The Mobile Presenter

I recently attended an event, an evening consisting of a series of short talks. Afterwards, it occurred to me that what I've seen could have been representative of the future of presentations, i.e. the average talk we're going to see in the future. And I have to say, the outlook isn't pretty.

On paper, the programme read a bit like a TEDx event: 12 short talks on a range of topics like innovation, management, motivation, health, etc. Content-wise, what we did get, however, were effectively 11 variations of a "you can do it!" talk plus one mildly entertaining one about sex.

It's been a little over two years since my first ebook, Presenting for Geeks, was released. I made the deliberate decision to write it in English, despite this not being my native language, in the hopes to reach a wider audience that way. I think it mostly worked out okay, thanks in no small part to my editor Anna Kent, who dutifully corrected my English and overall made it a better book with her sometimes radical but always necessary cuts.

I do get asked for a German translation from time to time, though. Until very recently, I simply didn't have the time to do it (hiring a translator was pretty much out of the question for cost reasons). Back in January, I sat down one day to see how hard it would be - and finished the translation just a few weeks later. Friends and family volunteered to proofread it and now I'm happy to announce that Präsentieren für Geeks, the German edition of Presenting for Geeks, is available for purchase from the Amazon Kindle Store.

There are several ways to find speakers for your event. You can invite them, for example, or you can put out a Call for Papers. Many conferences use a mix of both.

At TEDxStuttgart, we are constantly looking for good speakers and interesting topics. Some we find ourselves, some are recommended to us, and some suggest themselves via our website or by email; and we found quite a few good speakers via that latter method, so a little self-promotion is not something we frown upon.

That is, if you do it right ...

Quite a few conferences are using Twitter walls these days, i.e. a screen that shows tweets related to the event in real time. They help attendees see what's going on, in the talks but also around the event as such.

Twitter walls that are visible to the audience during a talk are a real challenge for the speaker, though. It means that any comments that are being tweeted are immediately visible to all the other attendees. So that remark which - in the times before Twitter - you would quietly make to the person next to you suddenly gets a much broader audience. This applies to praise as well as to criticism. Even more so to criticism, actually.

At a conference I attended recently, I noticed quite a few speakers that didn't seem to have put a lot of thought into the end of their presentation. Yet when you come to the end, your audience will start paying more attention again; this is something you should make use of to ensure that they remember your message better.