Making a stellar presentation requires you to connect with the audience—this post is about connection and is the third in a series on presentation technique (prior posts: How to Get a Standing Ovation and Go Own the Room: Enthusiasm).

We know this all too familiar feeling that the speaker, presenter, or lecturer does not connect with his audience. He is distant, he does not seem to communicate with you, and his content is out of place. The sad effect is that his message comes across less powerful, which is not desirable for neither the presenter nor the audience.

What this presenter needs is a connection with the audience. To establish such—and to do it well requires great ability. It also requires that nervousness does not get on top of the situation and take control; however, in this post we will disregard nervousness and focus on ability. (I will treat nervousness in a later post.)

“Connection” can be broken down into three basic parts—Conduit, Content, and Context. All three have a positive, causal impact on connection, and—to some extent—they also correlate with each other. Let me take them one by one.

• Conduit
  No great connection is ever established without some form of conduit. Although not always used, and rarely well, a classic example is eye contact. People far too often look at the audience as one entity instead of as a collection of individuals. Don’t look at hats, blouses or the back wall; don’t put your eyes out of focus. Look into people’s eyes and try to establish contact with as many as possible.
  Other ways of establishing a conduit includes techniques stimulating all the five senses. Speaking by itself is also a necessary, although not sufficient conduit. Being in the field of view of every single person in the audience is also an important factor. If they can’t see who is speaking, they are more prone not to listen. In smaller presentation forums, touching can also be very effective (clapping a person’s back).
• Content
  Irrelevant content has the bad habit of establishing poor connections with its audience. In other words: It is important to know who your audience is, because they listen only to content that interest, fascinate, develop, and challenge them. There are two things, which I have learned that helps me, when you want to make sure that the content-part of the connection equation is up to speed: (1) Don’t present borrowed hats and (2) make sure you wrap it up nicely. In other words, present what you know—if you don’t know or are not familiar with your subject matter, you should either not present or get familiar with it. Otherwise there is no value-add for your audience. And then make sure you deliver it nicely (one thing that enables you to do that is enthusiasm, connection, and sincerity) with effective statements, good data, visuals that do not distract but support, and a portion of self-irony—the packaging is half the good.
• Context
  Delivering content out of context is a lost cause. Give it up. I remember the first week of college, which was a get-together week, with lot’s of off-campus, in-cabin partying. Each morning in that week, in the camp, they tried to present important and good-to-know stuff about rules and regulations. Unfortunately for them and us, there was no real connection, and the content was lost.
  Therefore, a connection must be made in the right context. Presenting about food problems in the canteen, when your company has lost one third of its market cap, might also be a lack of a sense of occasion (although you should always make sure you have great food in the canteen). The context part is probably what is most difficult to control yourself, but you can adapt to the given context, which is important. Making sure that you are always in context and exercise a sense of occasion will make your connection with your audience much stronger.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 14th, 2006 at 12:43 pm and is filed under Business, Presentations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.