If you’ve been presenting for a while you know that Twitter has changed the audience. Presenting pre-Twitter – you saw a sea of faces looking at you Presenting during the age of Twiter – you see a sea of heads looking at laptops or smart phones It can be disconcerting if you’re not used to it. Pistachio has a great article on How to Present While People are Twittering covering topics such as Benefits of the back channel to the audience- As a presenter, the idea of presenting while people are talking about you is disconcerting. But to balance that, there are huge benefits to the individual members of the audience and to the overall output of a conference or meeting What about the speaker? Yes, presenting with the back-channel is challenging. Prepare yourself for what it will be like. We’re used to having eye contact with our audience and using that eye contact and audience reaction to measure how well we’re engaging the audience. Now when you say something brilliant, instead of nods of appreciation, there will be a flurry of tapping. Managing the back channel – We used to suffer in silence through bad presentations. Today, the audience
Posts Tagged ‘ presentation skills ’
Presentation Pressure? Too Much? Not Enough?
When someone first mentioned this post about presenting – Too Much Presentation Pressure during last weeks T is for Training, my first reaction was that writer is wrong, that there isn’t enough presentation pressure. But now I’m not so sure. On the one hand as someone who as sat through more than her fair share of flat out bad presentations – presenter reading the PowerPoint slides, which have too much information on them, to the audience, mediocre presentations, some good and very few great presentations, I would really love for presentation skills to improve over all. On the other hand, am I there to be entertained or to get information? Sure, I think it’s more likely I”ll absorb the information if I’m engaged by the presenter. But if my true aim is to access the information and knowledge of the presenter I’m doing that even in a mediocre presentation ( I can’t say bad because I’m sure there are some examples of presentations so bad you do miss the point). I’ve seen some brilliant people that I highly respect speak and not give a great presentation, it happens. So do I think there should be more pressure for good presentation
Reading
