For my keynote at TechKnowledge, I did something a little different to plan out my presentation - and provide value to the audience (or at least part of the audience). Twitter has become a pretty great tool to help with socializing at conferences. Here are a few of the things we've been doing Twitter as Social Chat At both DevLearn and TechKnowledge , we created a hashtag and created a specific Twitter account that was the hub.

Your audience has the technology. Here are two tech-driven ways to let your audience co-create presentation content. Audience interactivity is a big part of the draw of PollEverywhere . You ask your audience a question; they can answer using Twitter, text messages, or the web. They're carrying smart phones. They have net books or note books.

In preparation for her talk she asked me if there would be a way to reproduce an exercise called “Speaker & Audience Mapping” that she usually leads in the slideology workshops . The exercise goes like this: the audience picks one of a dozen different audience types (eg. Now, we expected a large crowd (we had over 200 attend this workshop) and we knew that Last month Nancy Duarte spoke at Web2.0 Expo and it was a huge success.

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? With an actively tweeting audience, a twitter stream can move extremely fast. It will be very hard for the audience not to pay attention to the constantly moving screen - so it’s likely to be distracting. Twitter is now a reality at many conferences. Sir Ken Robinson speaking at "Hacking Education" organised by Union Square Ventures.

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 like the idea of the principle that you should only tweet what you would be prepared to say face to face. Tags: Presenting with Twitter Audience presentation The latest academic research on Twitter and conferences addresses the issue of “snarky tweets” during presentations. What should be the guidelines of what is acceptable and what is not?

Clear transitions help the audience stay focused (and awake) and process your material. Here are ten ways to transition from one idea to the next. Show a slide or give a handout that gets the audience thinking about your next segment. Ask a question that gets the audience to respond to or summarize their learning from We talk a lot about organizing our content, main points, opening and closing, but we rarely talk about how to get from one segment to the next. How do you handle the spaces in between your points, stories, examples, and exercises?

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

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? 

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.

What should you know about your audience? think speakers have five opportunities, at minimum, to find out what they need to know about an audience . I always take the time to ask the organizers of any conference, session or meeting at which I'm speaking what I should know about the audience, especially in reference to my topic. If it is relevant to your topic, That sea of faces, those nudging/BlackBerry-ing/distracted people, the eager fans, the strangers, your office colleagues. Who are they?