Different Kind of Presentation Tip
Steven Johnson has a nice bit about presentations prompted by the Lacy-Zuckerberg flap at SxSW. He hardly talks about SxSW at all, which is one virtue. But it’s a great post because it highlights something that rarely comes up in all the presentation tips out there: dealing with the difficulty of reading an audience, especially large ones.
I probably did more than fifty public appearances last year in front of crowds — speeches, conversations, interviews, panel discussions, etc. And every time I get up there, the primary thing I’m thinking about — more than the words themselves, most of which I’ve said before in roughly the same sequence — is the room tone. In the words of our commander in chief: is the audience with me or against me? Are they having fun? Are they confused? Am I talking at too technical a level? Am I being condescending and talking down?
This can be very hard to gauge, because the information channels that flow back from an audience to a speaker are very narrow ones. An audience enraptured by a fascinating story is, most of the time, indistinguishable from an audience slumbering at a ponderous lecture. You can’t read facial expressions in that environment, so all you have to go on is the sound, and the sound in both those cases is silence.
This is specific to large audiences, I think. You can usually gauge a room of up to 50 people — the lights are usually up, you’re close enough to make eye contact, you can see body language more clearly. But the idea of room tone is useful. Johnson says he uses jokes to gauge a room. The amount of laughter and the lag time help break the silence and give him enough signal to gauge how he’s doing. Still, he believes it’s hard to gauge a room except in the best and worst of circumstances and that things like twitter (which allows an ostensibly silent audience to talk to each other and build a consensus) can amplify the room tone.