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.

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.

teams of designers (from IBM, Razorfish, Sapient and U of Malmö)  competed live on stage in front of a crowd of 800 people and were scored by famous judges in real time. 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 had to end the session early. Audience teaches me a lesson in front of 400 people ( San Francisco, One of the goals of the book is to talk about things going wrong in public speaking. Few books ever mention how often things go wrong, even for experienced speakers, and

Unless he's in a Marcel Marceau retrospective, without his voice he will miss an entire dimension of communicating with the audience. So the actor protects his voice by doing exercises to strengthen it, by warming it up before using it on stage and by learning breathing techniques to maximize its projection and tone. One of the actor's most precious tools is his voice. As business presenters, we can benefit by taking a page from the actor's script.

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.

audiences.   the large audience?   are reasonably comfortable in front of smaller audiences, but there’s something intimidating intimidating about the bright lights, huge stage, and row upon row of audience members audiences as well as in front of small ones.   I often get asked about differences between large and small audiences. 0160; How do you connect with the

The idea, in theory, is that when a performance is so exceptional that clapping isn’t enough, people in the audience should stand to show an additional level of appreciation. Rock bands are notorious for milking the equivalent of standing ovations by leaving the stage without saying they’ll be back for an encore. The audience so much want to believe they’re a part of something Standing ovation at Cannes (from wikipedia) Much like clapping and applause , standing ovations are curious things. 

How do you connect strongly with an audience?  0160; As a speaker, then, you’ve got to get into the personal space of representative members of the audience in order to connect with the whole audience.  0160; Staying behind a podium – even working the stage – won’t cut it.  0160; In a way most speakers don’t think about, don’t understand, and so, not surprisingly, don’t often take advantage of:  physical closeness.  0160; We all unconsciously measure the distance between ourselves and everyone else for obvious reasons of self-protection

Steve tells us how to do this; before you step in front of an audience, take a deep breath. Audiences will always applaud skill. This is especially so when you get yourself some ‘flesh-time’ with your audiences before you begin your presentation. Due to an overwhelming response for “Take The Stage” which just Photo credits to Neville I