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. Make it easier for your audience by following these seven guidelines: [Warning: 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

Do you ever feel like an audience member is attacking you when they ask challenging questions during your presentation? Hopefully, your audience doesn't actually try to discredit you or prove you wrong, as a client recently mentioned to me, but sometimes a particular question can provoke a feeling of anger or defensiveness. The main point I want to make here is that, just because you perceive a question to be adversarial, doesn't mean it is adversarial. You might get riled up. You might get ruffled.

My strategy for the post-lunch session was to keep the audience involved by asking questions. What I did was have a slide with a question, ask the audience, see what came up, and then reveal the answer I had in mind. There are few things “you just don’t do” as every audience is different and the rules change depending on what they’re expecting, and how good you are at using a technique.  Here’s a question from the mailbag: Last week I held a presentation to my company (around 60-70 people).

Here's a quick tip to make your audience more receptive to your presentation: use their names in your talk! His lighthearted approach also added some humor to the presentation, as his main point was that he was not going to talk about his business while, of course, talking about his business, and plugging other businesses in the process. If you think you can't incorporate your audience members because you don't know them, that's all the more reason to get to your Last week at my networking group meeting, one of the speakers managed to mention five or six people in the room as he went through his ten-minute presentation.

But what the good presentations have in common is that they were created carefully and thoughtfully with the audience in mind and were delivered with passion, clarity, brevity, and always with "the story" of it (whatever it is) in mind. Tony Robbins speaks for a living, and while I do not recommend swearing from the stage, Tony was able to engage a rather skeptical audience at TED in spite of poor visuals. TED has earned a lot of attention over the years for many reasons, including the nature and quality of its short-form conference presentations. All presenters lucky enough

And you can make it easy for your audience to retweet the main points of your presentation (make sure your tweet is easily retweetable by allowing space for “RT @yourusername” within the 140 characters). In my post 10 tools for presenting with Twitter , I lamented that there was no easy-to-use way of posting tweets from within PowerPoint. Timo Elliott of SAPWeb2.0

0160; Once you persuade the client that there really is no reason to show the audience his speaker notes, you’re off and running.  0160; Because we tend to trust people, broadly speaking, who move closer to us (excluding psychos and other scary folks), if you move toward the audience on your key points, finish the point standing near an audience member, and then move to another quadrant of the audience for your next main point, you will instantly increase your effectiveness.  Working with clients, I spend a lot of time coaching them on delivery skills as well as, of course, helping them write great speeches. 

0160; The idea is to let the audience inject the emotion precisely because you hold back.  0160; Two main techniques, the rhetorical rule of threes and (appropriate) repetition, are the most powerful ways to convey emotion through rhetoric. The political world is full of repetitive phrasing and chanting of key phrases that the speaker begins and the audience takes over, but most of them are quickly forgotten.  This is the third in a series of blogs on achieving authenticity in public communications.  0160; Authenticity is the sine qua non of our age.

The audience member has to read the words on the slide and listen to the presenter at the same time, leading to overloading of the language areas whilst leaving the visual cortex with very little to do: There are two main types: Since you can’t control the audience’s visual attention, it’s all about controlling what visual information you At last, we have some scientifically rigorous evidence to show that slides full of bullet-points don’t work. The research is the work of Chris Atherton , a cognitive psychologist.

Below I summarize some of his main points at a glance. (1) Getting Started • Choose a topic for which you have great passion. pauses are OK before the next slide if you're done with current point). • Make eye contact with audience. • I'll be presenting at Ignite Nishinomiya (Japan) on July 2 and I hope to attend the Portland Ignite (as an audience member) on July 16 in the USA, though I'll be flying into Portland Recently Felix Jung gave an interesting talk at Pecha Kucha Chicago, Volume 9. Felix told me that he became so interested in the