The Mobile Presenter

I attended a low-key concert recently. The artist wasn't too well-known (at least around here) and the audience was rather small. The concert took place in a small venue, but it could easily have held twice the amount of people. And so they (or rather us, myself included) were standing around rather scattered and well away from the small stage.

The opening act did his best in warming up the audience (and mostly succeeded) but couldn't change the fact that it was too small an audience for the venue. The main act then did the right thing: When she came up on stage, she encouraged the audience to come forward to the stage and also to get closer together. I like to think that this simple measure helped us enjoy the concert even more.

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.