Imagine Your Reality

In a recent post, Jeremiah Owyang discussed the necessity of integrating social media into Professional speaking, citing that monitoring the social media streams of information was as important as focusing on the in-person audience. He even suggested that professional speaker should expect to have a clicker in the one hand (to advance slides) and a cell-phone in the other to monitor the social media. I’m going to be devil’s advocate and disagree with him somewhat.

I don’t think monitoring social media whilst doing a speech is as important as focusing on the real-time audience. I think it can be a component of monitoring audience reactions, but even in those cases, it should just be a complement to what the person is already doing in terms of monitoring and responding to audience reaction. In fact, what we need to remember, in this particular case, is that social media is a tool, used to monitor conversation. However it should not become such a focus that the presenter is spending more time on it and less time on presenting a good speech.

Here’s another point to remember. No amount of monitoring the conversation will decrease the reality of a bad or unprepared speech or presentation. And if that’s what you’ve delivered, trying to respond to all the tweets will take up too much time. A better avenue would simply be to do your best to prepare a good and relevant presentation, which means that you need to spend time doing the necessary prep work and research.

The other reality is, you’ll never please everyone or answer every question to every one’s satisfaction. There will always be one or two people who will feel that what you presented wasn’t what they thought it would be. If the majority of your audience likes your presentation then you’ve done it right.

If you want to incorporate social media into your professional speaking (and I agree with Jeremiah that this will become more and more important to do), I’d suggest NOT using your cell-phone. If you do, you’ll be constantly looking at it and getting distracted, when you should be focusing on the audience in front of you. Instead have a laptop setup at an angle where you can see it, but it’s a bit to the side. Or two laptops, one for the presentation (if you’re using powerpoint), and one for your social media monitoring. While you are speaking, occasionally glance over at the screen and quickly skim over what’s being tweeted and then either answer questions from the tweets, or continue with your presentation, but adjust as needed to help you stay on top of your presentation.

Most importantly stay focused on the people in front of you. They want you to engage with them, and yes social media is one way to engage people, but in our enthusiasm to embrace social media, we mustn’t forget that it’s equally important to engage people in-person as well…and when you’re presenting a talk, people do want that in-person engagement. Monitor the social media stream to help with your presentation, but keep it to a minimum. your main goal, afterall is to present your talk and you need to stay focused on doing that, instead of splitting it, by worrying too much about how people will or won’t react.

I presented a talk on Sunday on hypnotism. It was the first time I presented this particular talk, and I knew, by the end of it, that I’d done ok. Not great. Not good. Ok. And my audience knew it too. Now I definitely engaged them and I presented some interesting material, but the questions they asked were what really made the workshop shine. The questions shows med areas where I could expand and improve my work presentation.

And what really helped were the eval forms. The eval forms provided further helpful suggestions and advice for improving the workshop. I already know I’ll be incorporating most of the suggestions from the workshop into my next version of it, so that’s better.

If you’re a public speaker, or even aiming for the stars to become a professional speaker, an evaluation form is definitely a tool you want in your toolbox. My evaluation form gives me an idea of what people thought of the program, me as a speaker and suggestions for how I can improve. Additionally, people can also indicate if they want to hear back from me about future workshops, one-on-one coaching, or a variety of other information. Essentially it doubles as a potential intake form, and it certainly has helped open doors for me when I followed up with people after the presentation.

If you’re not using an eval form, consider creating one. It doesn’t take a lot of work, it makes you look a bit more professional, and it can really go a long way toward helping you get some new clients, while also improving the quality of your speeches. You’ll get some useful advice, and be able to follow-up with people, without it being invasive. That’s definitely a win all around.