Tonight marks the start of the Toastmasters International Speech Competition, and I’ll be one of the contestants at my local club (Manassas Community Toastmasters.) This contest starts at the club level, working its way up through the area, district, and regional levels.  Then, finally going international – with one person being crowned the best speaker in the world.

Given this, and the fact that I received some very favorable grades yesterday for my presentation at SES London, I thought I’d go a little off topic today and give some tips on public speaking. Of course, it’s not really that off topic, as even though we deal with all manner of online marketing for our clients, we constantly have to make presentations to and for those clients. Maybe you’ll find some tips here that can help you the next time that you have to make a presenation.

1. Know your audience – What level of detail are they looking for? How granular should your presentation be? A presentation to your board may require the ubiquitous ‘view from 50,000 feet,’ while a presentation to the technical team may go down to the level of function calls and database field names.
2. Time it – You’re going to have a specified amount of time available for your presentation. Think about how much of that you want to allocate to Q&A, this can vary based on your audience and their familiarity with the material.
3. Set expectations up front – Do you want to be interrupted by questions during the presentation, or have them all gathered together at the end? The former can keep all questions in context, while the latter allows you to establish and control the flow of the presentation.
4. Engage your audience – Make them feel a part of the presentation. Use humor, ask questions, vary the tone of your voice, make prolonged eye contact.  Don’t just scan the crowd, connect with various people with your eyes over the course of the presentation.
5. Start and end strong – Your audience needs to be told up front why they should pay attention to you, and not to their blackberry or laptop. The end of the presentation should back up your points, and provide some form of call to action. Remember that the end of the presentation may be all that an audience with attention issues remembers, so make it worth remembering.
6. Prepare and practice – An audience can tell when someone isn’t familiar with the material, and if the presenter is not, why should they bother to listen? Walk through your presentation multiple times, try to see what’s working and what isn’t. If something doesn’t feel right, change the presentation until it does – reorder slides / key points, add data to back up a position, etc. Try not to read your presentation (either from notes or from your memory), know your key points, and let the rest flow.
7. Anticipate – Try to imagine what kind of questions the audience will and may ask, and have answers ready for them. If you don’t know the answer, don’t bluff, as if you get called out, that’s what people will remember.
8. Have fun – If you’re having fun with your presentation, then the audience can sense that and pick up on it.
9. Feedback - Get feedback from people in the meeting, find out what they think you did right, and what didn’t go down so well. Use that information to improve your next presentation.
10. Don’t panic – Even if the presentation goes badly, just remember that it can happen. Not every presentation is going to work how you think it will. If you stumble or mis-speak during your presentation, get up, dust yourself off, make a joke out of it, and continue.

I know that to some people, it’s hard to even imagine walking up on stage in front of 10 people, let alone 500, but with practice it becomes much easier. One way to get that practice is to actually do it. Toastmasters offers the opportunity for you to improve your speaking skills by presenting on whatever topic you want in front of a group of people who are there to help each other improve.

You can find a local Toastmasters club and attend a meeting or 2 for free to see if it looks like the right place for you.

Filed under: Education and Training, Off Topic on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 by Simon Heseltine | 3 Comments
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