Brad MacMillian, president of Meeting Professionals International (MPI) says that “the number one thing an audience wants is to feel involved in the actual creation and development of the session. When they are involved, they are much more connected, they feel it is more personal to them, and they get more out of it.
Now let me give you an example. When Don Tapscott, author of the best-seller Wikinomics, was our keynote speaker at MPI, he did a great job in advance of reaching out to all our attendees. He blogged with them, invited questions before the event, and considered them; he built them right into his presentation. So, in essence, he built his presentation around the interests of his audience even before they got there. The audience felt like they were personally involved. They felt like they could see their fingerprints all over the content he delivered. And so they got more out of it to. And Don went the extra step and engaged with people after the fact, too. It really was an end-to-end experience. It was personal, and the people who were in the audience felt that they had collaborated and created something remarkable.”
And for those of us who use PowerPoint, I believe the Ipad is a game changer for presentations. Why? Because it makes it much easier for the presenter to go where the audience wants to go – right there on the stage in real time!
Most PowerPoint presentations are linear in fashion – unless you have figured out how to insert hyperlinks to help you “jump” from one slide to another or remember the slide number so you can “go to” a specific slide in your presentation. But, it requires a bit of finesse to go over to the computer and hit some keys or manual dexterity to move your mouse over the just the right spot.
The Ipad changes all that.
The “computer” is in your hand, and you can simply tap on the screen. Doesn’t require much finesse or dexterity.
So, you may ask, what’s the big deal? It allows the presenter to easily go where the audience wants to go!
You can set up a “splash page” which is a main menu of topics you think you should cover – and then let your audience decide where to start and where to go so their fingerprints are all over the presentation.
