Get Your Audience More Involved In Your Presentation
By Patricia Sotolongo, Director of Creative Services, BarPoint.com
and Donald Baldwin, Brand Manager, Synergy Solutions
These days it takes more than just a slick presentation to seal the deal. It also takes a polished delivery and, most importantly, interaction with your audience to make an impression.
Handheld computers can now give presenters more freedom and flexibility to interact with their audiences. New software such as Slide Show CommanderT by Synergy Solutions can enable presenters to control Microsoft PowerPointT presentations from Palm and other handheld computers to provide new levels of flexibility and information.
Eye Contact and Body Movement
Before listeners can participate in your presentation, they have to know that you're talking to them. Making eye contact with your audience is crucial in order to establish a dialogue. Many presenters lose eye contact by repeatedly looking up at the presentation screen to keep their place in a presentation. Using a handheld computer to display screen snapshots, text and even your speaker's notes frees the presenter from having to break eye contact with the audience. Keep your eye contact on one person for each idea you are addressing, so as not to lose your place or your train of thought. As you continue on your presentation, move about the room, addressing each member of your audience directly for a period of time.
Do Your Homework
People love it when we talk about them. When addressing your audience, it is a good interactive strategy to ask them questions specific to their particular situation. You can include additional personalized information in your speaker's notes, which can now be available when using handheld computers and Slide Show Commander. Finally, presenters can see their speaker's notes without having to print them before hand. This enables the presentation to be customized with audience specific information that is not displayed on the screen. Audience's stay more focused when you are supplying information spontaneously, rather than just being a talking head reading the presentation to them. By personalizing your presentation the audience perceives you as talking about them rather than to them.
Questions...
An excellent way to accent your key message is to set members of your audience up with questions requiring some thought or speculation.
While sitting through a sales presentation for a company which aggregated and re-sold banner impressions, a presenter was showing us a chart of traffic figures taken over a range of several years. His key message in this presentation was to show his company's superiority. To drive this home, he asked us, given the business strategies he had outlined earlier, to speculate what factors may have contributed to the incremental growth in traffic. Not only did we begin actively participating, it also enabled us to reach our own positive, solid conclusions. something not as easily accomplished if your audience has slipped into a passive listening mode.
... and Answers
Finally, always allow time for Q & A. Slide Show Commander enables you to skip a few or a lot of slides or reorder your presentation on the fly. Your audience sees the normal slide transition but you've just cut out the time your needed to stay on time. To make certain that you don't run out of time, Slide Show Commander always displays a countdown or elapsed time timer to keep you on your pace. Are the questions you are receiving covered clearly on a particular slide? Use Slide Show Commander to jump back directly to any slide in your presentation. Always remember to control the flow of the Q & A session to avoid spiraling off the topic and keep your own answers concise, confirm rather than expand your previous remarks.
Finally, bribery
I recently attended a weeklong conference and, by the end of it, had had my fill of seminars. One of the last presentations of the week used good old-fashioned bribery to get us to listen... and it worked. At the beginning, the presenter announced that he would be rewarding people throughout the presentation for answering his pop quizzes correctly. On every fifth slide or so there was a question about the presentation, which an audience member promptly answered and for which he or she received a t-shirt or other promotional item. By "forcing" the audience to listen, the presenter drew them in and then was able to ask them questions directly and maintain a constant dialogue between himself and the audience.
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