Keeping an audience captivated is the number 1 goal of any presenter.  The content of your presentation takes a backseat to being captivating; no one is going to pay attention to what you are saying if you aren’t interesting and engaging!  Being engaging requires energy and enthusiasm, which is easier to do in person because people absorb it through your body language and facial expressions.  But so many presentations today are done across a variety of technology mediums that it become hard to keep people interested.  I’ve done podcasts, videos, and more recently a presentation via Skype and received pretty good reviews.  Here are tips to keeping your audience enthralled through the use of subtle body cues.  Some of these may seem silly or overly obvious, but I’ve seen and hear a lot of bad presenters that didn’t take the time to prep and think about how they were presenting.  The result was an audience that didn’t find them to be credible and tuned out.

1. Audio

If I’m participating in a podcast or phone call where I’m not leading it I will ask for questions and topics that will be covered ahead of time.  I like to understand the context and then run through answers in my head.  Preparing ahead of time helps me to be more articulate and clear in my answers.  Small pauses are good but the last thing you want is dead air, to stutter, or use a lot of “ums” and “uhs”.  To avoid sounding the like drone make sure there is intonation in your voice.

To place emphasis on a point or explain a difficult topic slow your pace down and be a little more deliberate in your delivery.

Its also good to express positive emotion such as enthusiasm through laughter, raising your voice slightly, ending a sentence up tempo, or speeding up your words slightly.

Of course all of these should be sprinkled throughout a presentation, and should come out sounding natural not rehearsed.  So treat an audio presentation like you are having a conversation with a best friend.  Don’t try to sound like a sportscaster or fake the radio voice; people want to be able to connect with you and can only do so if your natural accent and voice come through.

Don’t ramble!  Its ok to have a mix of short and long sentence and take breaks when speaking.  Remember you audience needs time to process what you said.

2. Video

While the key to delivering a good presentation via audio is vocal quality the key for video is facial expression.  Your facial expressions should mirror the emotion you are conveying.

Once again positive emotion is emphasized through a smile, and when you want to highlight a point keep a neutral expression and bow your head slightly.  Be aware of head and eye movements, overuse of either can be distracting and detract from the point you are trying to make.

Keeping eye contact with the camera shows focus and that you are attentive, but at the same time you can come off as intimidating if you don’t break the focus once in awhile.  To do so raise your eyebrows or open your eyes when trying to convey excitement.  No need for a death stare…

Also be aware of your overall posture when doing video.  The way you sit or stand conveys confidence and credibility.

I know people get nervous when giving a presentation, I still have 30 seconds of fear before any presentation I give. Dealing with technology can exacerbate your nervousness.  The key to delivering a relaxed presentation is to prep and practice your delivery.

Finally, once the presentation is done take time to review it.  Watching or listening to your presentation isn’t narcissistic, you need to be aware of how you look and sound to improve for the next time.

Many people have recently asked me for advice on presentation skills because I’ve had a number of speaking engagements so I figured I’d share some of my so-called skillz. I’ll do a series of posts because the knowledge I have spans 16 years, and I want to give people the full spectrum.

The rules of software product creation apply to presentations, the main goal of a presenter is to keep people engaged and coming back for more!  Sure there’s an element of information exchange, but really a presenter should be entertaining and captivate the audience for the entire length of his presentation.  So instead of doing a bunch of how-to posts or lists, I’m going to take a slightly different approach and present narratives based on my experiences as a presenter, which I hope will still be informative and instructive, but mainly fun

Poornima’s first presentation

At the age of 8 I decided I was going to be a  lawyer and after watching one too many episodes of Matlock I knew that I had to have good presentation skills, but I was still a little shy four-eyed introvert  so it wasn’t until the age of 12 that I signed up for the debate team.  The first real presentation I ever did was for the “Optimist Oratorical Contest” it had the tagline: “The time for…”.  The grand prize was $1000 towards a college scholarship.  I spent 2 months preparing for my presentation.  One of my neighbors, Anne-Marie was a 30 something lawyer.  I idolized her, because she was articulate and drove a Toyota 4-runner SUV.  I asked Anne-Marie if she wouldn’t mind helping me out and she responded that she’d love to.

A picture is worth a 1000 words

I started drafting up my oratory.  First thing was to figure out the tagline.  I looked up the word optimist to understand what it meant, and then completed the tagline with “The time for action is now!”  I sat down outlined my speech, wrote it up with lots of catchy phrases, and then took it to Anne-Marie.  Anne-Marie being a sweetheart at the time did what anyone who is approached by a precocious 12 year-old would do, she sat down with me, and proceeded to teach me a few things about speech writing.  The first thing I learned was imagery.  The words I had chosen were flat, I need to paint a picture in the minds of my audience.  She handed me a speech she had written while in law school and I read over it.  It visually depicted the effects of alcohol of a fetus and I was appalled, but more importantly I got the point.  I took my speech back and changed it to included sentences like “bestowed upon your shoulders”, which is really the only sentence  can still remember to this day.

Practice, Practice, Practice

Once I had nailed down my speech in writing I  proceeded to practice it.  I rehearsed it everyday and timed myself, because it had to be under 5 minutes.  On the day of the speech  I needed something to calm my nerves and prevent me from forgetting my speech so I outlined it on a notecard.  I was one of the presenters in the middle going up against a few other girls my age from other middle schools across the school district, and only knew the one other girl from my school, Margaret.  I liked Margaret she was a head taller than me (who wasn’t at the time?) and we were on the debate team together.  The speeches began.  I got up and was a little nervous presenting to an audience of my peers, their parents, and a few adults who were judging.  My heart was racing, but I began the intro strong and then kept going.  I didn’t even look down at my notecard, but just held it in my hand and used it to gesture.

Then Margaret got up, I noticed she was the only presenter who didn’t have a notecard or set of papers that she was reading from.  Her speech went well.

After all the speeches we took a break while the judges decided our fate.  I wasn’t too concerned with the cash prize, because I knew $1000 wasn’t going to be enough for college, but I still held on to a shred of hope.  During the break a lot adults came up to me and commended me for my speech, which I thought was OK, but they thought was fantastic.  I didn’t see them commending anyone else so my shred of hope got bigger.

Results

The judges came back.  We all sat eagerly awaiting.  They were going to announce the people who placed and the winner would go on to try out at regionals for the $1000 scholarship.  They announced the 3rd place winner, it wasn’t me… I started to get a little excited but was still nervous.  Then they announced the 2nd place winner, the announcer paused to pronounce the name slowly… It was me!  Wow, second place not bad.  Sure I hadn’t won but hey I had placed!  Margaret ended up winning.

After the awards I ran into one of the judges, who told me I had the best presentation out of everyone, but the panel had docked me points for using a notecard. DOH!  Regardless I liked the feedback and from that day on knew that whenever I did a presentation I would do it empty handed.

On Saturday May 1, 2010, I will speaking on a panel entitled: “Taking Flight – Launching a Belief into a Brand” at the I Don’t Know to CEO: Transforming Passion into Action conference at the Annenburg Auditorium at Stanford University.

I will speaking at the Social Developer Summit on June 29, 2010 (9:30-10:20am).  The session will be about Scaling Social Analytics.  I’ll cover some of the data analytics I worked on at Mint.com, and propose suggestions for building analytics in from the start to then help with scale.

I will be speaking at Deploy 2010 hosted by Seattle 2.0 on Thursday June 24th at Bell Harbor Conference Center in Seattle, WA.  The focus of my talk is pre-launch planning for startups, geared towards engineering.  I aim to cover technologies to use, best practices, and trade-offs to make before crunchtime!

I will be on a panel at the Invent Your Future Conference for Women, on Tuesday April 20, 2010 (10:15am – 11:45am).  The title of the panel is: Careers of the Future: Which One is Right for You?  The conference will be held at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA.

I will be speaking at the PairUp Conference April 8-9, 2010 in London; doing a pair presentation with Nick Pellant.  The both of us will be speaking on how to go about starting a tech startup, and focused on inspiring the youth of the UK!

Today I attend the Girls in Tech: Catalyst Conference at the Common Wealth Club in San Francisco.  It was a great meeting ground for all girls in tech.  I was introduced to VCs, CEOs, and of course fellow femgineers!  My panel was: “Curious About Coding & Developing: Developing Creativity & Building a Business.”  Here is what I learned from the Q&A period and hallway conversations I had with other girls:

1. Women want to code!
2. Entrepreneurs want to understand where they can meet developers and how to interact and motivate them to join their startups (this is gender neutral).
3. There is a growing gap between entrepreneurs and engineers (once again gender neutral).

Because the panel was brief some questions on each of these points went unaddressed.  I’m going to attempt to address some of them now.

1. Just do it!  Seriously, if women in their 20s can run companies, 30s can run marathons, 40s can give birth then they can certainly code!  Any new skill is daunting (believe me I’ve tried snowboarding on blues…)  But the key to learning a new skill is patience, practice, and perseverance.  Start by figuring out what you ultimately want to do e.g. designing websites (CSS, HTML, Illustrator/PhotoShop), creating software programs or web applications (Java, Ruby), or pulling data for business reports (mySQL).  Next evaluate what kind of learner you are: self or group?  If you are good at self-study then go do some tutorials.  Don’t do it all in one shot, pace yourself!  And if you like learning in groups then go attend a workshop or a class.  You can enhance your learning with podcasts on the subject (there are a ton on iTunes), and reading books on the topic.

2. Its no secret developers are a nose-to-the-grindstone bunch.  Good developers are especially hard to meet in the wild  Here are a few secret hide-outs: Hacker Dojo (Mountain View), Meetups (Ruby, Java, iPhone, Android) along the peninsula hosted monthly, and of course un-conferences like CodeCamp, She’s Geeky, and Chirp.

I hate to stereotype but I think there are two key motivating factors: building cool stuff, and solving tough problems.  By building cool stuff I mean developers who like to work in a fast paced environment, like a startup, and be a part of a product’s evolution.  By solving tough problems I mean developers who like to work in a stable environment and think about tough engineering problems like scaling a database or improving the performance of a site to load photos really fast.  Figure out which you want for your company or team.  Then motivate them, first and foremost with projects, and second with the autonomy to build or work on those projects and drive the direction of them.

3. This is mostly a communication issue.  I’ve noticed a growing trend in entrepreneurs understanding jargon, and even what technologies work best for front vs. back-end development.  But I have yet to see a movement in the developer community  to create a more articulate bunch of coders that can clearly explain tradeoffs in laymen’s terms e.g. more servers == more $$ or more code clean up == more developer time.  I think such initiatives needs to start at the university level, perhaps by incorporating a public speaking component to the curriculum.  And in companies managers should force their developers to explain projects and give presentations that are across departments.  I don’t think agile does a good job of emphasizing the need to be articulate, but I think it would help with the entire product development process.

I will be speaking to MEM (Masters in Engineering Management) students at my alma mater, Duke University, on Friday January 22, 2009. I’ll talk about how I contributed to Mint.com’s success two years after I graduated from the Pratt School of Engineering.

I was invited to speak to the Berkeley CS students for their e-talks series.  Here is the video from my talk last night.