Keeping audience attention is more important and more difficult than grabbing audience attention . What can I do to keep the audience’s attention through the whole of my presentation. It requires discipline and effort to simply sit and listen passively to someone speak for any length of time.  Reference: Hartley J and Davies I “Note taking: A critical review” Programmed Learning and Educational technology, 1978,15, 207-224 cited by John Medina in Brain Rules A

Now the question is: should you display a live twitter stream on a large screen so that everyone (not just the tweeters) in the audience can see it? Sir Ken Robinson speaking at "Hacking Education" organised by Union Square Ventures. At the Travolution Summit 2009 , 200 of the 1,150 tweets using the #travsummit hashtag were after the event. Twitter is now a reality at many conferences. Photo used with permission from Fred Wilson

Tony McNeil reports on a survey of 103 people from a conference on learning technology in April 2009: More than just passing notes in class? Twittering snide, insulting remarks about your fellow committee members while they speak and marking it with #ala09 hash tag to ensure that the widest possible audience sees your comment: REALLY VERY NOT GOOD Tags: Presenting with Twitter Audience presentation twee The latest academic research on Twitter and conferences addresses the issue of “snarky tweets” during presentations. What should be the guidelines of

0160; Lose the Power Point – when you put up Power Point slides you ask the audience to look at 2 – or 3 – things at once: you, your slides, perhaps a printout of your slides. 0160;  Talk from the audience’s point of view – a common mistake presenters make is to explain an idea the way they learned it.  0160; But your history is not inherently interesting to an audience.  1.  That’s distracting.

One of the goals of the book is to talk about things going wrong in public speaking. Leave your story of a public speaking disaster! To help get things started, here’s some of my own public speaking disasters: Someone yelled out that our scores were wrong, which prompted the audience to start yelling and booing us - things got out of control and I Few books ever mention how often things go wrong, even for experienced speakers, and I want to make sure these stories get told. It can be something that happened to you or something you saw or heard happen to someone

Yesterday I had a skype conversation with Twitter follower Todd (@TJList) on how to include audience participation in a presentation. He’s presenting on getting through the economic downturn to an audience of small business owners. How can I involve my audience in the presentation? Here was his question: I

Speaking, and it’s time to update it.   shall know that a speech is for the audience, not the speaker.   shall not dump information on the audience; thou shall rather seek to persuade.   attention span of the audience and keep it holy.   I did an article years ago on the Ten Commandments of Public Speaking, 0160;

As a presenter, I feed off the energy of the audience. used to think that the audience determined the energy in the room, but after applying some of Jerry Weissman’s principles, I learned the presenter has more control over the room than I previously thought. At first, I thought it was just a “cooler” audience than usual (which it was) but I could tell that the way I was presenting was having an effect on their energy level as well. I There was good energy at my Web2.0Expo presentation.

Audiences today expect to have a conversation with speakers, and they crave real connection with successful speakers.  0160; The best way to ensure that these good things happen during your presentations is to involve your audiences throughout.  0160; As the audience shakes itself awake, and starts wondering if it does in fact have any questions, the speaker stands there for what seems like an eternity, then gives up and concludes that no 0160; But that takes some art.  0160; How do you think about it? 

Your audience is there for what you are going to say. That’s because though you may not be comfortable in front of an audience, you can prepare good content. Its an awful feeling to be standing in front of an audience with a little voice in your head going “I’m waffling. It’s normal to feel nervous about presenting Giving your first presentation or speech is daunting.  I’ve worked with many new presenters and here’s the advice that has made the most difference to them.