Attention- Grabbing Presentation Skills – “Initiatives to Get Audience Interaction, Enthusiasm, and Energy”

Dave Hill - Presentation Skills Article

One of the big challenges presenters have is how to form a bond with the audience and keep them engaged and energized. Have you ever been on a training session where the instructor asks a question and there is no energy in the room and responses are hesitant? Have you ever been on a net meeting where the host asks a question and the silence is deafening? For any instructor, presenter or trainer, it can make you feel uneasy if you do not get feedback from your audience, whether in a conference room setting or on a net meeting. On the other hand, if you have a highly interactive session, you go away feeling that people were interested in your material and had value for it. The difference between success and failure is knowledge and technique.

At a recent monthly technical net meeting, an acquaintance was delivering technical information and I was impressed with the tact he used in getting about 50 people highly involved in his technical information exchange. The net meeting was lively, evoked discussion, and provided value. This meeting was highly successful, considering that many similar meeting prior to this had been relatively subdued.

Here is an excerpt from the meeting notice that was sent out a week before the meeting with the presentation slides:

“Remember this month we are having a homework exercise. The attached presentation slides contain nine scenarios that may or may not require a safety review for the impact of change of; procedures, materials of construction, or operating parameters. Each site should evaluate these as a team in advance, and be ready to discuss not only if a review is required but WHY. I will call out a plant name at random as we review the list, and that team will respond to that particular question“.

In his book titled “Winning”, ex CEO of GE, Jack Welch wrote that one of the biggest wastes of a company’s resources was the lack of candor in meetings. He also talked about the huge benefits of having a culture where people speak up at meetings, get involved, vocally challenge ideas, and feel a passion to do so. More information can be found on this at http://www.welchway.com/Principles/Candor-(1).aspx

As someone who has been researching presentation skills for over 13 years, I am well aware of the need to engage the audience as soon as possible and get interaction building the energy and excitement in the room.

One of the key considerations when using audience interaction techniques is what will work effectively for your specific audience and for your specific subject matter. What may work for one audience may seem flippant for another. The level of entertainment versus the learning value is important. Question such as “how many of you want to be successful and get rich” provides limited value and you as a presenter will have no practical use for the response from this “no-brainer” question. Another important factor is to make sure that your instructions to the audience are crystal clear for any engagement activities.

Some techniques I use for getting an interactive audience:
1. While training people on “Attention Grabbing Presentation Skills for Technical People – Get Noticed and Promoted” I play a video of an excellent speaker doing a technical presentation which incorporates some PowerPoint slides. The video is played early on in the presentation to help the audience envision what they are aiming for. I ask the audience to form several groups and I get them to watch the 5 minute video and discuss amongst themselves the quality of the content of the video presentation, the delivery, and also ask them to imagine that they are that presenter and want them to discuss how they feel (the presenter is confident, knows his subject matter, is funny, and the audience is visibly engaged and energized). After the groups have discussed the key attributes, I ask them to assign a leader who will summarize the groups’ thoughts.
2. I usually start off my presentations with a story that relates to what I am talking about and make sure that the audience can relate to that specific story – use the technique “make a point, tell a story, relate to the audience”. Relating to the audience is one of the most powerful aspects.
3. Get the audience brainstorming on a specific point, then choose the ones you want to “drill down” further to explore them in more detail. The initial brainstorming could be conducted on a flip chart if the writing is visible to the audience. Another way would be to have a projector and assign an assistant to scribe and capture the ideas.
4. Ask the audience (or separate groups) to discuss the pros and/or cons of a specific idea.
e.g. In my keynote speech on “Making Sure Your Meetings Have a Positive Impact on the Bottom Line” I ask audiences to give me feedback on the pros and cons of brainstorming in meetings.
5. A powerful way of energizing a meeting or presentation is to include competition such as a game. Everyone from front line workers to executives has a competitive urge. The important aspect here is to know your audience to make sure the competition/game is appropriate to the attendees, the occasion, and the learning value.
6. A simple way of getting the audience members focused on best choices is to give them a choice of several specific answers and ask them to identify the least effective ones. E.g. which of the following three speech opening techniques would tend to be least effective and why:
• Story
• Joke
• Rhetorical question
• Quotation
• Shock statement
Once they have answered, I have the opportunity to support the conversation and talk about jokes being ineffective if people have heard them before. I can build on the conversation and suggest that people use quotations that are not too familiar so that they will be more impactful than one that people have heard before.
7. When I have a presentation or keynote speech that uses a handout, I may have some pages with sentences that have key words missing. The audience members fill in the words as the information is given to them. The advantages of this technique is that it provides you with a “cheat sheet” so you do not need to remember the content and order of the information and it also helps the audience retain the information (“If they ink it…they will think it”)
8. When I was at the National Speakers Association (NSA) Academy, the Dean had an audience interaction technique that worked well. At the beginning of his training he would get all 15 of us to form a wide circle in the room and he would throw a baseball size lightweight “fuzzy ball” to someone and ask them to tell one thing that they learned from the previous training session. The person would respond and then throw the ball to another person. This would continue until everyone had spoken. The value of this was to help recall information from the previous training session and help put it into our long term memories.
9. Statistics indicate that when audiences hear information, they will remember about 20% after a week, if they listen and see information they will remember about 50% and if the listen, see, and physically work out a problem, or solve a specific problem with “hands on” techniques, they are likely to remember about 75%. In my presentation skills training for technical people, I have several exercises where we take ineffective PowerPoint slides and unclutter them to turn data into uncluttered visual information that audiences will understand. I start off on easy examples and make them progressively more challenging, building on the learnings from each one.

I would appreciate any feedback or personal stories on audience interaction techniques. Please use the comments section below, or send me an e-mail at dave@davehillspeaks.com. Let’s help each other succeed.
Thanks,
Dave Hill

Dave’s Public Speaking Website (Bio, Keynotes, Workshops, etc.)
http://www.davehillspeaks.com

Copyright © 2010 Dave Hill Speaks LLC all rights reserved.

Net Meeting Presentations – What Happens When Your Cranky Baby Argues With A Top Executive On a Conference Call?

Dave Hill - Presentation Skills Article on Net-Meetings

Imagine you are on a monthly global net-meeting conference call that is being hosted by a manufacturing executive. On the phone, he is getting down to business and moving from hot-topic to hot-topic while moving through his slides. There are several hundred people listening in. As he is stressing an important point, the piercing scream of a baby wailing with gusto comes over the phone. There is silence for a few seconds, and then the executive asks, “Is that a baby? Has someone got a baby with them?”

This was a real life scenario back in 2006. I was silently chuckling at the unusual situation that was taking place, when a timid voice on the phone said, “I am phoning in from home, sir. My wife is sick, and I had to come home to look after the baby. I didn’t want to miss your call”. The executive politely asked everyone to press “star six” to mute their phones and he continued his net-meeting conference call. Is that what you would call a “career limiting moment”?

As someone who has been presenting technical information for over 19 years, I have learned from my mistakes and experiences and also from other peoples. This article is written so that you do not have to go through the same learning curve as I did. Before I get into the success strategies for net-meetings, let me share two more examples that we can learn from:

1) In 2004 during a period of cost cutting at the corporate office, alternatives were being explored to conduct technical training using a net-meeting approach. Management wanted to explore this forum as an alternative to a face-to-face training session where people would usually fly in from all over the world. The subject I was asked to present included training people on the risks relating to explosions at chemical plants, refineries, and gas plants. This was a subject that I had presented at technical conferences and I already had a one hour dynamic presentation. All I would need to do was hone the presentation to my audience’s specific needs. The most popular parts of this presentation were videos of different types of explosions. The videos depicted how different flammable gases produce different explosion characteristics. They also showed parts of test buildings getting blown apart during live testing. There were segments of videos showing doors and windows failing catastrophically with research engineers cheering loudly.

As a mechanical engineer and as someone who has seen his fair share of audio-visual and other equipment failures, I decided to test my presentation to make sure the videos would play flawlessly. It did not take me too long to find out that playing the videos in a net-meeting forum was not going to work with the online net meeting tools I had available. The bandwidth of the internet connection would not allow the videos to play effectively on a computer that was being monitored by a coworker in another city. The video segments were choking on the limited internet bandwidth, and were playing ineffectively. I had to regroup, eliminate the videos, and rely on being able to describe the effects rather than demonstrate them. Imagine an Irishman on a net meeting doing impersonations of different types of explosions.

2) This year, one of our technical people started doing monthly net-meeting conference calls where he would discuss and present on accidents, concerns, and revisit lessons we had learned from previous challenges. The presentations were on target for the audience, the slides were uncluttered, and he had great visuals to drive home the points. One of the challenges he had was that some people on the conference call had weak internet connections, and as he moved through the PowerPoint slides with photograph visuals, the slides would still be loading on some peoples screens when he was already moving on to the next slide. This was causing frustration for people who were on the conference call and trying to view the net-meeting PowerPoint presentation at the same time. The simple fix was to send people the presentation ahead of time so they could watch it directly from their computers without an internet connection. The slides were numbered to make sure that people were looking at the correct slide.

Success Strategies for Presenting Using a Net-Meeting Forum:
1. Learn the capabilities of the net-meeting software and hardware you are using.
2. Understand the limitations of computers that people may be using (old computers with limited memories, poor internet connections- such as phone service).
3. Practice your presentation online with someone in a remote location so you can find out what issues or challenges there could be.
4. Know your audience and customize your information to their knowledge level.
5. Consider including humor to keep the presentation upbeat and energized when it is appropriate for the audience and when it suits the content of your presentation. Entertainment can help keep the attendees’ attention and can also help with information retention.
6. Use a darker background with lighter lettering to keep it easy on the eyes of participants (the glare from a white background with dark letters can easily tire the eyes).
7. Have a back-up plan in case the technology fails (will you e-mail plan B instructions, etc.).
8. Understand time zones and the impact on people having to stay late or get up early (or connect from home with sub-standard computers etc.).
9. Get people to disable call waiting if they are participating by phone.
10. Provide a list of participant’s names, contact numbers, e-mail addresses, and an emergency contact number in case there are technical difficulties – have a plan.
11. Send your presentation to people ahead of time including an agenda. Number the slides.
12. Get people to test the net-meeting ahead of time so there are no disruptions or delays.
13. When people log in to your online net-meeting, decide ahead of time if you want to choose the option of “accepting” each individual attendee when they “call in”, or do you want them to be automatically “logged in”. If you have a large group of participants connecting to your net meeting or if people maybe logging in late, it can be distracting if you have to stop your presentation frequently to “accept” the attendee.
14. Determine ahead of time if you are going to let people ask questions throughout the presentation, use the online “chat function”, or just ask questions at the end. Let them know at the beginning of the presentation what the rules are.
15. Find a quiet undisturbed area to conduct your call.
16. If there are other people in the same room as you (when you are presenting) ask them to mute their cell phones and keep them away from the phone. Cell phones, Blackberries and similar devices can cause feedback noise if they are located near the desk phone.
17. Ask people at the beginning to mute their phones so there is no distracting background noise.
18. Open with an icebreaker – a story that relates to your material, a shock statement, a quotation, or a rhetorical question.
19. Get some audience interaction about every 5 minutes to keep the energy levels up and to keep it interactive. If you anticipate that questions may not be forthcoming from the attendees, you could consider setting things up ahead of time where people will ask a question you have previously provided them. You could also arrange ahead of time for someone to give a real life example that will illuminate your point.
20. Maximum time for an effective net-meeting could be in the range of 1 to 3 hours.
21. Suggestions for video conferencing – Your clothing should have pastel type colors and have no stripes. You should make no sudden movements as this will cause blurring in the video image. You should speak slowly and clearly and there should be no distractions within the video line of sight. Watch the lighting – e.g. if you are bald and there is glaring lighting in the room, it may make you look as if you have a hole in your head.
22. If your presentation content is controversial with the possibility of conflict, you should consider all other options first. There is generally no substitute for face-to-face meetings when there is the potential for disagreement. A face-to-face meeting allows you to build rapport with others, and also allows you to take into consideration body language and other non-verbal audience feedback during the presentation.

I would appreciate any feedback or personal stories on success strategies for conducting net meeting type presentations. Please use the comments section below, or send me an e-mail at dave@davehillspeaks.com. Let’s help each other succeed.
Thanks,
Dave Hill

Dave’s Public Speaking Website (Bio, Keynotes, Workshops, etc.)
http://www.davehillspeaks.com

Copyright © 2010 Dave Hill Speaks LLC all rights reserved.