The Mobile Presenter

I've been taking a closer look at the characteristics of shorter talks recently, especially pitches; i.e. the (supposedly) short and to-the-point presentations that startups use to promote their ideas.

Disclaimer: The following are observations from a rather small sample of pitching events that I attended, so take them with a grain of salt.

Presentations, especially good presentations, are rarely taught at school, at university, or at work. As a result, presenters tend to simply copy what everybody else seems to be doing. So for years, they were copying the bad habit of bullet points. These days, they copy what they think is the trend to "use pictures".

But visuals in presentations only work if they are relevant to your topic and have been selected with some care and thought.

When you go to speak somewhere and you are offered a microphone, it's generally a good idea to use it. Keep in mind that the people running the event will be familiar with the venue and will know very well wether your voice needs to be amplified to be understood by the audience members in the back of the room.

You may be reluctant to use a microphone simply because you are not familiar with its correct use. It should be worth this small discomfort for the benefit of your audience, though.

One thing that I always stress in my workshops is that there's no excuse for going over time with your presentation. At a typical conference, this will quite obviously inconvenience your audience, since they may want to change rooms to attend the next talk, or take a bathroom break between talks, or grab a coffee. It also prevents the next speaker from setting up in time and may even derail the entire schedule of at least the conference track you're in. And even if you're the only speaker at an event, consider that people in your audience will have made plans for after your talk.

Fortunately, most speakers nowadays seem to have realised this and manage to finish in time; with their talk, that is.

Something that stood out from a bad presentation I had to sit through recently was the speaker's insistence on explaining to us what was coming next, why she chose a photo, where it was taken, that she'd tested the presentation in front of friends before (which is recommendable, of course), etc. This sort of meta information seemed very important to her but didn't really help the audience in understanding the presentation any better. In other words, it was extraneous information that only distracted from the actual presentation.