20 tips for better conference speaking ~ 16 February 2009 ~ View from on stage as I’m preparing to speak at An Event Apart New Orleans 2008. But if anything, I’ve done quite a bit of speaking over the past four years (see the summary on my LinkedIn public profile ), and therefore I’ve learned a few things about speaking along the way. The art of speaking I’ll be straight up with you: I don’t profess to be an expert speaker. I’ve had my share of presentations that have been total flops, along with some very successful

Olivia Today, I presented a session remotely at the Presentation Camp at Stanford University, California. don’t know whether this would be such an issue in a standard conference presentation (the fact that I was a remote presenter and that the presentation was about using twitter in a presentation - made it very tweet-focused). There were only eight people in the room tweeting (some also tweeting remotely) but they managed to generate over 80 tweets in 40 minutes! Home Presentation eBook Blog About Best Posts Content PowerPoint Nervousness Delivery Audience Contact Browse > Home / Audience / 8 things I learnt about using twitter as a participation tool 8 things I learnt about using twitter as a participation tool March 1, 2009 by Olivia Mitchell Welcome to this blog - my aim is to make a difference to the success of your presentations.

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Boing Boing Home Gadgets TV Boing Boing Offworld Suggest a Link Archives Subscribe Mark Cory David Xeni John Moderation Policy Excellent public speaking advice Posted by Cory Doctorow , March 8, 2009 4:01 AM | permalink The inestimable Duncan Davidson, photographer laureate of the OReilly tech conferences, has distilled his experiences watching thousands of speakers on thousands of stages into a pithy, useful article about how to be a better

One of the goals of the book is to talk about things going wrong in public speaking. Leave your story of a public speaking disaster! To help get things started, here’s some of my own public speaking disasters: 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 Few books ever mention how often things go wrong, even for experienced speakers, and I want to make sure these stories get told. It can be something that happened to you or something you saw or heard happen to

You know where you will deliver it, how many people will be there, and how long you have to speak. And, of course you have a backup copy with you, just in case. I’ve run into two situations lately that slipped right by my preparation process---I didn’t have a remote control, and both times, I had to make do with a less than ideal situation, and frankly, a little embarrassment. A brand new client was coming to my office for a presentations coaching session. He assumed by Dana Bristol-Smith Be prepared. That’s the Boy Scout motto and it’s really good advice when it comes to giving presentations.

Web seminars (AKA “webinars” or “webcasts”) are online seminars or presentations used to synchronously engage remote audiences with any content that can be presented from a computer desktop. Besides reducing travel, webinars deliver many potential benefits such as reaching audience members who may not otherwise been able to attend your presentation or including additional presenters who are also remote. This is a guest post by Roger Courville. You can find out more about Roger in his bio at the end of this post.

Here are just a few examples of what they've done: Raced full-size cars using remote controls Raced three cars as far as they would go on one tank of gas Raced a car to the top of a mountain against a rock climber climbing the cliff face Raced a car to the airport against a boat and a bike And one of my favorites: Placed one car on top of the other, with the steering wheel in one car and the brakes in the other. Tags: Engaging the Audience Public Speaking Techniques and Strategies Top Gear Entertainer If you want your presentation to be informative and fun and memorable, take a lesson from the hosts of Top Gear.

Most presenters click on the next slide, and then speak about what’s on the slide. Let the slide speak Let the slide speak for itself. “Here’s the main thing I want you to get:” [click - silence] You don’t need one - it’s easy to replicate if you know your slide well and have a remote. There’s a revolution in the design of PowerPoint slides, but not the delivery. Most speakers still rely on their slides to cue them.

It is a great way to both practise your impromptu speaking skills, and to have some practise with PowerPoint. Draw for random speaking order also gave them 3 minutes to prepare – basically while the previous speaker was speaking. If you are feeling nasty, give them a topic just before they speak, On Monday evening, I ran a PowerPoint Karaoke contest at the Cape Communicators Toastmaster Club. This is the first one that I have ran, and it was a fantastic evening!