Audience Engagement by Monica Rathbun || Public Speaking Virtual Conference

I am so glad to be here. I'm going to talk a little bit about audience engagement. Unlike

the other speakers today, I'm a fairly new speaker. I've only been speaking for about

five years now, and I'm a very nervous speaker. So doing this today still got me nervous

just like any other presentation. But, you know, you have to actually control that nervousness

figure out how to engage your audience. We're going to talk about some of those things

And we'll talk about how I can break the ice straight off the bat and get that audience

engagement before things even start. So let's go ahead and get started and show my slide deck if

we can. All right, there you go. So I like to actually start out with this on my slide. I can

let everybody know why they walked into the room that they're in and make sure they're in the right

place. So I do have an introduction slide like this. And if I can get my screen to go forward

There we go. All right. So I like to go ahead and talk a little bit about me

Let them know who I am. It kind of sets the tone. We'll talk about setting the tone here shortly

But I give them a little bit of view onto what my credentials are. So when they walk into a room

they can actually see, hey, yeah, this is the right person. She knows what she's talking about

You can see that I'm a Microsoft MVP. I'm a VMware expert. I set the tone that I am an expert in what

I'm about to talk about. So that's why I have this slide going up here. You can find me at SQL

Espresso. It gives them a follow-up method right off the bat. And if they ever actually download

my slide deck, it gives them all the information they need to reach me. I also use an agenda

Many people don't use an agenda, but I think it's important as I'm going through this to set an expectation, to let them know what they're about to see

And it actually gives them an opportunity to walk out of the room if they want to, to see another session

I tend to actually talk at conferences that have several ongoing sessions at the same time

I like to let my audience know that my topic is for them and I want them to learn something

If it's not exactly what they came in for based on my agenda slide, it's okay to go and move to another session

So I absolutely make my agenda available to everybody. And this is a give or take

Magnus may agree, not agree on whether to have an agenda slide

I'm sure I'll find out later. But this is what I like to do

So today we're going to talk about engagement before it starts. And like Magnus said, you have to project yourself as an expert

So we're going to talk about how to make sure you project yourself as an expert and what kind of things you can do to help them believe you are the expert

Then we're going to talk about relating. It's very, very important to be relatable to your audience

You want to make sure you're not stone, you know, a stone figure lecturing in front of them that they can't talk to or intimidated by

You want to just be this casual person that, hey, I'm just having a conversation with them

So that's what we're going to talk about. And then we're going to talk about virtual. Engaging with your audience in a virtual manner is very difficult

Obviously, Magnus before me did a fantastic job, but not everybody is as seasoned as him to do a virtual conference

And right now, with the way the world is, a lot of conferences are going virtual

And it's going to be a big skill set that all of us presenters are going to have to manage and figure out how to do it just to move forward in our in our speaking time for the next year

And then we're always going to close with a summary. I want to give my audience something to take back and an actionable item

I'm engaging with them to have them do something else after they leave the room and hear me speak

So we'll talk about that as well. Again, like I said, everything happens before your presentation even starts

How many times have you walked into a room? You see the speaker looking at their watch

You see them standing there talking to themselves, kind of going over their presentation

They're pacing back and forth. They are actually nervous and you can see they're nervous

So there might be tense. You can actually see them just standing there

The room is silent when you walk in and the speaker is just standing there like this

That is not engaging. Setting the tone as soon as the person walks into your room matters

You don't want to stand there and be quiet. Now, Magnus said take a pause and be quiet before you start to speak

Command your audience. Fantastic. But during the 10 or 15 minutes before you're actually going to do your session

when everybody is filing into the room and you're not on a big stage, you're in a classroom

you're in a conference of some sort where you're in a ballroom and not on a stage

It's important not just to stand there quietly waiting for everybody to sit into the room

And then you're saying, OK, let's talk. Meanwhile, everybody is coming in

They're thinking they need to stay quiet. And they're thinking that they can't say anything because they're going to interrupt you or whatever

That's not what you want to do. You don't want to be on your phone either doing those last minute texts or checking your messages or checking Twitter

It means you're not engaged and ready and prepared to start. And don't stare at your watch

Magnus said that already. He takes his watch off. I don't wear a watch usually when I speak

I actually use a timer just like his. Doing things like that is awkward

It's very, very awkward to walk into a room and sit there where the speaker is quiet

just standing and waiting. They're sitting there, standing with waiting, with their arms crossed

Maybe they're moving back and forth. It's just quiet. What do you need to do with your audience

as soon as you walk into the room, you connect. You get common ground

You make connections as they walk in. I love to start engaging my audience as they walk in

As they're walking in the door, I say, hey, how are you today? You know or I starting to talk about my Twitter handle is SQL Espresso Many people want to know where SQL Espresso came from So maybe I talking about the quad shots of Espresso that I took four times a day not even knowing I was doing four quad shots a day because I didn know how to use the machine correctly

That always gets lapsed. There's something that you can talk about that engages everybody, whether it's asking them if they enjoyed the sessions that they did prior to coming into your room or it's talking about how did they find out about the conference

If it's talking about the coffee hasn't kicked into your system yet because you're the first session in the morning and you're dragging and you're laughing about why you're so tired or something, you're connecting and making friends with those people in the audience

Even if it's just one or two people, you're making that connection. And people who walk into your room in that kind of environment automatically feel comfortable

We're about to have a conversation. Oh, man, this person is going to be great

You're setting an expectation and you're actually becoming familiar to them, maybe making friends even before you start

When you do that, you get that immediate connection. They're paying attention to you

They are engaged and they are ready to go. It's not something where you're going to have people falling asleep in your room because they are already engaged with you, became your friends, and they are ready to have that conversation

So connect even before you start your presentation. and like Magnus said you've got to be the expert how do you do that you make them believe I don't

care if you don't know everything I don't care if you feel like you're talking about a topic

that you're just not quite sure you're about to say the right thing I don't care if it's the wrong

thing but you've got it in your slide deck you are the expert and because you said that's what it is

That's what it is. And how do you do that? You have the confidence when you speak

Notice when I'm speaking, I just all of a sudden stood right up, sat right up, obviously

because I'm at my desk, but I'm standing here in command, confident that I'm about to tell

you everything on this slide is correct because I said so, right

Now, if I was sitting here completely slouched over, which you probably can't even see me

right now, but completely slouched over or my arms crossed or my shoulders were saggy

then it looks like, okay, maybe this person doesn't know what they're talking about. So confidence, believe in yourself that you can do it

The confidence will shine through and you automatically become the expert. Tone

Again, if I'm talking in a complete monotone or I'm really, really quiet or I have a stutter

to my voice to where, oh, you can tell I'm not quite confident

and what I'm about to tell you, it actually shows to your audience. Tone makes the whole

thing different from how they see you. Speaking with confidence, a stern voice, you believe in

yourself, makes a world of difference. When you have that nervous tics that come through

the ums, and really, and uh-huh, and yeah, and all of those things, it gives the audience a second

to pause and they start to wonder, hmm, are they second guessing themselves? Did they forget

something? Did they say something wrong? Is there something that I'm missing or they skipped

that they're realizing they did? Sometimes people have the nervous tick of ums

just normally and that's okay. There are ways you can practice and we'll talk about that

to get rid of those things. That comes completely with becoming a seasoned speaker

Everybody starts out with those. I know some speakers that are very seasoned that have been doing it for 10 years and still

have those nervous tics. Just remember, if you're going to have the nervous tics, say them with confidence, right

You still become the expert and just do your best. You know, try to see what you can do to get rid of it

Did you catch that? I just said, you know, that is my nervous tic and I just caught it

So it happens to all of us. And watch your posture. Like I said, I'm standing here in my desk chair trying to do my best

to still watch my posture. Standing up there in the middle of the room with a slouching posture

again makes a huge difference. Do your best if you're in the middle of your speaking engagement

Correct yourself if you find yourself doing it. When you do that, sometimes restraining your

posture grabs the attention of your audience. It can make a difference. So just watch yourself

Make them believe. You don't have to be right. You don't have to be perfect about what you're

saying, although with practice and with research, you can make sure you're saying the right things

but make them believe regardless what it is. Practice, practice, practice, practice. For a speaker, whether you're new, whether you're seasoned

a brand new deck, a brand new topic, practice. There's so many things that you need to work on

before you go and speak to an audience or after you've gone and spoken to the audience, come back

and make corrections for. Try to record yourself when you do your session

when you're practicing at home. Give your session to family members. Sometimes I've actually given my session to my pets

If a cat is sitting at my desk or something, I might just go and pretend they're an audience member

Do your best. Everybody has coworkers and friends. Maybe you give your session at your office

and ask a couple of people, hey, at lunch, can we sit into the conference room

Let me practice my desk with you, my deck with you and maybe get some feedback. Preparing and practicing is all you can do

I've given sessions the same sessions over and over again, and it continues to improve

The first time I give a session, it's never perfect. It's never perfect. I always either

say something wrong or I miss something every single time. So practice. Practice in a mirror

If you can record yourself, record yourself and listen to it. I hate listening to myself record

However I will struggle through that just so I can see As you can tell when I talk I talk fast I talk really fast And no matter what I do to pace myself it always speeds up That is the biggest feedback that I get all the time You talk so fast I can keep up It happens It will always

happen. But I continue to try to slow it down. Just now, I slowed myself down just the tempo

just a little bit. But I try to do that engaging with the audience, trying to slow your speed down

watching the audience to see, hey, are they connecting? Are they following me or am I going

too fast? And then slow down. All of that is a skill that gets mastered with practice

Looks like my slide deck doesn't want to prepare. Okay. Involve your audience, right? You don't want anybody sleeping in your audience. You want

them to actually feel like they are part of the conversation. Now, this is what I do. This doesn't

work for everyone, but it's what I do. This slide is present in every single one of my slide decks

Why do I do that? This is usually the second slide that I put up, and I set expectations of

engagement with my audience. Now, what do I do? I tell my audience, hey, this is about you. It's not

about me. So let's have a conversation. Let's learn from each other. I don't mind if my audience

raises their hands to ask me a question during a slide. I don't mind if they want to share something

that can actually help other people in my audience. I want them to stay engaged, to interrupt me. Now

I do caution, like today, we only have 30 minutes. Sometimes I have 50 minutes. Sometimes I have an

hour. Sometimes I have an eight hour session. I want to make sure me as a speaker controls the

flow of those questions. I control my time. A lot of times you can get somebody that actually takes

advantage of these presentation rules and likes to have a question with every single slide. And

they tend to kind of take over the session. You actually have to master the skill as a speaker

on how to actually gauge your time and how to be able to allow for the conversation and the

engagement from your audience. I want to make sure, like I said, I want to keep them awake. I want them

to know that this presentation is for them. They need to get out of the presentation as much as

possible. And how do they do that? Engagement, asking me questions, making sure that they

understand my content. So this slide, again, is set in the very beginning. It sets the expectation

that I'm not here just to lecture you. I'm here to learn with you, to teach you, to show you

what you can get from SQL Server, as an example, to help your environment. So this is what I do

It may not work for everybody, but I set the tone right away that that engagement is important to me

Now, I need to get them involved. If they are not involved and they're all just sitting there quiet

maybe I have somebody who fell asleep or somebody who's nodding off because of the time of the day or time zone differences

things like that. I take control of the engagement and I ask the questions

So I may say, how many of you guys have ever run into this issue

Show me your hands and have them raise their hands. And then I say, oh, and I might point to somebody or gesture to somebody and say, oh, really

Why don't you tell me about that? Was that really difficult? How did you overcome that

And I turn the command over to the audience. I pull the engagement out of them and I urge the interactions

Maybe I say, hey, I got this error. And when I got this error, as I'm talking about whatever topic I'm doing, I really struggled to get through this

And I ended up solving the issue by one, two, and three. Did anybody else do it quicker than I was

Can you actually share that with the audience? Or I might look for head gestures

You know, I might say, hey, who has done this or that? And you'll see the audience shake their head

or you'll have some kind of action from your audience that tells you, yes, they're engaged

Maybe we have an activity we have to do and I might ask somebody to stand up

and demonstrate something or I'll do something that says, hey, audience, are you with me

Are you still there? Like right now, hey, maybe you have a comment

and you wanted to put it inside the chat. We'll be going back to those later and we'll follow up on some of those questions

There are ways to do it and encourage active listening with your audience

if they are not engaged with you automatically. Be relatable. Again, this is something we talked about with tone

as well as your body language. Being relatable means that they're not looking

at you to lecture. You're not a professor in which they're sitting in a class

standing there taking notes and they know they need to be quiet

And it's really, really monotone. And it happened to go back to be the most boring class

you've ever been to. And you dread going to hear that professor talk because they have this lecture tone

and they're just like speaking at a blank wall. That's no fun, right

When you're talking with your hands, when you're using inflection in your voice

when you're just having a conversation like you would with a friend, that's the way to do a good presentation

If you watched Magnus earlier, He talked with his hands. He talked to his camera just like this. And he was actually engaged

Regardless, he could see who was on the other side. His voice had the energy and his voice was saying, yes, I see you

I'm not here to to just talk at my camera just because I was told to do that

What fun is that? That is not fun. It's not engaging. Watch your cadence, too

Again, that goes with tones. What's cadence? Cadence is the music of your words

It's the tempo of your words. If I'm talking in the same cadence, and it might be really, really fast, really, really slow, or it's just not melody-like, then you're not going to want to listen to it

If you're actually using inflection, if we're talking in different fast, slow, fast, slow, different kinds of tempos, that's the word I'm looking for, different kinds of tempos, it makes your talk more interesting

It not bland It not something you going to fall asleep to It really makes it so you not boring What to take from this Don be boring Do everything opposite that you actually

encountered when you've gone to that really boring lecture from a professor. Do your best

to avoid that. Now, what if it's virtual? If it's virtual, how can you do this? I'm trying my best

now to talk to my camera and engage, right? So first, don't look down at your slides

which to me, you're on my desk. Make sure you're engaged and you're looking at your camera. Your

audience may not be in front of you, but they are on the other side of that camera. Or if you're

actually just recording your session, maybe you put your kids in the room while you record and

really hope that they're silent and don't make any noise. So you can actually have some eye

contact with somebody. Or maybe you put a mirror. Some people put a mirror in the room so when

they're talking, they can actually see themselves and pretend they're talking to somebody else

But when I talked about earlier, I talked about engaging your audience and audience participation

Doing that online can still happen. Always have a moderator. We have a moderator in here today

He can actually go and look at questions and then come back to me. I can pause at any point in time

and say, hey, do we have any questions? And let him interject and allow those questions to come through

Always have a moderator. Don't do it without it. And then work with your moderator beforehand

Let them know, hey, I'm actually going to ask you midway if the audience has questions

Can you stop us and see if we can address some of those questions

before we move forward? There's things you can do to make sure you're still getting that audience engagement

And C-Shark Corner does a great job with taking care of that in sessions like this that they do

It's one of the best things about their training sessions that I love. Pause for questions

I haven't done that so far, but I'm going to leave some time after this for some questions

and I will have them kick back over to make sure we get that audience participation that I've been talking about

You can always pause and check for questions, even though you're virtual

I like to do that, too, if I'm not virtual, especially if you're a speaker and you realize you're going too fast through your slide deck

Take a pause. Use some of your extra time to engage your audience

Take a couple minutes to see who has any questions on what I just covered so far

It slows your pace. It allows engagement with the audience. And you can still do that in a virtual environment

Like I said, speak as though they're in the room, right? Make sure they can see you. They can pretend that they are in a room with you because you've engaged them in that camera. You've actually found a way to make that connection. It's a hard thing to do. It's something, again, within this next year of all these virtual conferences we're going to do. Sooner or later, we're going to master it, but a lot of us are going to fumble through it because it's a new environment for us

So speak as though they're in the room as best you can. It's difficult, as you can tell in these things today

It is a skill that a seasoned speaker will still have to work on as well

Lastly, turn on your camera. Turn on your camera. If you are actually using a system like we are right now called StreamYard

you're able to do what we're doing right now. We have the camera and the slide deck

It is very, very difficult to look at somebody's slide deck only on your screen in a virtual environment and not get distracted by your email, by your Twitter account, by your kids that are in the other room, by whatever thing that you have going on work or whatever it is that is commanding additional screens in your environment

It's hard to keep the engagement. I'm sure many of you right now, besides streaming this live, have something else that's distracted

you during these engagements. Putting on a camera reminds you that there's somebody else on the other side of that screen

talking to you. It lets them know, hey, there's a person here

Usually when there's a person and they are looking at me through their camera, they get

the engagement. They actually say, okay, there's a person I need to pay attention

I need to respect their time. They're talking to me. That's how it works. For many people that

just do webinars that have no camera involved, it is extremely, extremely easy to disengage

or to not be able to be an active participant and ask questions or take notes or whatever it is

because you've just gotten distracted by whoever's tweeting their favorite dog on Twitter or whatever

cute animal that was just tweeted. And then you've lost the whole context of whatever that slide or

whatever the thing the person was teaching you. Turn on the camera as a speaker. It engages your

audience. It lets them know that you're real. It lets them know that you're there, they're speaking

to you. So definitely do that if you get the opportunity. That's all I have at this time

but I'm actually going to kick it over. And I did this on purpose. One, I leave my slide with an

action item. You can see it says get them involved from the start. I want all of you new speakers to

make sure you engage your audience before your speaking starts, before your session starts

Engage them as they walk through the door. The number one thing I want you to take away from my

deck is an action item to start talking to the people as they walk through the door. Before you

get started, it relaxes your nerves. It gets the right tone. It allows you to engage your audience

right off the bat. Leaving you with the rest of my contact information, I always let my users know

or my users, see, I'm a technical person, let my audience know they can reach me. Again, I'm

relating to them. I'm telling them, hey, reach out after the fact. Tweet me. Hit me up on my blog

Ask me questions. When you leave this room, still engage me. I want to know about you

I want you to learn more from me. This is how you reach me. So I always end with that

Thank you