A few weeks ago I was invited to deliver a presentation along with a social media “expert” at an annual joint networking event for several women’s business groups, and boy, that second speaker sure could have used my help! The speaker was a college professor who was an expert on social media, certainly appearing on the surface (or in the brochure) to be a highly relevant topic to small business owners. Sadly, her presentation was a big bust, which I found particularly surprising, because she give presentations to her classes several times a week. As a professor, she should be regularly concerned about the educational value of her presentations, which was clearly not the case here.
There were several major mistakes made in her presentation, but one gigantic doozy overrode them by a mile:
Her presentation was irrelevant to the vast majority of her audience. She knew this at the beginning of her talk and consciously chose to make no adjustment whatsoever! As she took the stage, the speaker asked the audience for a show of hands as to how many people used social media at all. Only about 8 out of 60 attendees raised their hands. This clearly meant that while most of the audience may have known what social media was, they had never used it and probably didn’t understand how it could improve their business exposure. The vast majority of the audience was very much at the absolute beginner level of comprehending social media. They needed a basic introduction on its relevancy to their businesses and how to get started using platforms like Facebook, Linked In, or Twitter.
Nevertheless, the speaker proceeded to deliver an hour-long speech on the complexities of social media and an overview of the plethora of social media platforms available in cyberspace. Her presentation was over my head, and I was one of the minority who used social media. But, the speaker chose not to adjust her presentation to be relevant to her audience. This was really inexcusable, especially for someone who is supposed to be a professional educator who presents to groups several times a week.
What could she have done instead?
1) First, she could have turned off her disaster of a PowerPoint (see archives for article on “Avoiding Death by Powerpoint”) and dropped the canned speech that mostly consisted of reading the bullets off of each slide.
2) Ask the audience their questions on social media and answer them. The speaker clearly had a great deal of knowledge on social media, and she surely would have been able to handle any questions this audience would have had for her.
3) Once ascertaining exactly where the audience was on the subject, showing some flexibility and immediately adjusting her planned path to get her audience to the obvious call to action at the end of her presentation (use social media).
For those of you experts out there engaging in public speaking, whatever you decide to present upon, you must speak to your audience’s needs. It’s far better to abandon a useless prepared speech and speak simply and directly from your own experience and knowledge. However, that requires connecting and caring about the message that you send to your audience. Do you?? If you want positive results, you’d better begin!
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