How to effectively present in English in the 21st Century

I don’t like them. I think they are useless and are a product of the 1990s.

Presentations have a bad name. When people are told they “have to” attend a presentation, the image in their minds is of being sat in a room, listening to an unprepared presenter reading slides about a subject that is boring, full of jargon, has no story and no point.

So, as a presenter you are beginning your presentation with an audience full of preconceived, negative ideas about what you are going to talk about. if you begin your presentation in a way that confirms their expectations, you will already have lost your audience.

To overcome this you need to begin your presentation in an unexpected way. That is why the use of a contents slide only confirms to your audience that your presentation is going to be boring. Instead, eliminate the contents slide completely. All you need is an introduction slide with the title of your presentation. That slide should be on when your audience arrive. Then, once you get started you are straight in to your presentation.

This is a simple change to the ‘standard format’, but it can make a huge difference to the way your audience views your presentation.

Managing your audience’s expectations is one part of your presentation that is increasingly becoming more important. Audiences’ attention spans are becoming shorter and shorter and keeping your audience’s attention focussed on your presentation is becoming increasingly difficult. Today, you have to think like a movie director. To have to think about what will grab your audience’s attention and what will keep your audience’s attention. Following tried and tested formats for a presentation is just not going to do that today.

Product Launches.

First there was Qualcomm at CES with their ‘crazy’ show. Then there was Sony launching their Play Station 4 with no Play Station, no price and no launch date. Now there is Samsung with its highly sexist launch show For their Galaxy S4 phone. 2013 is turning out to have an unusually high number of presentation fails.

What I don’t understand is why companies with very creative, professional and intelligent employees should make such basic errors. Of course being different is important. It would be a very boring world if every company launched their products the same way. But what Qualcomm, Sony and now Samsung have failed to do is to let their new products speak for themselves and be the ‘star of the show’. That should always be the highest priority.

Qualcomm’s mistake was they put so much effort into their ‘show’ they forgot about the reason they were doing a show in the first place. Read the blog accounts afterwards and all you see written is about the show and little or nothing about the product. CESS was in January, now, just two months later nobody remembers anything about the product or products Qualcomm were trying to show off.

Sony’s mistake was they had no product. Putting on a product launch with no product is just plane stupid. Particularly as this is a games console product. The media want to play with the new product, they want to get their hands on it and see if what you are saying is true. Sadly in Sony’s case all people now remember is that there was no product.

Samsung’s Galaxy S4 launch should have been the best product launch the company had ever done. Instead we got a Broadway show. Then Samsung essentially went about upsetting every modern thinking woman in the world by showing stereotypical images of women. Sexy Brazilian girls, girls waiting for their nail varnish to dry and getting excited when a gardener takes his shirt off. And nobody has any idea how much the phones will cost.

These companies have no excuse. They have the money and the resources to put on a proper launch presentation. Instead, they focus so much on being different, they forget that the reason they are there is to launch a product. The product needs to be up front and centre with no silly, gimmicky distractions.

So, for all companies out there who are planning on doing a presentation for a product launch here is the formula:

Product + Available date + Price (+ Hands-on Demonstration) = Successful product launch

How you put those elements into your presentation and in what order is up to you and your creativity. But they need to be there. Without these elements, you are going to fail in your product launch because you have not shown your audience what they came to see.

The product is the star, not the MC or presenter. Your goal is the have people talking about your product, not about the ‘show’

Samsung were lucky, they are the media’s current golden company. They can do no wrong. But your company might not be so lucky. So make sure you have all the elements, and if you don’t, delay the launch event until you have.

One of the biggest complaints that come from attendees of presentations is that the presenter was boring. In today’s world being boring when presenting is just going to turn your audience off you and on to their smart devices.

No matter what your subject is, there really is no excuse for boring your audience. You are not presenting for your own good. You are presenting for your audience, you are in effect giving something to your audience and you have a responsibility to give them that in a way your audience will find stimulating and interesting.

A good presenter today is an entertainer. I know the traditionalists will disagree with me, but the truth is audiences want and expect to be entertained when they attend a presentation. It is no longer acceptable to say “but our business is a serious business” that is the excuse of a 20th century management nobody who has not moved in to the twenty-first century.

If you want your presentation to have impact, to be remembered and acted upon then you need to present your message in an entertaining and logical manner.

Failing that, you can continue to bore audiences, but do not expect your message to be acted upon, remembered or even you being asked back to speak again. You lost your opportunity – you lost.

Over the last few months I have been training groups of employees at a large Korean company. All the students are non-native English speakers, and all the employees have differing levels of English.

In each 4 week course ( we do four hours per week) the students do two presentations. One at the beginning and one at the end.

These students are continuing their everyday work, and have to prepare their presentations in their own time, and, if they can find the time, during their working hours.

A number of interesting observations have come up that I would like to share with you.

1. at the beginning of the course, almost all students believe they cannot present in English. By the end of the course all students have the realisation that actually they can present in English. This has nothing to do with the course, or my teaching method – sadly. This has everything to do with confidence. At the beginning of the course, most of the students simply have no confidence in their English ability. Once they have completed two, short presentations in font of their peers they begin the believe in themselves.

This problem in endemic in Korea. Most business people are tested on their English ability before entering a company, then they spend the next ten or twenty years only speaking in Korean, with the occasional English greeting and a “thank you”. If you do not use English regularly, then you are not going to be confident using English in your professional life.

If you want to feel better at using English, then find every opportunity you can to use English.

2. Many students over prepare their short presentation and end up either memorising their words, or reading a script. These students are always the worst presenters. They lose their place during their presentation, they hardly ever look at their audience and they spend too long looking down at their notes / script that the words they are speaking sound muffled and unclear.

Doing a short presentation in class is not the same as doing a keynote presentation in front of a hundred English speaking journalists at the launch of a new product, but all the same, if the presentation is important, the way you communicate with your audience is vital. Reading a script will prevent you from connecting with your audience in a personal way and you will fail. Not only will you fail, but your whole presentation will fail.

You need to know what you are talking about. If you do not know your subject well enough, then you should not be presenting. Reading a script is unforgivable, and simply tells your audience that they are not important enough for you to prepare properly.

Preparing for a presentation is about knowing your topic, knowing your stories and knowing what it is you want to tell your audience. It is not difficult. Any presenter, who is presenting in a foreign language should have the necessary language skills already. If they don’t, they should not be presenting.

3. It is hard to let go of practices learnt in the past. Yet, letting go of 1990s style presentations is something we must all do if we are going to be great communicators in the twenty-first century.

Maintaining a love affair with complex charts, text and bullet points is damaging your ability to communicate effectively. A twenty-first century presentation is about presenting your ideas in a clear and concise way. It is not about presenting slide after slide of technical data. That simply does not work today. If your grandmother would not understand your presentation, then it is not simple and concise enough.

If your presentation is all about technical data, then consider preparing a handout with the details. Then in your presentation itself focus on the key points that you have pulled out from the data. Explain to your audience that the detailed data is contained in a handout.

On a side note here – I am shocked and amazed when students turn round and tell me that preparing a handout means more work! Unbelievable! If your presentation is important enough for you to be presenting it to an audience, then a handout should never be considered “more work”. It should be considered an essential part of your presentation for your audience’s complete understanding.

These are just three things I have picked up over the last few months. There are more and I will write about these over the coming weeks.

Yesterday, I did a presentation training course with a large company here in Korea. After dinner, I did an exercise inspired by Garr Reynolds’ Google presentation where he asks the audience to talk about the best and worst presentations they had attended.

The Results:

The most striking think about the results was that both the good things and the bad things about the presentations my students had attended in the past, were pretty much the same as any western audience would say.

The interesting thing here is that many people think that there is a difference between western and eastern audiences and what they want. Clearly, from this rather unscientific experiment, that thinking is not true. Audiences around the world appear to want the same thing. I found particularly interesting the fact that my students want humour, simple and short presentations with a presenter who is confident and not afraid of eye contact. My students do not want a presenter who is always looking at a script with too much content in their slides and using too much jargon.

Pretty much want any western audience would say.

Next time you are presenting to an international audience, keep in mind that had I done this experiment with almost any audience in almost any country, I would most likely to have got the same result.