For events from board meetings to training conferences, the emergence of public speaking 2.0 is here. A growing number of speakers are leveraging the latest technologies to make their presentations interactive and gain useful audience feedback.
Whether through social networking websites or audience response systems, meeting organizers and speakers can ensure audience members stay engaged and excited throughout presentations.
Below are a few tips on how to use technology to make presentations more interactive:
- Elicit real-time audience feedback. By allowing audience members to directly and immediately offer feedback during an event, speakers can improve presentations in real time. For example, an October Econsultantcy blog post discusses how a speaker at a recent event used Twitter to gather audience questions and answer key themes during the presentation. Audience response text messaging systems can achieve the same objective.
- Give audience members an incentive to participate. Speakers can motivate audience members to participate in the event by making it fun. For example, interactive quizzes via handheld devices help generate enthusiasm among audience members. Plus, they help invoke a lively, competitive atmosphere.
- Make it easy for audience members to participate. Meeting organizers and speakers must be aware of their audience’s level of tech knowledge – after all, not all participants know how to interact with Twitter or other social networking sites. Any technology leveraged in a meeting or other presentation must be intuitive and easy-to-use, so that audience members aren’t confused or left out of the discussion.
Now is the perfect time to embrace public speaking 2.0. With the array of technologies available to encourage participation and elicit audience feedback, meeting organizers and speakers can easily take their presentations to the next level.
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