How To Be an Engaging Presenter

I’ve been priv­i­leged to co-present with good friend, Allison Carter of Roundpeg, several times this year. If you don’t know Allison, you should; she’s a talented and pas­sion­ate person. One of the best things about our pre­sen­ta­tions is what I learned.

Last year, we discussed co-presenting about taking net­work­ing from on-line to off-line, from the per­spec­tive of a young introvert and an old-ER extrovert. We talked about it, outlined the pre­sen­ta­tion, and role-played. Then we role-played some more. We put enough thought and effort into the pre­sen­ta­tion to make it look effortless.

What’s the Key to Presenting?

One of the keys to our pre­sen­ta­tion was engaging the audience in net­work­ing. Near the end of the pre­sen­ta­tion, we had people change seats, introduce them­selves, and gave them a couple questions to ask each other. At our Richmond Social Media Breakfast, ECI Social Media Group, Cancer Services of Northeast Indiana, and my TEDx Fort Wayne pre­sen­ta­tions, we had similar results with this technique — we were forced to interrupt their con­ver­sa­tions to continue our pre­sen­ta­tion. As well, people would stay after our pre­sen­ta­tion to continue their chats.

Sharing the Credit

I’ve mentored and trained pre­sen­ters who conduct meetings to not just stand in front and lecture, but one of the best engaging pre­sen­ta­tions I’ve seen was Vince Robisch, last year, at Blog Indiana 2011. His pre­sen­ta­tion about blog titles, “This Session Speaker Smells Fantastic” rocked. He had an entire room engaged in writing and sharing suggested blog topic titles. We attempted to apply what we learned from Vince to our presentations.

The Master Plan

We arrived early and networked with attendees as they arrived. We asked what expec­ta­tions they had. What would help them? How do they use social networks? What net­work­ing chal­lenges did they face, and what successes might they share?

We cus­tomized our pre­sen­ta­tion for the audience from what we learned prior, and through pre-qualifying attendees early in the presentation.

We asked open-ended questions — who, what, when, where, why, and how through­out the pre­sen­ta­tion. Sometimes, simply changing a question from, “Are there any questions?” to “What questions do you have?” made a dif­fer­ence.

We called on par­tic­i­pants who had shared with us.

We shook things up by dis­trib­ut­ing numbered action sheets, then asking attendees with odd numbers to switch seats (group engagement).

We gave assign­ments. Ours was simply having the par­tic­i­pants ask each other, “How can I help you?”

After giving the assign­ments, Allison and I stood at the front of the group, smiling at the engage­ment we observed. Even­tu­ally, we learned to set time limits, or we’d run out of time. So, what did we learn about pre­sent­ing? If you want to be an engaging presenter, engage your audience. Don’t talk AT them – talk WITH them. Now go have fun.