Great Speaking Advice from Amber
Amber MacArthur has a great new post up giving some of the tips and tricks she’s learnt from a Year on the Social Media Road. Amber’s someone I’m lucky enough to consider both a mentor and a friend, and I’ve been fortunate to collaborate with her on a few little interviews and projects over the last three years, so I definitely sit up and pay attention when she hands out advice! Especially now that we’re co-hosts at the excellent butterscotch.com 
I agree with everything she says, especially about keeping your energy up and listening to your audience. As I’m getting more and more speaking experience, like the forthcoming Web Strategy Summit in Calgary in May, I’m learning to really focus on the people in the room and to tailor what I’m saying to what they need to hear. Practicality dictates that you need to work from a similar base every time you speak, but the reality of being a good speaker means that you have to adapt every time. I’ve got a folder full of old Keynote presentations that I keep very handy and I constantly go digging through my archive for slides I can re-use in future gigs. Work smarter, not harder! Check out Presentation Zen for more great tips.
What are your top presentation tips? What’s the best thing you’ve seen a speaker do?
Likely-related posts:
- Social Media Strategies for Organizations My presentation from Web Strategy Summit, delivered May 4th 2009....
- Mr. Mobile – #38 – Two great games with innovative iPhone controls Apple is clearly making a push for the iPhone...
» December 18th, 2008, 3:53 am • permalink • categories: Observatory • tags: amber macarthur, ambermac, butterscotch, keynote, presentation zen, presentations, tips, webstrategy09 • Subscribe to comments for this entry through the 
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Top tips: Always try to remove words and add images from slides; they should act in harmony with what you're saying, not as speakers' notes. Pause. Smile. Remember that your audience doesn't live in your head – no acronyms, no assumptions. Try to inspire, not explain. Pause. Smile.
One of the best speakers I've seen in a while was Kareem Rashid, speaking on why he thinks every object should be beautiful. His backdrop was a slide presentation of over 2000 beautiful objects, changing at a rate of 4s/slide. He just spoke lyrically about it and let the images do the talking. It was gorgeous.
I'll tell you something I saw yesterday. I had asked one of my programmers to speak for 10 minutes at our end-of-year meeting to summarise the major changes he's implemented in the past 6 months, with a focus on the business drivers (scientific drivers, in this case) for each change. I let him decide the actual content — he hasn't had to make many presentations and felt like this would be a good opportunity to get some exposure in our organisation. He's a great coder and deserves the recognition for his hard work.
Anyway, I got a text message at 8am saying he wouldn't make the morning session of the all-day meeting (his talk was scheduled for 1pm). I inferred that he must be getting his slides in order at the last minute, or just practicing. No problem… most of us had only produced our slides the day before, and I could imagine how his inexperience might cause him some difficulty.
When he turned up at noon he made some reference to "maybe needing a bit more time" than scheduled. Oooookay, after some last minute negotiation I arranged for him to have 15 minutes (vs. the 10 I had asked him for). He didn't look too happy about this 50% increase, but said he could probably get through his slides if he rushed.
What he presented blew me away. An absolutely breakneck slide presentation where he went through ****190**** slides in 15 minutes. It was absolutely crazy to watch, and the audience (including our boss) sat absolutely stunned. No eye contact. Barely a pause for a breath. Basically 15 minutes of watching the guy hammer away at the space bar to flick slides. He went through absolutely every feature in the system. Even experts in the system (basically myself plus maybe one or two others) had a hard time understanding what he was presenting… the rest of the crowd must have found the whole thing quite inscrutable.
In his defence, he hadn't used any slide animations within a slide but rather had implemented appearing and disappearing arrows and circles as separate slides, so he had used between 2 and 6 slides for each animation effect.
As it happens, our boss is becomes quite jovial when his underlings are clearly flailing. At the end of the 15 minutes, presentation done, the audience didn't move or say a word. My boss broke the silence: "Well I think that deserves a round of applause" without a hint of irony. Classic!!