Episode #196: How To Maintain Audience Interest When Presenting

Maintaining the audiences’ attention presumes you actually have their interest in the first place, doesn’t it. Gaining and keeping attention are no simple achievements in this Age of Distraction. One of the interesting findings of online meeting studies is the miniscule number of people who are attending, who are NOT multitasking in the background. This means that the content and the delivery are not sufficiently gripping, to keep a grip on our listener’s attention.

We know that most people who present are pretty boring in the first place. This has been the case in the face to face world. So it is no surprise that these nefarious time wasters and energy sappers, should be up to their same old tricks on whichever semi-functional platform we all forced to struggle with. Escaping to a better place then is the easy choice and we tune out and check email, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Tik Tok, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram or just surf the internet. In other words, we are not short of choices if we get disinterested in you as the speaker.

To grab interest at the start when in the room with the audience, we need to pare down every possible distraction, hesitation, segue, diversion or interruption possible. That means getting there early checking on the equipment, testing the microphone, ensuring the MC will do a proper job of introducing us to kick things off. We get right into a strong start, with a teaser of some sort to break through all the clutter in our audience’s minds. Then we can move on to thank the sponsors, start launching our slide deck, introduce our company and set up the importance of the topic.

In a thirty minute talk, we will break things into five minute segments, so we are dividing the delivery up into six blocks. In each change of blocks we need a transition, something to wake the audience up they have started to drift. It might be launching a rhetorical question.

Jesper Koll, a well know economist and speaker here in Tokyo, is an absolute master at this. He is very flamboyant. He will boldly wander into the forward tables of the audience, stand over the top of you and hit you with his question. You are now diverting your full attention to him, because you imagine you will have to answer this little doozy he has proposed, and do it front of all these business people assembled in the room. Everyone else is nervous too, in case he switches to another member of the room.

Just as you break into nervous sweat, he sweeps in and answers the question he posed. With a silent, private sigh of immense relief you realise, “oh, that was a rhetorical question, so I don’t have to front up with an answer”. To keep us all on our toes, he sometimes does expect an answer, in case we regular Jesper speech attendees think we can start gaming the system.

We might change the pace of the energy we are expending to lift it up to much higher heights, for a short burst of adrenaline transfer into the crowd, to keep them with us for a bit longer. We might tell a fascinating story that grabs interest. Or it might be the supply of some stunning, unknown facts or hot off the presses data, that will be deemed valuable and make everyone happy they attended the talk, because they feel they are getting value from investing their time to be there.

In the online world, we should keep everyone out of the room, until it is time. This way they don’t see the presenters for who they really are – tech novices, totally out of their depth with the platform, having side discussions in public about what they are going to do and who will be doing it. When it is time, be ready to go and go hard from the start, to kick things off well.

In the online world, we can’t apply the five minute rule. The distraction factor is nuclear, so we have to apply the two minute rule. Every two minutes, we need to be doing something to keep people with us. That means fifteen things have to be pre-planned, for a thirty minute speech, before you go live. It can be the things already mentioned or doing a poll, getting a raised hand, a green check, a red cross, entering something in the chat or calling on someone to unmute and share their thoughts on the subject.

In person or online, the secret is in the planning. Expect total distraction and then work back from that possibility, minute by minute, as to what you have to do, to overcome the gap between where you want the audience to be and where they can wind up.