Salvaging a Presentation Train Wreck

If you attend conferences for any reason, you know that almost nothing is worse than sitting through a bad presentation. Except of course, if you suddenly find yourself giving one. Then what?

As a presenter, there are a number of ways you can quickly find yourself at the wheel of a train wreck, from technical problems to a combative or skeptical audience. A presentation can wreck quickly, such as when you realize you brought the wrong slides or the audio goes completely dead, or in agonizing slow motion such as when you come to the dreaded realization that the content or your presentation style is going over with the audience like a ton of lead.

Regardless of why or how, your job as the presenter is to grab the wheel and will the train back on the tracks. You owe it to the people who took time out of their day to give you the privilege of their attention to make it work.

Which is exactly what I did not do in one particular presentation. My particular train wreck involved having prepared content that ended up being a complete mismatch with the interests and background of the audience. That become glaringly evident right from the start, but rather than toss the deck and adapt on the fly, I forged ahead in the hope that somewhere in the slides I’d find some common ground with the group arrayed in front of me.

The end result was a disinterested audience who asked just a couple of cursory questions at the end. While I hope they took away something positive – some insights or understandings they didn’t have before – I doubt many walked out eagerly waiting to hear when and where I might be speaking next.

The kicker is I because the mismatch was clear early on – I asked some hand-raiser questions like usual at the outset to gauge their skills and interests – I had an opportunity to toss the deck and just talk to their interests. To do that takes both some guts and a load of confidence, and while I feel pretty good about where I stand on both fronts, I still didn’t take that plunge.

What lessons did I learn that I’ll take into every presentation from now on?

• Do your audience homework: This is where my presentation initially failed. I thought I had done the homework, but a combination of errors led me to prepare to speak to an audience that looked very little like the one I found sitting in front of me. Be crystal clear with the conference organizers on the background of those attending. Get a list in advance with names, companies, and job titles at the least. See if you can do a pre-conference informal survey on Twitter, through the organizer’s blog or e-newsletter, etc. Understand the context surrounding your presentation – is it part of a larger conference? What’s the focus? Who else is presenting, and is there any overlap with your proposed content?
• Ask the audience questions up front: Before you launch into your opening story, pause and ask a few questions to validate the results of your homework. Find out who they are, what they do, how familiar they already are with your subject, and gauge what they might want to hear or learn in the time allotted. After all it’s better to know up front, than a week later in a horrible post-event survey. In my case, I actually did ask these questions, but the results surprised me to such an extent that they threw me off and I failed to properly react.
• Most critically – Be willing the dump the deck, and always have a backup plan: What if you find yourself in my situation, where you quickly discover that the presentation you’re ready to give is not at all what the audience is interested in hearing? Have a plan – or at least a broad sense of some options – for what you would do. Can you cherry pick a subset of slides that would make for an interesting – if different than planned – presentation? Have you mentally prepped which slides you might pick? If not, do you have the knowledge and confidence to go completely off-script and have an engaging, no-slide talk with the audience?

By all means rock your slides (I highly recommend reading Garr Reynolds’ blog and books), but the most beautiful and informative slides in the world are useless if they don’t convey information the audience is interested in hearing.

Obviously do your audience homework in advance, which is pretty much standard advice for presenting to a group of any size. But if you find yourself in my situation, where your audience still isn’t the one you were expecting, get ready to do toss the script out the window, be flexible, and focus on creating an interesting and positive experience for everyone in the room. Do everything you can to keep that presentation train on the rails.

Making A Change: Leaving Ignite, Joining Pace

A bit of news on the personal front: Today is my last day as Director of Strategic Innovation with Ignite Social Media. As of next Tuesday, November 1st, I’ll be joining the team at Pace Communications (@PaceComm) as Director of Digital Strategy.

Working at Ignite for the past two years has been incredible, both in terms of the daily experience and the insane growth and change the agency has gone through – such as growing 4x in staff count and picking up ridiculously cool clients like Samsung, Microsoft and Chrysler, among many others. I have no doubt that their already impressive client list will become even more enviable as time goes on.

I also had the privilege of working with insanely smart and funny people and getting a crash course on how social media marketing for large brands is *supposed* to work. Throw in all the behind-the-scenes stuff that truly makes Ignite Ignite - like Mystery Trips (Jamaica anyone?), Nerf wars, sarcastic Yammer threads, pups in the office, out-of-context quotes, inspirational and occasionally disturbing brainstorms – and it all adds up to not so much a job as a slightly crazy and very inspirational home away from home.

All of it has been wonderful, and all of it will be missed.

Sometimes however a great opportunity pops up that you just can’t pass by, and that’s the case with Pace. It’s a combination of the right team, role, timing and circumstances that’s making this move happen, and I can’t tell you how excited I am to get started.

Content drives conversation, offline as well as on, and as a content marketing agency Pace is in a unique spot to help companies spark and nurture conversations around their brands, products, experiences, and communities. I get to help drive and shape those efforts across both digital and social – all in all, it’s a pretty cool challenge.

As a bonus, Pace is located just a few minutes from my house, shrinking my daily roundtrip commute from nearly 3 hours to less than 20 minutes. My wonderful, and very patient, wife and kids will get to see a whole lot more of me in the near future (ready or not!).

I’ll share more here and on Twitter (@kevinbriody) as I settle in. Thanks again to everyone at Ignite, and to my future colleague at Pace I’ll see you next week!

Photo by delphwynd via Flickr an CC License

Two Insanely Bad Social Media ROI Arguments

Doubters notwithstanding, there are some very useful methods and tools, available right now, to understand the return on investment (ROI) for your social media marketing efforts.

I’m not revisiting those here. Rather, this post is about two arguments I’m still seeing pop up time and again from speakers, marketers, columnists, and strategists alike. Arguments that will get you exactly nowhere when it comes time to fight for, and justify, your social media budget.

What are they?

• The Opportunity Cost Argument aka “What’s the ROI for social media? Well, what’s the ROI on picking up the phone? What’s the ROI on your secretary?” This line of reasoning uses fear to scare managers into investing in social media efforts, in effect saying that your customer expect it, and if you’re not active, not listening or engaging, there is a risk for huge customer dissatisfaction.
• The Aspirational Argument aka “Those who really know social media aren’t talking about ROI.” This relies variously on the appeal of the shiny and new mixed with the fear of being left behind as a company or professional.

Don’t get me wrong, buried in both arguments are grains of truth and worthy sentiments, particularly around opportunity cost. Depending on your industry, yes, your customers might be very active on social media and your lack of monitoring and engagement could result in both lost opportunities or worse, a disconnect with the needs and interests of your customers.

But acknowledging that doesn’t excuse you from taking steps to quantify what kind of ROI you could reasonable expect for taking the social media plunge – whether it’s a concrete metric like new sales generated or a more indirect, proxy ROI metric like higher customer satisfaction. Your job as a business professional is in part to understand what your company stands to get for money you propose investing – relying on fear and generalities unsupported by numbers is just not going to cut it.

I have less sympathy for the aspirational argument, which seems to be flung around by people who have never run a serious budget, are making their living on the speaking circuit where you aren’t generally accountable for actual results, or simply can’t be bothered to do the hard math. Supporters of this argument fall back on the “cool kids” line of thinking, making others feel dumb or like anti-social luddites just for daring to ask smart business questions.

Social media is rapidly maturing as an element in the marketing and communications mix, and just like the other elements – email, direct mail, TV, PR, digital, etc. – it is reasonable and necessary to try to calculate what you get out of the resources invested.

Don’t make the mistake of falling back on either of these two arguments if you expect to get your next social media initiative funded in the real world.