A good thing about talking about presenting is that a lot of what works for one type of presenting translates well into another. For example, when speaking to an audience in an auditorium it’s good to take deep breaths and project from your diaphragm; and this works well when on a conference call too. With this in mind, I’d like to share Olivia Mitchell’s encompassing blog post of
best tips for different kinds of presentations.
The Training Session – Her main point here is that longer doesn’t mean more effective, and we can use her tips in conference calls. A solid forty-five minutes is more than enough for anyone to sit and listen in one setting. Anything longer and time is wasted. Even better is to break up a big time block into ten to fifteen-minute segments. On your next conference call, it could be good to speak for ten minutes then take ten minutes of questions. Repeat that four or five times and you could be four or five times more effective than just having ten minutes for questions at the end.
The Conference Presentation – Well, this type is good for conference calls because it is for conference calls. The best tip here is to provide backchannel communications for your participants. Use twitter, instant messaging, email, or even texting so that without interrupting you, participants can comment or ask questions. Then you can decide if you want to stop and address their point, work it into the presentation, or bring it up at the end.
The Internal Company Presentation – The “take home” point here is to have a solid key message. This is a vital part of any presentation. If you are unclear of what you want to say, want to convey, or worse, at the end your participants are unclear of what they should have learned then presentation = fail. Start with your main message, your main point, and then build your presentation on that. Make sure you never obscure the key message with the supporting parts.
How do you feel about your presentations on average? Do you think these tips will help you? Do you already do the above? Leave a comment and tell me about it!
