Making Public Speaking FUN! Part 11
Let’s dip our ladle into another swirling soup of out-of-the-box ideas for Making Public Speaking FUN, shall we? We’re about through wading through the oodles of ideas submitted via HARO.
Let’s take a nod first from Justin Foster, a Founder and Partner with Tricycle Brand Development
I follow some fairly basic but outside-the-box rules whether I’m speaking to a large event or in a small group:
I encourage interruption. At the beginning, I tell the audience to feel free to stop and ask questions; even challenge me on a point. I encourage the use of Twitter. This does two things: endorses new thinking/technology and provides the people who don’t know about Twitter a chance to learn some thing new.
My last slide doesn’t say “Questions?” or “Q & A”. Instead, it says “Open Discussion” along with prompting questions like “Clarification on terms?” “New trends”, etc. This really sets up the audience to have a good exchange rather than that uncomfortable silence after the presenter asks “any questions?”
I never do hand-outs in advance unless it is for a particular exercise during the workshop. Instead, I put them up at the podium and instruct the audience to come and get them. This accomplishes many things: keeps them focused on the presentation, is a gauge of interest, and creates an atmosphere to talk with them afterwords.
Jackie Gordon, an Executive Singing Chef (!) at DIVALICIOUS INC. likes to sing. Well, I suppose if you have the chops, why not?
I always incorporate music in my public speaking. It’s a great ice breaker and crowd warmer. It’s always in context of what I am speaking about so it makes the content multi-sensory and sticky.
Sandy Gluckman, Ph.D in Plano, Texas, the author of a leadership book, “Who’s in the Driver’s Seat?” likes to get someone (or two or more) else up on stage with her. She says “I am a keynote speaker at leadership and business conferences. Here’s what makes my talks great fun…”
I use performers with me onstage. I elaborate my ideas by bringing two performers with me who enact scenarios scripted to model the leadership skills I speak about. The interplay between my content and the performer’s humorous dramatization of this content keeps audiences spellbound and transforms the motivational keynote into an experience they will not forget. The performers may act or sing or use drums.
Sandy even offers a link to a clip showing this (right-click and save the target)…
Back to the props with Kathy Klotz of San Jose, California:
My audience expects my speaking to be fun – by nature of what I do (my backgrounds are in improvisation and marketing). One thing that I do to surprise people at the very beginning of my talks (not all the time but a fair amount) is come into the room dressed as a walking metaphor. For example, I spoke several times about how PowerPoint can be a crutch for people and I entered the room with fake bandages and on crutches – which gave people a surprise and a laugh. Metaphors stick and visual metaphors are hard to forget. I also speak on branding and messaging. To illustrate the point of “Frankenstein branding” where all marketing materials are inconsistent and patchwork, I have dressed like Frankenstein with non-matching clothes. You get laughs, claps and giggles – but you hit the point home. I still have people who come up to me and say they never forgot that talk.
Wendy Levine shows that a simple prop can get people to having fun:
“I was hosting my first Toastmaster contest. It was a humor and evaluation competition and while the votes were being tallied, I had to briefly interview each contestant. I brought a couple playing cards and put them in different pockets. After a couple superficial questions I’d ask, “And is this your card?” It caught them off-guard and gave the playful among them something to work off of if they wanted.”
Another way to use a prop is to hand it to the audience and challenge them to come up with some use for it, as Ana-Marie Jones, Executive Director of CARD – Collaborating Agencies Responding to Disasters in Oakland did:
The thing that has always gotten my audiences laughing, smiling and fully engaged is for them to be active in learning and presenting. To have my audiences learn how to generate solutions to emergency preparedness problems, I hand out zip-top bags and have them generate how they would use them in an emergency.The instructions are that their answers can be sensible, silly, sexy, serious, sentimental — all answers are good. I give them 20 or 30 seconds to generate as many answers as they can, then go around the room with them calling out their answers. Sample answers: protect my photos; use it as a glove or condom; I’ll save my goldfish; it’s a tragically see-through porta-potty. Sometimes they act out the answer. But people are always creative and funny. Evaluations frequently mention that they thought the presentation was fun and memorable, and I present to diverse audiences across the US and internationally.
Another way to bridge the gap between speaker and audience in a FUN way is to spice up a dry or technical talk with magic, such as the suggestion here by Jared M. Spool, a User Interface Engineering from Andover, MA.
I give presentations to audiences large and small all over the world, often speaking at more than 20 conferences each year. While my topic is fairly technical (Creating usable designs) for a technical audience (web designers, programmers, managers), I have developed a style that lets me do some cool stuff.
The neatest things I’ve done is include magic tricks (my son is a professional magician, so I’ve picked a few up) and human bar charts (where I administer a survey as the audience is walking in, then have the survey participants line up based on their answers).
You can see pictures of the human bar chart here.
Here’s me doing a cards across at SxSW with an audience of 1000+ folks.
Gotta love the human bar charts! Definitely a creative idea. Finally let’s wrap up our series on Making Public Speaking FUN (for now anyway) with a contribution from Tamara Shaya, the Public Relations Specialist at Crescent Project, an organization that bridges the gap between Christians and Muslims. Tamara offer some tactics from Crescent Project’s CEO Fouad Masri, a Lebanese minister who speaks extensively to various religious and political people on Middle East politics, Islam and Christianity and social justice issues for Arab women, among others.
1) Fouad will say something surprising or funny during the first few minutes of speaking to the audience. He usually starts out with jokes. One statement that gets the crowd laughing is, “I met my wife at a matchmaking dinner for terrorists.” or “My friend said he hates Lebanese food because they use too much garlic…I told him, of course they use garlic, we brush our teeth with garlic.” Since the topic he speaks about is usually heavy for the audience, it helps break the ice and he eases the audience with jokes.
2) Fouad also uses stories to captivate the audience and help make a point. He’s an excellent story-teller and uses specific situations from a man he met in Morocco to a Tunisian woman he met at a party to help bring home his message to the audience.
Thanks again to all to contributed to our series on Making Public Speaking FUN! Be sure to contact us if you have a story to contribute.
