Ideally, you would plan for audience participation exercises to be roughly evenly spaced through the presentation. However, having genuine, as opposed to contrived, exercises is more important. Many people don’t like speaking in a group situation, so you need to make it easy for them. 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.

I got a question in my workshop yesterday from a student who has been invited to speak at two different banquets for two different groups of people, and he wondered if he could use the same material for both. We never want to give a canned speech; that is, a speech that you wrote once and continue to deliver exactly the same as it was written to every group you speak to. However, having good base content that you can tweak and customize is a great idea. Most of us who speak on a regular basis have a couple of standard topics we speak on.

Krim is a principal in the Arlington Mill Group. Krim is a principal in the Arlington Mill Group. He shared his thoughts on how branding has changed since the era of the MadMen when ad agencies and marketing departments exercised control over all branding elements. Tags: Business Communication Social Media Arlington Mill Group Krim Stephenso I met with Krim Stephenson who presented at the December lunch of the Silicon Valley Chapter of the IABC on the topic of social media - beyond the hype. Krim A former journalist with Bloomberg News and communications leader at

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. Then Nancy asks the entire group to shout out responses to several questions. Last month Nancy Duarte spoke at Web2.0 Expo and it was a huge success.

GROUP #1: The Brats. But if we’re going to do this exercise at all, we have to deal in gross stereotypes. Because GROUP TWO: The Married with Childrens . GROUP THREE: The Middle Aged. This group is between, say, 40 and 55. Here’s an interesting question: Is there an optimal age that a company should want the majority of its employees to be? In other words, do people of a certain age make better employees, in general? Here’s

This activity is even better in a group where people occasionally come together and share their scrapbook contents with others in a kind of “examples of design show and tell.” (2) Keep a digital scrapbook in the form of an online photo blog — either private or open to anyone to view — where you log all the examples of design you find of interest. Besides relieving stress and keeping you fit, exercise seems to stimulate ideas. Kaizen (??) means "improvement" — "kai" (?)

Ice  breakers; presentation of formal content; software demos (for IT training); group exercises and activities; discussion; formative and summative assessment Unless I’ve missed something important, there seem to be three distinct uses for real-time online commmunications. The following table represents a first attempt at clarifying the discriminating characteristics of these three:  

10 minutes exercise If it’s a small group this can be in the front channel i.e. out loud, but in a large group make use of backchannel technology which makes Q&A almost friction-free. Every type of presentation has its own challenges. As part of a “Public Speaking and the New Year” blog carnival organized by Angela de Finis, I’ve identified what I see as the major challenge or trend for each presentation type in 2010 and given you my best presentation tip to overcome it.

This need not be a full exercise - ad hoc questions serve nicely and save you from needing to script your entire engagement. Roger is the principal at 1080 Group, LLC, an independent training firm that helps companies learn and optimize online presentations and webinars, and his real-world expertise is backed by that of the seasoned professionals at 1080 Group - who together have worked with hundreds of clients on thousands of events involving more than a million event attendees. This is a guest post by Roger Courville. You can find out more about Roger in his bio at

Wanic assigned 45 female undergraduates to exercise next to either a fit peer, an unfit peer or no one (the control group). Women who exercised next to unfit peers exercised longer than the control group, whereas women who exercised next to someone who was more fit exercised for a shorter time and expressed greater body dissatisfaction. In a study at UC San Diego, researchers Kari A. Wasilenko, James A.