1. Add Vocal Variety.
Even the most boring presentation in the world can come to life when a presenter employs vocal variety techniques. Specifically, changing how phrases are sounded out, raising your voice for important statements, or even lowering your voice for effect can make unexciting content much more interesting. Changing from a monotone to a lively delivery can help your audience perk up and listen.

2. Add Passion.
Take the most uninteresting topic in the world, add a passionate presenter, and—like magic—you have something worth listening to! Audiences are very smart and can instantly discern whether a presenter truly believes what he/she is saying. When a topic is presented with genuine excitement and passion, even the most technical fare can come to life.

3. Make It Real.
One of the biggest challenges for presenters of technical content is creating relevance, especially for a group that may only have light familiarity with a topic. For example, not every person is interested in data warehousing and analytics. However, if a presenter can show how analytics works using “day in the life” scenarios for a retailer, suddenly that content becomes applicable. Approved case studies work even better as audiences discern that the presentation is more than “vaporware” and, in fact, touches the daily decision-making of consumers. By making the information real with examples and case studies, a presenter answers the inherent question of a listener, “What’s in this presentation for me?”

4. Bring on the Visuals.
Most presenters understand that audience members absorb information in different ways. Some prefer an auditory approach, others prefer handouts, and there are plenty of people who would rather watch a multimedia video than listen to a one-hour lecture. That’s why an interesting presentation uses most/all of these devices—and often! Bring pictures, videos, charts, handouts, and more to your presentation. Employing two or more visual aids helps keep audiences interested in your subject matter.

5. Slow Down and Breathe.
There’s no rule of thumb that says a presentation must be delivered with breathless abandon. In fact, use of elongated or pregnant pauses in a presentation can give an audience time to mentally catch up, especially if the presentation is overflowing with facts and figures. Take time to breathe, look around, and make sure people are engaged. A rapid fire presentation with slides rolling every minute or two is usually disconcerting, and it may leave an audience with only a small fraction the information you intended to convey.

These are just five steps to fix a boring presentation—there are certainly more tips. Please contribute to the conversation by adding the best and worst practices you’ve observed!

1. Capture my attention. First, you have to be noticed. You need to engage my faculties, my senses, my front-of-mind interest. You have massive competition for my attention, so this is where creativity and daring are required. Giving away $20 Amazon gift cards for $10? That garnered a ton of attention for Living Social. Offering 5% off this Wednesday only? Yawn …

2. Capture my imagination. You need to engage my mind, and make me think and dream. Use a compelling illustration that will stick, or start a train of thought that builds its own momentum. Don’t tell me about a three-tiered architecture that will create efficient data exchange. Make me imagine how I can find an answer to an obscure question in 10 milliseconds.

3. Capture my affections. We all know that engaging the emotions is the most powerful way to bring people along. So don’t merely explain, tell a story. Tell me about someone like me, someone whose life has been changed. Yes, the use of video in social media is a cool thing. I don’t need the technical details—just show the video of the discovery of Ted Williams. Even though that story continues to have twists and turns, it strikes us at a deep emotional level.

4. Capture my self-interest. All of the above doesn’t yet move me to action. You need to clearly explain the WIIFM (What’s In It For Me). I’m not going to act unless I know why I should. If it’s only because of something you want, I’m going to set up an elaborate defense. I will, however, take action for something I want—you need to put a spotlight on that, and point it out to me.

If you’re a marketer, or a public speaker (yes, that includes preachers), you need to structure your communications to touch all four of these “captures.” Grab your audience in the first 15 seconds. Move their minds and hearts immediately after. Make the call to action clear and compelling. If you want to capture the king and queen of my assent, then you need to neutralize the pawns and castles that fill my board each day. These four moves will go a long way toward achieving the goal.

* * * * *
You must admit — marketers have a curious way with language. For decades it was the industry’s goal to “target” an audience, as if to say the only way to make money was to treat consumers as objects to be destroyed. More recently, although we are using more 2.0-friendly language for interactive marketing, just as often we still use “target” and “engagement,” both of which project the consumer as an adversary.
Though it seems strange and disjointed, the language isn’t actually the problem. Even when we use the “right” terms — or at least terms the hypersensitive have less to be offended by — too often to be ignored, the problem is that our goal is still the same as it’s always been.
Consumer Electronics: An Analogy
Imagine walking into an electronics store in search of some speakers for your home entertainment system. You don’t know exactly which ones you want, but you’re pretty sure you’ve got an idea about how to narrow your choices. You just have a few questions you want to ask about the ones the store has available.
You track down a salesperson and explain what you’re looking for and what type of system you have. Easy enough.
A normal person would expect to be given helpful information, but the head of marketing, hip to the whole “Information Superhighway” thing that’s all the rage with the kids these days, meticulously trained the sales team on how to approach prospects. Thus, instead of giving you the answer, the salesperson hits you with a thirty-second explanation about how great his company is. Worse yet, there is no skip button (Not that
one would help).
Sound like any splash pages you’ve seen?
Beyond Appearances
This is what clueless people think passes for “marketing 2.0.” For all our ruminations and advocacy on the blogosphere, the goals of marketing today are the same as they’ve always been: Interruption and
Transaction. They are just dressed in a different garb.
Today’s marketers call what they do “engagement,” “interaction,” “relationship-building” or worse yet, “encouraging the customer to experience the brand.” However, substitute “brand” with “Tabasco enema,” and you can picture the usefulness of such tactics and how uncomfortable your audience is with them.
The sad news is that your company’s brand isn’t nearly as important to your audience as it is to you. Unless you’re the only provider available online, which is unlikely, it’s very easy for your audience to find someone else. No amount of “brand engagement” you pull out of your magic hat is going to make people think more about you than they do of themselves.
So don’t fool yourself about this “brand experience” thing. It’s important, and it can be done, but it isn’t going to happen because you dressed your marketing up with prettier language or pictures.