I hope parts one and two of this series have fired you up. It turns out that even though you’ve finished talking, you’re not done yet. There’s still work to do to make sure you get the most from the opportunity you’ve been given.

Follow up and follow through

1. Thank your gracious hosts. Be sure to personally thank the people who organized your talk. Chances are they did at least as much work arranging the venue and inviting attendees as you did preparing for it. In many cases they’re not getting paid for their efforts so the least you can do is show your appreciation. They just might invite you back again.

2. Get feedback. Strive to always gather and review feedback. There’s no way to get better if you don’t. Evaluation forms are a great way to do this. A word of warning: you’ll need to swallow your ego and be objective when reviewing the feedback – much of it will be negative. Your natural tendency will be to go overboard and hyper-focus in the things you did wrong. Don’t go down that path. If the feedback makes sense, adjust your presentation. If you feel the feedback doesn’t represent the feelings or needs of the entire audience, FIDO.

Confession: I have several friends who also deliver technical talks and when they attend my talks, I ask them directly for constructive feedback. Their critique is much more valuable than the typical attendee survey.

Double confession: To make sure attendees fill out evaluation forms, we usually raffle off books or software at the end using the forms as raffle entries. This helps us get better and also keeps the audience from leaving before the talk is over.

3. Make yourself approachable. Be sure to share your contact information on screen and pass out business cards liberally. Encourage anyone with follow up questions to contact you at any time. Believe it or not, less than 1% of the audience will ever take you up on it and if you handle it right, those that do may very well become your biggest fans and champions. Which reminds me…

4. Follow up on every inquiry. No question is too big or too small. Read and respond to every follow up email you receive from your audience, even if all you have to say is “Thank you.” This shows that you value and respect them and care about their success. Some audience members will never ask questions in a public forum for one reason or another. This is your chance to connect with them one on one and really drive your points home.

Confession: Due to the nature of my job, I get a LOT of esoteric “tech support” and “debug this for me” types of follow up questions. I respond to every one. If I know the answer of the top of my head, I provide it gladly. If I don’t, I typically offer strategies for how they might solve the problem themselves or offer links to other people or blogs who might be able to help. We work in an extremely broad field and there’s no way we can know it all. I’m not afraid to admit that.

5. Publish your content online. It should be trivial for your audience to obtain the materials you presented. Plus, with all the hard work you put into your presentation, wouldn’t you want even more people to see it? Ideally, you want the materials available right away so you might want to upload them somewhere a few hours beforehand and provide the link at the end of our talk. If attendees email you looking for the content, you can send them a quick link instead of a 4 MB email. My favorite tool for this is Slideshare.net.

Confession: My most most successful presentation to date (Organizational Politics – A Survival Guide) has only been delivered live to about 50 people. However, through online buzz it has been viewed and/or downloaded nearly 10,000 times . You gotta love it when your stuff goes viral!

6. Take your show on the road. You’ve put a lot of time and effort into your presentation. It’s a waste to only deliver it once. You owe it to yourself and your potential audiences to get out there and deliver it again. If your material was well received and feels solid to you, start applying to other venues right away.

Confession: We evangelists always try to book our speaking tours starting with the smallest city in our district and work our way up to the biggest. This lets us practice our delivery, get a handle on the commonly asked questions, and tweak our deck appropriately. By the time we deliver in the last city, the presentation is polished and the biggest audience gets the best show.

Double confession: Landing a speaking slot at a regional or national conference is a great way to get free admission. You have to commit to an hour or two to deliver your own materials, but in return you get to see all the other great sessions and rub elbows with the other speakers. You couldn’t pay for a better experience at a conference.

7. Jump at the chance to deliver on the “big screen”. There’s no more exciting experience for a speaker than delivering at a big event. These opportunities don’t come along often so be ready to take advantage of them when you can. Never turn one down. It’s a real thrill.

Confession: This is me at DevLink in Nashville in front of what I fondly dubbed the B.A.S. (BIG ASS SCREEN). It was over 50 feet wide and the auditorium had upper and lower decks. The acoustics were crazy - my own voice was bouncing back at me from the back wall of the room. It was a lot of fun and I’d do it again in a heart beat.

8. Learn from the best. Each year the best thinkers and speakers in the world are invited to the Technology, Education, and Design Expo (aka TED). There’s no better resource for watching others deliver moving, world class technical presentations. I HIGHLY encourage you set time aside to watch one or two each week for the next few months. Study them and you will get better.

Final Words

I want to close this series by mentioning a funny dream I had the week before I started writing it. It went something like this:

It was the morning of a big regional conference. I woke up, shaved, showered, put on my smurf blue Microsoft event shirt and went downstairs to eat my normal morning breakfast. After that, I got in my car and drove to the event. I felt prepared so took my time and enjoyed the drive. I was in no rush.

Once at the conference hall, I spied several of my friends and fellow speakers. After chatting with them briefly, I new the time for my presentation was getting close. I made my way towards the door to the room I would be speaking in. While waiting for the previous speaker to finish, I mingled some of the other attendees who came to see my talk.

As the last speaker was finishing up, the host of the conference walked over to me, welcomed me, handed me a thumb drive and said “Here’s your PowerPoint presentation. Good luck.”

Then I woke up.

What’s funny about this dream is that it wasn’t a nightmare. I didn’t wake up in a panic, scared out of my mind that I would have to deliver material I’d never seen before. In fact, I wasn’t the least bit phased. I suppose after three solid years of delivering presentations, my subconscious mind is telling me that it thinks I can finally do this job. It’s a good feeling. For me, I think the next big leap is to ditch PowerPoint and learn how to deliver compelling presentations without any props, crutches or safety nets.

Resources

Here’s a complete list of the resources I’ve mentioned in this series.

     Confessions of a Public Speaker by Scott Berkun

     Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds

     slide:ology by Nancy Duarte

     Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath

     Brain Rules by John Medina

     Beyond Bullet Points by Cliff Atkinson

     Voice Lessons to Go Volume 1 by Ariella Vaccarino

     Professional Presenter R800 with Green Laser Pointer by Logitech

     Audition by Michael Shurtleff

     The Power Presenter by Jerry Weissman

     Zoomit from Microsoft’s Sysinternals group

Credits: All images are licensed under Creative Commons and have been linked to their respective creators.

Hopefully you found a few new tips in the last post to help you prepare for your next presentation. At this point, your slides should be all set, your stories polished and demos practiced. You should be ready to take the floor and deliver a presentation that they will talk about for weeks.

In this post I’ll share some tips for improving your stage presence and the quality of your live delivery regardless of the audience or venue.

Deliver an alacrity

1. Find your inner calm. Do whatever it takes to get into a relaxed but alert state. This is the only way to deliver naturally and deal with distractions, glitches, and tough questions without flinching. Set up early and mingle with the crowd to get over your initial presentation jitters. Always remember that the audience is on your side. They’re rooting for you and want you to succeed in delivering a great presentation.

Confession: With enough practice, you may even find that you’re so comfortable that you can wave to friends and acquaintances as they walk into the room without breaking your stride. Congratulations. You’re in the flow and on your way to a solid presentation. It’s a great feeling.

2. Amplify! You need to speak at least twice as loudly as you think to fill the room with your voice. If a wireless microphone is available to you, always use it. Acoustics can be dramatically different from room to room and you never know when ambient noise is going to cancel out your voice. Air conditioning units are notorious for creating background hisses and hums that dampen a speaker’s volume.

3. Make yourself the center of attention. In many situations this may be easy – you’ll be in a room where all seats are pointing in your direction. But regardless of the setting, you need to step directly out in front of the audience. If you feel naked, you’re doing it right. Don’t use your screen or the lectern as a shield. Get a presenter’s remote slide clicker and use it every time. It will help you keep your hands out of your pockets and remind you to step out front.

Confession: This works even in a smaller setting. If you are in a ten seat conference room where everyone else is sitting, stand up at the end of the table nearest the projection screen. You now have the floor!

4. Open with a strong “Welcome.” Come up with a short, sincere welcome statement that you can use at the start of all your presentations. It doesn’t need to be anything fancy – a simple “Welcome. Thank you for coming today.” is sufficient. It lets the audience know you value their time and attention and sets a positive tone for the entire presentation.

5. Channel your passions. Actors have techniques to get them into the emotional state needed to perform their scenes. Find similar techniques to awaken your passion for your subject matter. Focus on the topics that you feel most strongly about and come up with emotional stories that relate to them. Get fired up when these slides appear. Michael Shurtleff’s excellent book Audition describes the essences of dramatic delivery and provides a series of twelve guideposts to help discover the emotional aspects of your material.

Confession: Avoid cursing. It seems like an easy way to convey your emotions but in reality sends a very unprofessional vibe and you run the risk of offending someone in the audience. I’ve done it several times and immediately regretted every time. There are more positive and inspiring ways to share your passions to the audience.

6. Watch the hands. Keep them out of your pockets and under no circumstances cross your arms while presenting. Improv performers will tell you that this creates a barrier between you and your audience. Your goal should be to connect with them. Use your hands to help you tell stories and convey emotions. Your audience listens with both their eyes and ears.

7. Don’t forget to smile. Deliver your talk with lively enthusiasm, even if you’re nervous or you’ve presented the material several times already. Remember, it’s a brand new audience and they want an enjoyable presentation. If you look like you’re having a miserable time, the audience will share the experience. Scott Berkun and Jerry Weissman both discuss mirror neurons and how our audiences have a natural tendency to share our emotions while we present. Don’t make them suffer. Have fun and they will too.

8. Don’t forget to breathe. Pause between slides to catch your breath and collect your thoughts. This will also give the audience time to take in the new slide before you begin speaking to it. It may feel awkward but it will help you establish a relaxed, sustainable pace. Jerry Weissman’s book The Power Presenter offers even more advice on timing your delivery for maximum effect.

9. Always credit your sources. It’s rare that you will be presenting 100% original material. Be sure to cite your sources to give credit where it’s due. There may come a day when you’d like the favor returned.

10. Favor interaction over slides. Strive to maintain the tone of a conversation instead of a lecture and engage your audience in a lively discussion. Use slides with questions on them to prompt interaction. Before switching gears in your talk, ask them what they think of the information you just presented. Is it useful and actionable? Do they agree? Don’t be afraid to receive questions and freely pass the conversational back and forth between yourself and audience members. Always repeat questions to make sure you heard them correctly and for the benefit of others in the audience.

Confession: Pause before answering a tough question. It will give you time to compose a proper response and more importantly create dramatic tension. People will lean forward in their seats to hear the answer. You’ll be surprised how often this pause will give someone else in the audience the chance to participate when they otherwise wouldn’t have. Give them the spotlight briefly, grab it back promptly, and then move on.

11. Handle dead air gracefully. There’s a good chance that at some point in your presentation, something will get stuck and you will be forced to wait it out (e.g. slow machine or virtual machine, demo delay, etc.). DO NOT PANIC or you’ll just make it worse. Don’t apologize and don’t toss the blame over to the vendor (they’re not there to defend themselves so it’s a cheap shot). It’s your demo and if you have practiced multiple times in actual presentation conditions, so you should anticipate where things might potentially go wrong. Use the delay constructively to explain your environment and configuration - what hardware and software is being used, where you obtained everything, etc. If you’re still stuck after doing that, remember the acronym FIDO - Forget It, Drive On! Don’t stop your presentation and try to fix it. You won’t be able to give it full attention and you’ll break your delivery rhythm. Instead, mention that you’ll check back in a little while and move on the next topic.

12. Zoom in for emphasis. Use the free Zoomit tool to focus in on areas of the screen that are being discussed. The mouse pointer can be hard to see and the amount of information on screen  with tools like Visual Studio can be overwhelming. Zoomit also allows you to annotate the screen while you’re zoomed in for additional emphasis.

13. Time box your presentation. If you find yourself running over, cut it off at the end of the next complete thought or slide segment. Don’t show any more slides and don’t apologize for the lack of time. Avoid saying “There’s no time to show this in more detail.” It serves no purpose. If you hadn’t mentioned it, the audience would never know there was more to be covered. Simply mention that you’d be happy to provide more detail at a later date. If you find that you’re running under, step up the conversational tone to get more audience engagement. Poll them for specific questions or discussion topics. What did they come to see or hear? What concerns do they have? You should be able to get 2-3 minutes out of each question. If you’re still running under, end the session. It’s always better to go under than over.

Confession: Speakers love audience participation. Delivering the same material multiple times gets to be a drag. Having a lively discussion is much more enjoyable that the show up and throw up presentation we get stuck doing all the time. We would gladly give up our entire slide deck in favor of a meaningful 50 minute conversation with the audience.

14. Close with a strong “Thank You.” A simple “Thank you. I hope this has been valuable to you.” reinforces the value you place on their time and also gives them their queue to applaud. Sounds simple but many speakers forget to do it and they leave an awkward gap of silence at the end of their presentations.

Coming up next: What to do after the show

Coming up in part three, I’ll discuss some of the follow up you should be doing after a presentation to ensure you have long lasting connections with your audience. Stay tuned.

Credits: All images are licensed under Creative Commons and have been linked to their respective creators.

I picked up Scott Berkun’s Confessions of a Public Speaker last week. It’s a great read with well researched findings and fun anecdotes from a seasoned pro. Scott offers poignant insight into the ins and outs of delivering presentations and some splendid advice for those of us who want to make a profession out of public speaking. It reinforced why I love my job and re-energized me with a desire to get even better.

Scott’s book also gave me pause to reflect on my experiences over the past 3 years as an evangelist for Microsoft. It’s been a heck of a ride and I’ve learned tons, mostly the hard way. Inspired by Scott’s confessions, I thought share some things that have helped improve my technical presentations. Following in Scott’s footsteps, I’ve also included some of my own confessions as well.

Preparation is half the battle

For most presenters, more time is spent preparing for presentations than actually delivering them, so I thought I’d start by offering these twelve tips for preparing your material and yourself for success right from the start:

1. Make the content your own. There’s no substitute for knowing the material inside and out. It is your single best confidence booster to help you relax, deliver smoothly, and allow your passion to shine through. It’s essential that you become comfortable with the ideas and messages on each and every slide in your presentation. This can be a challenge if you’re using a canned corporate deck or have cobbled together a Frankenstein deck from several sources. It’s natural to be afraid of modifying the information since it came from an “authoritative” source. However, you’re the one presenting so the audience needs to believe it’s your material. If you don’t feel comfortable you have two options: get more background knowledge or cut what you don’t know. Getting more background is the preferred option. While reviewing your content, flip to your browser and search the Internet or Wikipedia and read until you’re satisfied that you have a good store of background information to draw upon. Cutting is the quicker option and as long as the topic you eliminate doesn’t break the natural flow of ideas or shorten your talk too much, the audience will never know.

Confession: We evangelists prefer our own content over someone else’s if we have a choice. We always feel a little dirty delivering stuff we don’t feel strongly about or know well enough. The guilt of presenting material poorly to the audience eats at our souls so we will perform significant surgery on a slide deck to get it to a state we’re comfortable with.

2. Slides are mnemonics. Slides are a pacing device not crutches. When you flip to a new slide it should do nothing more than trigger your memories for the topic you are about to discuss. If you know the material well enough and have practiced sufficiently, you should be able to easily deliver at least 2-5 minutes for each slide. If you find yourself reading them to your audience you’re doing something wrong. Each slide should cover one and only one concept that you can confidently discuss without blinking after seeing the slide’s title appear on screen. See Garr Reynold’s Presentation Zen and Nancy Duarte’s slide:ology for the right way to design your slides.

3. Show, don’t tell. Reinforce your speaking points with demos and case studies so your audience can share an experience rather than of listen to a lecture. Through real life examples, they’ll associate your material with their own experiences and job functions and remember more of your talk. Include an emotional aspect such as a challenging difficulty level, conflict of interest, or confrontation with a coworker to arouse their feelings and they’ll be hooked. See Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath for excellent guidance on how to maximize this aspect of your presentations. John Medina’s groundbreaking research in Brain Rules recommends shifting gears every 10 minutes to keep your audience’s attention alert and actively engaged. Use demos or case studies every 3-5 slides to drive home the message you’re presenting with your slides.

4. Fit the content to the time slot. Not respecting your audience’s time is a sure sign of lack of preparation and disrespect for their busy schedules. However, there’s nothing harder than determining the number of slides to include in your presentation to fill the allotted time. Too few slides and you’ll finish way too early. Too many slides and you’ll overload your audience with information, start apologizing as you skip past things, and kill an otherwise great presentation. Practice and experience are you best friends here. Over time you’ll learn your natural pace and be able to estimate an average number of minutes per slide regardless of the actual content. Cliff Atkinson’s Beyond Bullet Points provides a great system for plotting out your content. A good rule of thumb to start with is 3 minutes per slide (with only one topic on each) and 5 minutes per live demo. Breaking down a 50 minute conference session: 20 slides for 30 minutes, 3 demos for 15 minutes, and 5 minutes left over for Q&A.

Confession: Over time I’ve learned that my natural pace is 2 minutes per slide (including the bookend slides like title and section headers). I always plan with that value now without worrying about it.

Double confession: The longer my demos take, the bigger my challenge to the demo gods and the greater likelihood of their interference. One out of three demos has a glitch in nearly every presentation.

5. Practice at least 3 times. One of my best college professors gave me this advice once: “If you do your homework once, you’ll get a C. If you do it twice, you’ll get a B. If you do it three times, you’ll get an A.” This has proven true in many situations throughout my career including preparing for a presentation. The night before a presentation you should do a full walkthrough of the entire presentation three times. If you stop and rework something (slide or demo), it doesn’t count as a full walk through. Start over at the beginning to make sure the changes still fit the natural flow of ideas. Iterate until you make it all the way through the deck three times. If you have time, go through it once again within an hour or two of your live presentation to make sure you’re warmed up and the content is top of mind.

Confession: I always use this routine the first time I deliver a new presentation. Subsequent deliveries are a lot easier so I tend to only practice once or twice as a refresher.

Double confession: Even on my best days, something ALWAYS goes wrong with my demos, even with a printed step by step demo script right beside me on the lectern. If I’m lucky, it’s a minor glitch and no one notices. If it’s something major, my whole demo is blown so I tap dance and move on as fast as possible. My success directly correlates to the number of times I’ve practiced.

6. Practice with real world conditions. It doesn’t matter how big your laptop screen is, there’s a good chance the projector you’ll be connecting to has a resolution of 1024x768. Set your laptop to this resolution when practicing your talk. Just like a bumpy airplane ride, items have a tendency to shift during transit. You’ll have better things to worry about during a demo than where the buttons have moved to. If you’re going to demo a tool like Visual Studio, set the text editor font to 14 point so the audience will be able to read it from the back of the room.

Confession: I once did a demo of Expression Blend 2 beta 1 without practicing at the projector resolution. The fly out toolbar panel I needed shrunk and while trying to resize it, it came unpinned and floated into the middle of the screen. To make matters worse, there was a bug in that particular build that caused the entire panel to show up empty when unpinned. Complete bomb.

7. Visit the Department of Redundancy Department. Always travel with a backup of every piece of hardware you will use in your presentation (laptop, mouse, remote clicker, etc.). Bring a USB thumb drive and after your practice sessions copy your latest changes to it as a third backup. Make sure your laptops can connect to an external monitor or projector before you arrive at the venue. You may need a newer video card driver to get external connections to work. If you do live coding demos, it’s a good idea to have a separate folder with the finished demo in case you get off script. You can load up the completed project and simply walk through it if your live coding goes awry.

Confession: I’ve had two laptops fail on the same day. One was a motherboard failure which rendered the entire machine useless. The other was a Windows Update that pushed a new video card driver to my backup machine and hosed the external projector connection. I had to borrow a laptop from my host and run my presentation from a thumb drive.

8. Secure your own Internet access. Don’t rely on the host and/or venue to provide you with reliable internet access if you need it for your demos. You might be sharing the same pipe with the 100 attendees in your audience if you do. Your best bet is to add a data plan to your mobile phone service and use a smart phone that has internet connection sharing. The speed is not great but is workable and you don’t have to share with anyone.

9. Don’t drink alcohol before a presentation. There’s a good chance you will be either sleepy or goofy or both and you will suck. Enough said.

10. Schedule your presentations outside of the dead zones. There are two presentation times you want to avoid if you can help it. The first is the hour immediately after lunch. One out of five people in the room will be sluggish or sleepy. Food digestion has diverted blood flow from their brains to their stomachs and they are simply not paying attention. The second time to avoid is the very last speaking slot on a multi-day conference. As a conference progresses, there is slow but steady attendance drop off as attendees leave for an early start to the weekend or to catch flights home. By the final hour of the final day, less than 40% of the attendees remain and they are overloaded with what they’ve seen. If you’re not a big name draw you’ll be presenting to only a handful of people.

Confession: I often have little control over my speaking slots so both of these issues happen to me way more than I like. Don’t let it happen to you!

11. Warm up your voice. Your voice is the primary instrument in your performance so you need to give it the attention it deserves. Pick up an introductory vocal lesson CD such as Ariella Vaccarino’s Voice Lessons to Go Volume 1 CD and practice in the car once a day for a few weeks. After that, use the CD to warm up on the way to each presentation you deliver. You’ll be amazed at the difference and have greater confidence in your volume and diction.

Confession: Early survey feedback quickly told me that I had a soft voice that lacked volume. My good friend John Alexander had experience in radio and recommended voice training to me. I keep Ariella’s CD in my car (and a backup on my MP3 player) and practice in my car every time I drive somewhere alone.

12. Charge your batteries. Eat an energy bar and drink a bottle of orange juice about one hour before your presentation. This should provide you with about 250 calories of healthy energy to draw upon. You need to be alert and energetic when you present.

Confession: Many events offer light snacks and/or full meals to their attendees. However, presenters  often get short changed because they’re too busy setting up before a presentation and don’t get a chance to get in line. There’s rarely anything left afterwards. Ask your host to grab you something while you’re speaking or plan for a beer and steak dinner afterwards to reward yourself.

Coming up next: Tips for a better delivery

I hope you’ve found something useful here that you haven’t discovered on your own. Coming up in part two, I’ll share some tips for improving live delivery. Stay tuned!

Credits: All images are licensed under Creative Commons and have been linked to their respective creators.