tellingpeople

I’ve spent some time, recently, listening to a speaker who’d been described to me as “brilliant” and “inspirational”. I went, therefore, with a certain expectation and got exactly what I expected. J John’s certainly charismatic and entertaining… but I nearly didn’t go because of the video material he had on his website.

Watching the videos, obviously intended to show me how good the speaker was, my hackles were raised (so to speak), by his ‘personal’ stories. The problem was that they weren’t. Personal that is, not that they weren’t stories. Anything that starts “A couple of months ago, I ….” should be about something that happened a couple of months ago to the speaker – not a re-telling of material the comedian Dave Allen was using on the BBC over a decade ago! It’s a shame, because the idea was good and the story was certainly relevant but it jarred on me…

Even on the night, there were a dozen times when it was possible to tell the story a few seconds ahead of the speaker, because we’d heard it before somewhere else.

Now I freely admit that I’m over-critical in terms of things like that so it may be that I was the only person in the audience of a couple of thousand who was actually bugged by this pretense, (though I wasn’t the only person who noticed it) but why, for the sake of a simple gag, pretend? It may have felt like a little white lie from the speaker’s point of view but who cares about the speaker’s point of view – it’s all about the audience’s perspective.

Given that the speaker was a Christian evangelist, and presumably he was keen on getting me along, it seems a silly mistake to make. If it’s yours, use it – if it’s someone else’s, accredit it!

I’m doing five hours of lectures today. That’s a long, long bash in one day and I’m anxious about the three hours in the afternoon, particularly, because the room is stepped (very steeply indeed, if my memory of it is accurate). That means that (if I’m not careful about my posture) to look people in the eyes I have to tip my head back for those who decide to sit at the back of the room….

…and sit at the back they will, Murphy’s Law being what it is.

Tipping your head back like that, of course, stretches your neck and tightens muscles around your vocal folds unless you’re very careful. That, in turn, will make your voice somewhat more harsh – you’ll sound more aggressive and your voice will tire (even possibly damage over a three hour session) much more quickly.

So, given that presentation skills trainers like me are always telling everyone to keep face-to-face contact how do you square the circle? Essentially there are three approaches you can take

use your back: literally bend over backwards for your audience to protect the position of your neck – but that brings with it its own problems and so isn’t a good idea;
raise your eyes: keep your head and neck as they should be and make a point of lifting your eyes – it works but you’ve got to have a degree of faith to pull it off;
ask your audience to move: typically, if your audience in large auditoria are like mine, they will tend to fill in from the middle to the back, leaving the front few rows completely empty – plenty of room to bring ‘em forwards.

There is, of course, an added extra advantage to bringing your audience to you and it’s all to do with something called “proxemics”. Scientists have identified a range of distances that people can be apart with such names as “Intimate Distance”, “Social Distance” and “Formal Public Distance” which tells you pretty much the whole of what you need to know. Crudely speaking (all other things being equal, of course) the closer people are to you, the less formal they’ll be and the less formal they’ll expect you to be.

Of course, if you enjoy working really hard to deliver formal lectures and presentations, then your audience can be as far away as you like but if you’ve prepared an informal, intimate presentation then you need to get your audience to sit the appropriate distance away. If they sit to far off, they’ll subconsciously expect you to be formal and will be un-impressed at you when you’re not…

…even if you weren’t ever supposed to be formal in the first place!

You probably won’t have noticed, but there’s been a big change in the back-office workings of this blog.

Up until now, we’ve accepted the NOFOLLOW default of our software (Wordpress): however, to be fair to people who take the time not just to read the posts (quite a lot of you) but to comment on them (not many of you) we’ve changed that.  As of now, posts will follow links included in them, so if you make a comment on one of the posts here, you’ll get a link back to your website – something Google likes to see.

The downside is, of course, that in order to deal with the inevitable moronic spammers we’ll have to be hot on the moderation – so links won’t have the NOFOLLOW tag removed for a week after posting, to give us time to make sure nothing gets link-love that shouldn’t!

I was asked recently how I did this.  I didn’t have a ready answer – because I wasn’t doing so.

Firstly, this was because it was a freebie presentation I was doing for fun so I’d not made any attempt to measure things and secondly because I won’t know if people have taken my ideas on board until I see presentations from them subsequently – which I won’t for that group, because of the freebie, taster-session, fun type of event it was.

It did bring to mind, however, a conversation I had with someone on another forum (which I can’t find at the moment) where they suggested that the volume and length of your applause told you how successful the presentation had been. I disagreed.

Firstly, I feel that at best all this will do is give you a measure of how well received your presentation has been at the time, not how effective it’s been in the longer term. I can leave audiences raving and wanting more if I decide to (and get lucky! ) but that’s not always appropriate. What’s more important to me is that the message gets taken in – and if that means finishing on a quiet note with no applause at all, then so be it!

Secondly, with my theatre-background-head speaking, I’d argue that all the applause can measure is how well well you did what you did. The volume of the silence before it tells you more about the quality of what you tried to do in your presentation….. if you see what I mean.

So where does that leave me? Well pretty much unable to measure the effectiveness of presentations, unfortunately, unless I get feedback from clients later on (which fortunately we do, obviously). That’s a hit-and-miss affair, of course, so if any one out there’s got good metrics for measuring ’success’ I’d love to hear them. Come to that, I’d even be interested in how one defines success in a presentation, much less measures it!

but despite that it’s still worth a few minutes of your time, I’d say.

It’s a brief look at one of Steve Job’s presentations, talking through why it is that his presentations are just so damned cool. Of course, there’s more to it than this, but it’s a nice starting point.

Recently, I attended a seminar given by a ’sales guru’. Great, I thought, as I went in – this will be exactly what I need. Well, sort of!The guru’s presentation style was engaging and the audience was invited (even encouraged!) to get involved: what’s more, there was applause at the end and the audience went away happy. But those I spoke to afterwards all mentioned that the presentation wasn’t relevant to them personally- though they were sure other people found it useful…

I was not satisfied at all. Why not?

Well, because the presentation started with 20 minutes when we in the audience were asked as share our specific issues. So far so good – but the presenter’s response was simply to throw that page of the flipchart away and make his prepared presentation in any case. So what was the point of the interaction? I don’t know – particularly not as the presenter ran out of time at the end of his session and didn’t quite have time to give us the free, high-value stuff he’d been promising…

…maybe I’m just unduly cynical though!

In old-fashioned management speak, presentations can…

• tell
• ask
• sell

…or sometimes a combination of these. However, ask-&-tell is rarely a good idea. Why? Because it’s a betrayal: it sets your audience up for one thing and gives them another, risking leaving a sour taste in their mouths. If your purpose is simply to tell or sell, then have the courage to do exactly that!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with any of these approaches, so long as you use the appropriate one for the occasion. Like most things in designing presentations it’s not rocket-science, just common sense: the hard part lies not in knowing which style your presentation is but in remembering to ask yourself first.

And if you don’t ask yourself the question, you don’t know. And if you don’t know, you might have the wrong one!