Tips and Tricks for Presentations and Panels

• All those fancy charts you want for your presentation are locked behind paywalls? Do a google image search for what you’re looking for, like “number of Facebook users“.*
• Want to know what “real people” say about something? You’re not going to find it on LinkedIn or Twitter. Use OpenBook.
• Want honest feedback? Don’t ask people if your presentation was “okay” or if you did well. Say, “tell me three things I can do better next time.”
• Always have a plant in the audience prepared to ask a question. No one wants to be the first person to raise their hand.
• Conversely, always be the first person to ask a question, if you’re attending a seminar. Make it an interesting one, but easy. It gets the ball rolling, and it’s the nice thing to do.
• If you’re on a panel, ask questions of your fellow panelists. Your audience came for a discussion, a conversation, not a talk from a hydra.
• Smile and have a sense of humour.
• If people look bored, move on to the next slide or point. It’s your responsibility to be interesting, it is not their responsibility to care. They were probably forced to attend anyway.
• As Kurt Vonnegut said about storytelling, “start as close to the end as possible.”

*IF THE CHART COSTS MONEY, BUY IT. Only use this as a way of seeing what’s available or getting the sense of some statistics. (I’m serious. Don’t be a dick.)

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