’t try to cram a 45-minute presentation into a 25-minute time slot by speaking at machine gun pace. You might just as well stay at home.
3. Don’t read from text bullets in Powerpoint. If you have to use text bullets, keep them very short and very few per slide, then first let the audience read it and then, on your own words, expand on the subject.
4. Don’t use complete sentences in your slides. Your voice shall tell the story and the slides shall only support it.
5. Don’t start talking immediately on top of your slides. Let the audience interpret the slide for a while, then add your comments.
6. Don’t use hard-to-read fonts or garish backgrounds that obscures the text.
7. Don’t use cute or unusual photos that are not illustrating exactly what you are talking about. It distracts the audience, nobody will hear what you are saying.
8. Don’t use texts that fly into the slide or ANY other disturbing transitions. You’re not running an amusement park, the interesting stuff should be in your content, not in your fireworks.
9. Don’t waste you audience’s time by presenting the history and organization of your organisation. Unless it is essential in order to understand your presentation, which is very seldom.
10. Don’t mention tips like “be sure to check out the website www.fancynewstuff.com, it has great features” without displaying a slide with both a picture of the web site and the URL in big letters + a note stating that the URL will be in your posted presentation.
11. Don’t hide behind the computer or speaker stand. Make sure the audience sees you and maintain eye contact with them.

For the ambitious seminar organiser:

Do’s

1. Be fanatic about keeping the time schedule. First of all, don’t delay the start because there are many people still arriving at the door on the official starting time. Start on the official time, exactly! This is paying respect to all the people that made the effort to be there in time, instead of letting the latecomers make everybody suffer.And make sure that each speaker understands the time frame given, so that they don’t try to run their usual 40-minute speech in their 20 minute time frame!
2. Don’t waste everybody’s time by reading a thank-you list of sponsors, speakers and volunteers. Instead make a slide presentation of them and run it in a loop 10 minutes before the start of the seminar. (See Seth Godin’s post about this.)
3. Try to mix on-stage discussions/conversations and fewer stand-alone speakers. Also, be sure to show a lot of visuals during the panels, for example the web sites that are being discussed. This can for example be done by having a small wireless laptop connected to the big screeen and pass it around the panel members as they talk.
4. Use runners that hands out microphones to the audience, time is crucial!
5. Use back channels that enables both the audience in the hall and the internet visitors in the outside world share their questions and comments. Let the backstage people extract the best questions and send them immediately to the moderator using an IM client. These questions are often better than the questions from the audience in the room, since it is easier to formulate in writing than standing up with a microphone.
6. Videotape and/or write a blog from all the speeches and put them on the conference web site with a searchable index of content.
7. Use name badges that can be easily read from 2 meters in low light conditions. Put large national flags in colour on the badges so that you also can see the nationality of the delegate.
8. Offer free wireless internet all over the conference.
9. Offer electrical outlets for as many seats as possible.

Don’ts

1. Don’t allow the audience to ask more than one question at the time. Neither the speaker nor the audience can remember two questions!
2. Don’t allow the audience to pose long-winding comments or questions that are more about presenting themselves. This steals the show from everyone else.
3. Don’t allow one person to pose more than two questions per session.
4. Don’t use badges on a long string to hang around the neck. They hang too low, often show the blank backside and they are sometimes hidden under the jacket, (if you must use them, print the name on both sides).

Also see the presentation: Death by Powerpoint it is useful!