Some of us who are 45+ are finding that younger people text and use computers during presentations to the point of rudeness. Your audience are adults. If their behavior is not distracting or annoying other people in the audience it’s up to them whether they pay attention or not, and how they pay attention. A reader asked me this question: This happens even when others in the presentation give great evaluations. 

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.

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 Many of us are frightened of challenging people out loud, and I think holding people to the standard of only tweeting what you would be prepared to say face-to-face would stifle valuable debate. 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

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

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, 2007, @Etech ). spoke with a 2 second echo delay in my headset (required so 5 people could listen in remotely) the entire time, to an audience of maybe 15 people 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 I

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.

speaking:   the audience is on your side. 0160; The audience wants you to succeed. 0160; To begin with, an audience is yours to please.   But what about those rare audiences that really do want you to 0160; How do you survive Many speakers understand one of the great truths of public speaking: side.  

Here's what I came up with (and it worked really well):          Don't bore your audience.         Don't drone on or read all your bullets — in fact, you don't have to have bullets at all! That was startling to a lot of them, even after I'd shown them the Notes pane in PowerPoint and the Presenter view (where they could see their notes, but the audience would see only the image on the slide).          To help them understand the possibilities, I showed them four versions of the same presentation, based on one my older son had done for this same teacher two years ago. TALK ABOUT A TOUGH CROWD!

First of 3 blogs on connecting with your audience.   All speakers speakers wish to connect with their audiences.   how do you connect with an audience through body language?   get interesting for us. 0160; What is the most powerful way to do that?   0160; Every communication is two conversations

0160; The classic way, first noted by the ancient Greeks, is to begin with a problem the audience has, and then put forward a solution.  0160; That’s particularly suited to the presentation format, because it makes sense to us; it’s easily graspable in a speech.  If the problem is well understood by the audience, but the way forward is unclear, try the statement of reasons .   How do you put together a persuasive speech?  0160; We get the problem, we naturally turn to thinking, ‘OK, how can we solve it’.