Incorporating social media into your presentation

Social media have changed presentations in a fundamental way.  Now audience members are tweeting with each other during the presentation, as well as sending running accounts out to the twittersphere in real time.  Rather than fight this trend, presenters should use it.

Ideally, we should be incorporating the audience’s use of social media into the presentation.  For example, in the Q&A segment, the presenter can ask, “What thread/topic is attracting the most comments among you in your tweets?”  That’s the hot button. 

Also, days prior to the event, presenters can ask audience members for their Twitter handles and to tweet their questions on the speaker’s topic.  Their responses and comments from their followers can help shape the presentation content and flow. 

Similarly, a presenter can build a Facebook fan page or simply use his orher own account to accept questions/comments before the presentation. 

One of the advantages of these approaches is that a path for dialogue will have been blazed so that, post-speech, comments and ideas can continue to be exchanged among attendees and presenter.

Presenting around the conference table

While stand-up presentations in front of large audiences may cause presenters to become nervous, presentations around the conference table often are more important.  That’s where projects and budgets are discussed, finalized or rejected.  It’s also where you need your best presentation skills, because you may be ”competing” against other presenters at the table arguing for their own interests.  Here are eight techniques to employ during tabletop meetings:

1. If you are “presenting” to the group, stand up at the table and use your presentation gestures.  This position gives you more command of the conversation and allows you to meet all participants eye to eye.
2. While sitting, keep your hands above the table and, again, use natural (but smaller) gestures when engaged in discussion.  Avoid hiding your hands in your lap–this position can make you look meek. 
3. During discussions, turn toward the individual or group you are addressing and make eye contact. 
4. Lean slightly toward the speaker–or toward the person or group you are speaking to–to show personal interest and command attention.
5. Avoid interrupting others. Take reminder notes, if necessary, and state your views after the speaker has made his or her case.
6. Know the message you want to instill in the group.  Begin with it in your presentation and reinsert it during discussion. 
7. Ask for objections before others interrupt you with them.  Then empower the objector to seek a solution and report back. Transform objectors into your collaborators. 
8. Actively support the views and actions of others that you favor if you expect them to support you in the future.

How to manage Q&A after your presentation

While your presentation might be nerve-wracking, the question-and-answer period after you speak can be even more problematical.  You should never enter a Q&A session without having prepared for it.  Here are eight tips for managing these sessions so that you will come out on top instead of hitting bottom:

• Thoroughly understand the topic of your presentation, so that when you are asked questions on related topics, your expertise shows.
• Know your audience.  Are you speaking to novices or experts?  A homogeneous group or people from many walks of life?  This analysis can help you anticipate and prepare for the kinds of questions you may be asked.
• Understand your audience’s hot buttons, the issues that are most pertinent to them.  These topics will be the most likely subject matter on which you’ll receive questions, and being aware of them enables you to prepare more effectivey in advance.
• Always go into both the presentation and the Q&A with one or two key messages.  These are the themes, advice, or information that you want the audience to remember as the “take-aways” from your appearance.  If you are asked a question that you can’t or don’t want to answer, transition to your key message instead with a phrase like, “While that’s an important issue, I think it’s more important that we (insert key message here).”
• Anticipate the most likely–and most difficult–questions you can expect to receive.  Then develop responses to them–either a direct answer or a way to transition to a key message.  Provide colleagues with your presentations and get feedback form them on what hard questions they would ask if they were in the audience.
• Don’t over-talk your answer.  When you’ve responded to the question, stop talking before you dig yourself a deeper hole or reveal something you didn’t intend to discuss.
• If you are under assault from a member of the audience, regain control by asking a question of your own, such as: “Does anyone here feel differently about this issue?  Who has another opinion?”
• Assume that everything you say–in both the presentation and Q&A–is public.  Your audience will be Tweeting and blogging to the world while you speak and shortly thereafter, so never assume that your responses in a Q&A session are confidential, even to an internal audience.

Get off the stage and tweet

The new year is a fine time to resolve to advance your presentation skills.  If you’ve been presenting to groups for decades, take the time to listen to what your audiences are telling you this month and in the months ahead.  They’re not your father’s seat warmers.

Chance are that, whether you are presenting to a class of college freshmen, a conference of marketing execs, a technology trade show group or even moms-with-a-mission, many members of your audience will be tweeting and blogging as you speak.  By the time you’re done, you’re done–or, alternatively, a success. 

Therefore, as you gather contact information from those attending your presentations, ask for their Twitter handles and blog URLs, along with their e-mail addresses.  Then monitor what they have had to say about you, as soon as you’re out of the room.  It may be painful, but it’s the best critique you can get.

Also keep in mind that PowerPoint bullets may be deadly if the caliber of your presentation is not raised at least with real images (no more Mr. Bean clipart) and preferably video clips. To your audience, a screen now is a place to project motion and sound, ingenuity and pop culture.

Finally, think about getting off the freakin’ stage and down with your “peeps” so you present from your audience as an expert peer–a maven or influencer, in the current argot.  They’re not going to listen to one-way, top-down communications anymore.  The 2010s will be interactive, one-to-one and niche, rather than highly produced,  mass and generic.

Just as marketers have had to place control of their brands in the hands of consumers, thanks to social media, you need to place your presentation power in the hands of your audiences.  Join them, lead them, respond to them, enlighten them, and your brand as a presenter will be awesome.

What to ask when you’re the reporter

When you pull out your keyboard to interview someone within or outside your group, the questions you ask will determine the impact of the article you write, whether it’s for a customer magazine, an internal newsletter, an awards submission or a marketing case study. Deciding which questions to ask can make the difference between a drab column and an insightful feature.

Of course, the specific questions likely will be different for every interview, but it’s useful to have a basic framework on which to build the set of questions that will elicit the story you want to write. The following framework can serve as a starting point in developing your interview questions and can help you guide the interview subject through the crucial subject areas:

1. What were the challenges/issues that led you to take/seek action (the “pain points” or opportunities)?

2. Why did you choose this approach?

3. What were the barriers you faced?

4. Describe the process you used or developed.

5. Who influenced this the most, and how?

6. What are the most significant impacts of this action/product/service/decision on people, customers and/or the organization?

7. How will this change things?

8. What will not change?

9. What specific results do you expect to see/have you seen, and when?

10. What are your plans for the future in this arena?

11. What tips can you offer to others?

12. Who else should I interview on this?

These 12 questions may lead to a dozen more as you prepare to explore a particular topic area, but this foundation may enable you to build a logical structure for your interview to help ensure that you capture the information you need.

Stumbling into 2010

As we stumble into the last year of the century’s first decade, we’re all a bit woozy from the battering administered by the threadbare economy, snowballing public scandals and NBC’s abandonment of 10 p.m. dramas. Still, things are looking up considerably compared with last year at this time, and certainly the past year has offered no shortage of subject matter for communicators of all stripes. So we have some basis for optimism as we approach 2010.

We will (we hope) be writing about the flipside of the economy as housing, retail and 401(k) funds surge toward recovery. Enough scandals already remain in play to consume our hard drives for at least another year of writing about Tiger Woods, Mark Sanford and the everlasting Kwame Kilpatrick. TV will get better and worse, with home 3D capabilities and more HD channels but less worth watching. We will rejoice in the emergence of Glee and the humanizing of Criminal Minds, while we mourn the loss of Monk—perhaps counterbalanced by the loss of Lou Dobbs.

What should communicators expect to be writing about as the year turns? Here are a few thoughts on what will be occupying our minds and fingertips:

• Climate change will become a more urgent story following the Copenhagen conference and new push in the U.S. to limit greenhouse gases.

• Health care reform will change from a story about harsh tensions and debate to one, surprisingly, about health care, as we explore how its provisions will alter our thinking about who and how we treat for illness and prevention.

• More economic stimulus will be coming and we’ll be a bit more united in accepting it because it will be focused more on job creation and supporting the unemployed than on salvaging banks and corporations.

• Electric cars will become the rage as the Chevy Volt is introduced and automakers around the world prepare to throw the switch on their own electric fleets.

• The 2010 Senate and House election coverage will take on proportions of a Presidential year as media seek to predict if the Democrat majority will preserve its power or if President Obama will suddenly find himself confronting an opposition Congress.

• As always, scandals will erupt and dominate our TV screens and home pages. Anticipate much deeper probing by the media into the backgrounds of elected and appointed officials, as well as entertainment personalities, before they become rock stars to uncover scandal-worthy information.

• More news publications will fold and more journalists will be flipping burgers, but online cooperatives developed by serious investigative reporters will become more prominent. These groups will syndicate more of their investigative stories to online media. We are in the middle of a major transformation of media from print to digital online publication, but the journalistic spirit is as intense as ever.

• Finally, we will likely stop writing about Jon and Kate, Bret Favre, Michael Jackson and a few dozen other personalities who should just calmly fade away from the headlines.

Ten ways to use your presentation content after the presentation

Too often, presenters toss away their notes before they’ve reached their largest and best audiences.  Whenever you deliver a presentation, consider the immediate audience–the 10 or 50 or 300 people in the room with you–as only a beginning.  You can reach hundreds and thousands more if you apply public relations techniques to your speech content and roll it out beyond the meeting hall to the innumerable niches occupied by others whom you may wish to influence. 

Here are 10 ways you can extend your presentation–and your reputation–to people in other corners of your region, country and the globe:

1. Use your presentation as the basis for multiple posts on your blog.  Half a dozen good points can make half a dozen good posts.
2. Post your presentation content on your Web site as a resource.
3. Transform your notes/script into a bylined article and submit it to a trade magazine for publication.
4. Write a news release, not on the fact that you will be presenting, but rather on what you said.  Your comments and perspective may encourage a reporter to contact you for a news report.
5. Reach out to local radio and TV stations to pitch a local-news interview based on the subject matter of your presentation.
6. Use your presentation content to create a marketing brochure or newsletter that provides subject matter of interest to your mailing list.
7. Develop a short white paper incorporating your presentation content and offer it through your Web site.   Publicize it through a news release and through social media, like Facebook and Twitter.
8. Record your live presentation and post the video on YouTube.  Publicize the video by posting links to it on social media sites and your Web site.
9. Develop a podcast of your presentation that visitors to your Web site can download.
10. Submit your presentation as a topic for a session at an industry conference in which you can re-present the material in updated fashion.

Would you like green cheese with that bucket of water?

Once again, science reminds us that many of our assumptions are completely wrong, even when we think we have evidence to support us.  NASA reports that its LCROSS probe has discovered, not a little bit, but a significant amount of water on the moon.  It amounts to about 24 gallons in the 20-meter-wide crater and immediate environs that the scientists explored.

Now we’ve been to the moon–four times, and eight men have spent many hours gathering samples of rock and dust that have been analyzed for 40 years, and nothing in those samples apparently led anyone to believe that more than a few molecules of water could be buried in the moon.  But, then, aliens probing our Pacific Ocean would have no basis on which to predict Las Vegas.  Our astronauts trod a relatively narrow belt around the moon’s middle, whereas the beds of water ice are most obvious at the moon’s south pole.

The lesson from all this is that communicators really need to explore their assumptions and not reach conclusions based on hard, fast–but scope-limited–evidence.  The justice system has discovered this fact–why are so many convicted “murderers” being released on DNA evidence?  Medical researchers have discovered this fact–why are so many opinions about so many diseases changing as the scope of medical research widens?  We communicators need to realize it too.  So good advise would be to:

• Always obtain–and question–multiple sources for claims by businesses, government officials, scientists or others.
• Report the scope of evidence on which a conclusion is based (was it tested with 25 males over the age of 80, or 5,000 women aged 22 to 63?)
• Identify “who says so.”  My old newsroom boss used to toss copy back to me, declaring, “I’m not going to say that.”  He wanted me to attribute the information to its source.
• Always try to gather opinions and/or quotes from those on the other side of an issue.  Don’t be hasty in considering those with seemingly outlandish opinions as nut cases.  They may be lunar rocket scientists.

How do you, yaknow, eliminate the yaknows, yaknow?

Nothing is more disappointing than hearing your baseball hero or off-screen movie star stumble through an interview peppered with more “yaknows,” “ums,” and “ahs,” than an eight-year-old caught preparing to drop a lizard on his unsuspecting classmate’s head.  More often than not, presenters who are responding to questions or speaking off the cuff  don’t even realize they are filling “thinking time” with such vocalizations.

One technique for eventually removing the yaknows from your presentation style is to first hear yourself on audio or video tape.  You may be amazed at how often you revert to vocalizations while speaking to an audience but are as oblivious to it as you are to snoring while you’re sleeping.  However, your audience–like your bed partner–is likely to be greatly distracted.

Once you recognize the vocalizations your are spewing into your speaking patterns, you will be more likely to recognize that you are about to use them.  Then, try inserting a pause  in place of the vocalization.  For this to sound natural, you should be speaking at about 150 words per minute.  If you’re talking too fast, a pause will sound like a stumble; too slow, listeners may start checking your pulse.

The pause can be a very effective speaking tool, gaining the audience’s attention just before a major revelation or signaling a transition point. With the right pacing, it can also serve as a tool to get you past the yaknows and into what the audience actually should know.

Relying on Dad at 93

My dad turns 93 tomorrow and, while we’re 600 miles apart, we still rely on each other.  In our phone conversations, though often strained because of his hearing loss, Dad draws renewed confirmation that we remain a family, and I am able to renew a sense of family heritage in a way that talking with my three scattered brothers (scattered geographically, that is) cannot.  My brothers and I are of a generation; Dad is of the generation that reared us and gave us our values.

Those kinds of feelings and reminders are difficult to communicate in words.  They grow from the still strong sound of Dad’s voice, from mental images of holidays and relatives and friends, from evaluations of our mutual health that assure us we’re not doing that bad after all.

My brothers–two of whom already are enjoying retirement–and I are unreasonably fortunate to be able to continue to communicate with and visit Dad, who remains as mentally sharp as a 40-year-old.  Mom was our communications confidante until a couple years ago when, at 89, she reminded us all of her independence by passing on at the stroke of 12 a.m. on July 4.

As much as I depend on wordsmithing to earn my keep, I long ago learned that communication is more than words.  It’s sharing.  Sharing a common history, new stages of life and a future that I hope will propel Dad into the Guiness library of centenarian feats.

Happy birthday, Dad.  What do you have to say for yourself?