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Presentation Tips | 7.06.2006

I’ve been doing a lot of public speaking lately. This rings ironic to even me as I use to skip public speaking class in middle school. I’ve been doing so much speaking in fact, that I’ve been getting horse lately. I lecture 3 nights a week at Boston University where I teach a web design class. I’ve been doing a road show of a webcast called Web 2.0. with my Colleague Jeanne Friedman. I’m presenting to clients during the day at least twice a week and I give a web-marketing seminar to MGH every quarter. Even with all this speaking, I’m far from being an expert, but I thought I would share some tips and tricks I’ve come across in helping make better speakers and presenters out of us all.

My fist tip is to rehearse. I can’t say this enough. The best way to do this is to do several full dry runs through the presentation in front of a few trusted critics. I’m not talking about reading word for word out loud. I’m talking about body language; hand movements and having your “audience” interrupt and challenge you with questions and opposing views.

I typically use a pencil to jot down notes, ideas and diagrams weeks before the presentation. One of the valuable lessons I learned early in my career was to take a bunch of blank copy paper and quickly sketch out what each slide will be. This is easier than going directly into PowerPoint or Keynote as you can reorder, add and delete more quickly and efficiently. Once the paper presentation is solid, I’ll put it into Keynote, add effects and rehearse again with it projected on screen.

One mistake that many people make is literally presenting on screen, everything they want to say. While this is a natural path for beginners, it’s boring to the audience. The more comfortable you are with the presentation, the more you can adlib. These days, I’ll dedicate each slide to a particular point that I want to discuss and freely talk to the slide during the presentation.

Another exercise I do is time myself. Typically, everyone talks faster when in front of an audience. Keynote and PowerPoint both have the options for you to time yourself. Given the choice of finishing too early with not enough questions being asked or too late with not enough time for all the questions, you should choose the latter unless you’re good at hand puppet shows. You should figure that you’re going to talk 12% faster during the real presentation and you should adjust your slides accordingly.

If you have the choice of what order you’re presenting in and what time of day, you should go first and before lunch. If you go toward the end of the cue, people tend to get antsy and god help you if you’re after lunch and at the end of the cue.

Add visual interest to the slides. Even the nerds who typically produce all bullet point slides hate looking at all bullet point slides. Take people by surprise. Put in images that seem unrelated but give you a perfect segway into making your point. Check out what O’Reilly did with all their technical books…they put a different animal on the cover of each. What does a Lama have to do with learning Perl? Nothing! That’s why it’s so brilliant. It’s memorable and visually stimulating.

Once I’m done with the presentation, I rehearse more and more until I almost don’t even need the deck in front of me. I don’t keep fine tuning not matter how much extra time I have. At some point, you have to lock it down and get intimate with it. The time you spend “owning” it will show in the quality of your presentation.

When I worked at Philip Johnson years ago, Phil himself would come into a presentation meeting and tell a story about what happened to him on a flight or at the local coffee shop. It had nothing to do with the presentation at hand but it was a way to break the ice, make the meeting memorable and hopefully connect to people in the room on a more personal and emotional level. I once had an important pitch to HBO a few years back. I had the flu the night before and checked myself into a hospital in Manhattan at 2:00 AM to get some medicine. They kept me until 20 minutes before the meeting. After finally getting checked out, I hopped in a cab and went directly to the meeting. I showed up 10 minutes late but what a great story I had for an opening. “Sorry I’m late but I just got my intravenous out but I’m…” My point is that the audience might only remember a little bit about your presentation but they’ll remember a good story.

Nothing makes a speaker more nervous than an antsy audience or one that makes no sounds. Even the most experience speakers hate this. What I do is pick on members of the audience and ask them questions. This sharpens everyone up and even spooks them a bit thinking they’re going to get picked on next. It’s good to turn the table to take the pressure of yourself.

So my tips are:

1. Use iterations in developing your presentation. Start with pieces of paper with ideas on them and then distill them down to coherent ideas, bullets and pictures.
2. You can’t rehearse enough. Pick people who are going to challenge you and poke holes in your presentation. If you don’t have friends do this, strangers are going to do it for you AND it’s going to hurt more.
3. Time yourself. You don’t want to be finished too early and if you can pick the order and/or time you speak, do it!
4. Lastly, don’t be afraid to pick on people in the audience. This is a great card to have up your sleeve if you feel yourself getting nervous or if the audience is making you nervous

Below are a few links to more useful tips.

• How to get a standing ovation
• Advice for the first time speaker

posted at 7:22 PM

3 Comments:

J.E.S. at 2:34 PM:
hoverpod at 9:22 PM:
mari at 1:27 PM: