Todays “Quora Question of the day” is
🎙 WHAT ARE SOME GREAT “HACKS” FOR PUBLIC SPEAKING? 🎙
If you really looking for “hacks” you are searching for the magical pill. 🔴🔵
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Todays “Quora Question of the day” is
+++ How do you go from being a good public speaker to a great speaker? +++
If you are already a good speaker and you want to become a great speaker, then you need 2 things: Read more
Transformational life coach, public speaker and author Daniel Mangena is creator of the “Beyond Intention” paradigm and ambassador for The Mangena Foundation. Read more
Hi, I am Michael Sinnhuber! Founder of PRESENTER.WORLD, mcprezi.com, King of Presentations, Prezi Independent Expert.
I am on a mission to save this world from boring presentation by leading Presenters from Zero to Hero! Read more
8.55 a.m., the room is fully packed and the audience is waiting in anticipation. The conference is about to kick-off with the keynote speech, held by a well-known expert in his field. Many of the people in the audience have come from away and paid a high price to see him live and to be part of an inspiring day full of interesting topics. He steps on stage and starts to talk. The first sentences fill the room and all of sudden the audience seems to freeze.
What’s that? Is he really reading his words one by one from a script? No, this can’t be true. But it is!
Instead of an inspiring talk all he does is holding a lecture, and a very boring one indeed. It doesn’t take long until the first people start to fumble around on their smartphones, typing messages on their social media profiles. Just a few seconds later, these messages pop up on the large twitter wall for all (around 450) people in the room (and everybody on twitter) to see. And they state what everybody in the room is thinking.
- “This years keynote speech is a keynote read. What a start?!” #fail
- “I just thought, I heard my grandpa reading fairy tales? But I never paid him 500 Euros.” #iwantmymoneyback
- “If I want to read a book, I’ll buy a book.” #cheaper
- And so on…
Pay money to receive pain?
I must admit, that this example is a pretty extreme one, that rarely happened to me. But I have experienced a lot of similar presentations at several occasions & conferences in the last couple of years. In most cases the presenters read their slides out loud, which doesn’t make a big difference to reading from a script.
Reading slides is not presenting
And if people want to read from slides, there are cheaper ways to do so.
How do people react to that kind of “lecture”? The results are always the same. Attention drops to a minimum and the presentation mutates from gain to a real pain. But if you pay a lot of money to attend a conference, you don’t want to sit through painfully boring presentations, right? And from an event organizers point of view, I am pretty sure, the last things they want people to remember from their events are pain and boredom.
Being an expert does not make you a good presenter
So why do such things happen again and again? I guess, because event organizers only check the expertise of their speakers. But being an expert doesn’t make him/her a good speaker/presenter. So why do event organizers not check the presentation (slide design) skills of their speakers?
I have no idea!
Quality management for event organizers
Let’s face it – speakers are the main assets of any conference. Their heads are on any piece of marketing deliverable. From website to social media, from brochures to PR kits. Speakers are the lead magnet for the event. And you don’t check the quality of your main assets? Why?
If you hire a catering company, you try the food before you buy. There’s a technic check for all the technical equipment. Before you buy a new car, you take it for a test ride. Why not asking your speakers for a test ride – in public speaking and/or slide design?
Stakes are high for both. But I guess there is a lot more at stake for the event organizer. If a speaker is really bad, he won’t get a lot of future invitations to speak. Unless he’s a professional speaker, this will not harm his business. But if the feedback about the “bad quality of speeches” of an event gets viral, this could kill the credibility of the event and the organizers and lead to economic ruin – in worst case.
Reputation
Nobody wants to ruin his business with bad products, right? So I tried to find out, what event organizers think about that issue. The outcome pretty much confirmed the thoughts I had in mind.
Although all organizers focus on building a good reputation, none of them had a quality management in place, checking the quality of their main assets. Why? Because most of them said, that “the expertise of a speaker” stands for itself. “And, it is not possible to ask a well-known expert for a test-ride.”
Conclusion
I completely disagree!
As a production company you are fully responsible for the quality of your products. If you outsource production, it’s still you, who’s responsible. As an event organizer, the speakers are the main parts of your product. If you don’t check their quality upfront, you are fully responsible, if the end product is of bad quality.
Dear event organizers!
If you want to put your reputation & business at risk, go on like you did in the past. But, if you want to make your event business future-proof, you should take TED as a role model. You will never see a bad presenter stand on a TED stage. Why? Because TED really cares about the quality of their speakers. And so should you!
This article was originally written as a guest post for Presentation-Guru.com.
Image source: #101143687 | © vege – Fotolia.com
A business event – two weeks ago. Awesome location, interesting topics and… a firework of bullet points! A speaker steps on the stage and starts his personal firework. Five minutes later, 99 % of the audience members are playing around on their smartphones to escape the “death by powerpoint”. But the guy keeps on firing his bullets for another 30 minutes. Does that sound familiar to you? I am sure it does!
In the lunch break I find myself seated just next to him. After a little small talk he asks me “What do you do for a living?”. “I save the world from boring presentations”, I tell him. “Oh, that sounds like a ‘Mission Impossible’” he says with a giggle. “When I think of all the boring presentations I see every day, I could fall asleep immediately. But I know, that less is more”, he adds.
9 out of 10 times when I tell people what I am doing, I get the exact same answer. So it seems, that everybody knows the simple basic rule of a great presentation, right? But if everybody knows it, why the hell are 95 % of presentations out there are so bad?
Knowledge is nothing without execution
In my opinion the answer is quite simple. “Knowing” and “saying” are easy tasks, but “doing” is something completely different. Because it requires hard work! This is true for any topic in our life, right? I guess everybody in the so called “modern world” knows that we shouldn’t eat too much fatty food and work out on a regular basis to stay healthy. But the truth is different – we are getting fatter and fatter. Why? Because working out is hard work.
And, no matter if we are talking about health or presentations, too many people simply don’t want to put in that hard work or do not have the time to. When preparing a presentation, we think everything we have to say is important and people have to hear as many of it as possible in a given time. That’s why we copy/paste tons of text onto powerpoint slides and hope, that if we hammer out enough info, the message will find its way to the audience anyway. But – as sad as it is – it doesn’t!
And by the way, if this was the way it worked, the proverb would be “more is more”, but it says “less is more”! So why is it less and what is this “less” in your topic?
Do you remember?
Think about all the presentations, speeches and conferences you attended in last couple of months. How many great presentations come to your mind immediately? One? Two? Three? None? If you remember any of them, what exactly do you remember? Is it the presenter, the topic, a message? When you are like 90 % of the people, chances are, you don’t remember a lot.
Why am I asking these questions? To make clear that, compared to the tons of information we hear and see every day, only a tiny fraction of it makes it to our longterm memory. Less information is being remembered and it gets harder and harder for any message to survive the fight for attention.
Be memorable!
Having said that, it seems quite obvious, that if you present, your audience will also remember only a tiny fraction of what you are saying, right? Sad but true!
How can you make sure, that people remember the right part of it or anything at all? Well, YOU have to define, what people should take away from your speech! That’s why it’s often called “take away message” or core message. Think of it like a bag, you are giving away to your audience, when they leave the room. You define what’s in the bag – but it can only be ONE thing!
What’s your message?
So, if you want to be memorable, you have to define your core message first. To find it, strip your content down to the bare essentials. What is the main argument and why should your audience care? Put yourself in the shoes of your audience and answer their number one question, being “what’s in it for me”!
You find it hard to define your core message? Just think of a first aid course. A typical first aid course takes between 16 and 30 hours to complete. In all that time a lot of important information is delivered to the audience. Important information that can save lives! After finishing the course, you walk out and hope, that you will never have to use anything you’ve learned. And, a lot of it will be forgotten pretty soon. But, there’s that one core message, that you should never ever forget, no matter if it’s 2 months or 20 years after completing the course.
And that is “HELP”! Do anything! Don’t walk by an accident, help! No matter, if you call the ambulance or you administer first aid, do anything possible to help the victims! So, when defining your core message, always think of what’s the “HELP” of your topic.
Will this be easy? No! Worth it? Absolutely! Because the payoff is pretty obvious. If you don’t know your core message, how should any audience on earth get it? But if you define a great take away message, you have the chance to stay in the mind of your audience forever.
Creating a memorable presentation
Once you have found your message, build a story around it. Why a story? Stories are easier to remember than plain information chunks. I know that storytelling is one of the most misused buzzwords in todays marketing. But it works, just think of your childhood. I am sure you remember the core message of all the fairy tales. But none of them was ever presented to you in list of bullet points, right?
Telling a story is not rocket science. Just put yourself in the shoes of your clients and think of the challenges and issues they might have? How can your products or services solve those issues? Think through all the steps, use real characters and let them experience the whole situation from suffering to solving the issue. Done right, your core message will be remembered as the problem solver forever and always! Less information with more value!
Conclusion
We live in world of massive information overflow. The more information we hear and see every day, the less we can remember. If you want to stand out with your presentation and be memorable, you need to find the core message of your topic and define it as the take-away message for your audience to remember. Done right, this kind of less information with more value will lead to more success.
Giving “Less is more” a meaning!
This article was originally written as a guest post for Presentation-Guru.com.
Image source: © Rawpixel.com – fotolia.com
