SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, USA – March 14, 2013 – My very first business presentation was in 1977. I was a shy, nerdy teen, presenting to my local Rotary Club, shaking with nervousness, hoping to get it over with as quickly as possible without letting those nerves overwhelm me.

36 years later, things are a little different. The nerves have been gone for years, I can present off the top of my head, and I actually get ENERGY from presenting to others. These days, I absolutely love presenting — and connecting with audiences over things I’m passionate about.

I keep running across articles on best practices for presentations, made by self-proclaimed “presentation experts” – and I find that their counsel really match up with my experience. So rather than echo someone else, I wanted to share my own key learnings gleaned—sometimes painfully—over the last few decades.

First requirement: “bringing the Energy”

You’ll find all sorts of books admonishing that you use no more than four bullets per slide. That you wear a business suit. That you pause for a second between every sentence. You can do all those things — but nothing about your presentation matters if you’re not bringing The Energy. I’m not talking a brighter smile nor an upbeat voice. Bringing the Energy means being ON in every sense of the word: full of passion, vigor, and a strong desire to give something to the people who have given up their very valuable time to hear you speak.

Some people naturally have this energy. It’s infectious, fun and gives attendees hope that they can do more, be more in their careers. Bullets or no bullets, five topics or one: if you can’t bring energy to a preso and infuse it with your audience, you might as well stay home, because audiences will feel robbed of their time.

If you don’t feel you have this energy – as I felt in front of that Rotary Club – you need to act like you do until it comes naturally. Imagine the most  engaging, gregarious, and effusive person you know. Now stand in front of the mirror and pretend to be that person. Imagine telling your imaginary audience some incredibly important secret, or news, that will affect their lives in a big way. And when you’re presenting, turn on this persona and your heartfelt desire to help people’s lives will come across.

Dare to tell personal stories

After millennia around the campfire, people still love stories and being entertained by a great storyteller. Storytelling puts us instantly into our imaginations. Don’t just present your argument, or your statistics, or your tips. Inspire your audience with stories in which you (or others) have overcome a challenge that audiences might face, related to your presentation. Make sure to share a personal experience that will make you seem human and someone they can relate to.

For example, one of my topics is social media engagement. Most speakers talk about how consumer engagement is good, why you must listen to your customers, etc. But also, engagement drives up your content’s ranking in search results. So I tell a story about my wife, showing a photo I posted of her on Flickr, entitled “Hottest Woman Ever.” Because her photo is on Flickr, a huge driver of conversations, it ranks #1 in a Google search of “hottest woman ever,” and it’s a great way to prove my point. By bringing something personal into my business-oriented presentation, I get people to chuckle a bit and the presentation becomes more interesting.

Put yourself in your audience’s shoes and tell a story about how someone like them overcame a challenge.

Add a little drama

We are emotional creatures. In fact, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman has found that 95% of our decisions are based on emotional decision-making. Emotions help make the data in our presentations real – and I don’t feel I’ve done a good job if I haven’t made my audiences feel what they were hearing was real. So inject humor. Add a little outrage or shock. It may feel a little overblown but remember that you are onstage. The play’s the thing! Strut and fret a little already – as long as you keep it credible and audiences know that you’re doing a little entertaining, not coming unglued.

Know your content inside and out

I customize every single presentation for each new event. I’ll find some current events, or news, that tie my presentation to what the audience has been reading about that week in the news. I’ll do some research and update my statistics, or I’ll tweak the copy specifically for that audience (a grocery business conference, a health-and-fitness event, etc.). But I always make sure I know my content inside and out.

Why? Because equipment fails. Videos freeze. Hecklers heckle. People make faces at you or will take a phone call during your presentation. Stuff happens. Only by knowing your content backwards and forwards can you suffer these mishaps with ease.

So. You can join Toastmasters and you can wear the right suit and you can do a one-second pause between each sentence. You can follow all these old-school tips on how to be a great speaker. But in my experience over 36 years, without these four key requirements, you’ll be fully appropriate and fully uninteresting. (*high five!*)

Try these four best practices and I can guarantee that your audience will actively seek out an event organizer to tell them what a great experience they had listening to you speak.

For a few more tips for beginning speakers, see my interview in this roundup by Annie Jennings PR.

Social Business — the idea of aligning your entire business, not just Marketing, with customer input, feedback and preference via social channels — continued to be the primary topic of interest for my audiences this year. Companies are making efforts in connecting with customers via social channels, but wondering, “how can we do this better?” Consequently, this year my talks have shifted from consumer behavior into business operations, and I’ve discussed social media resourcing, operations, process, governance and related topics like crisis communications and training. I’m finding that many attendees are time-starved and struggling with internal communications, cross-departmental handoffs and left-hand-right-hand issues. So, discussions have centered around those challenges.

Business schools, and their students, have also awoken to the opportunities provided by digital, and this year I served as adjunct and/or guest lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School fo Business, the University of Washington’s masters program, and Dublin City University’s Business School.

I’m predicting that local and mobile technologies and behaviors will become prominent in 2013 as the conversation shifts away from social and toward ubiquitous, local digital. At the close of this year, I had the chance to lead a panel discussion with app developers and Microsoft around “Is Windows Mobile 8 a game-changer?” at Innovation Dublin 2012. When social and e-comm become local and mobile, how do consumer behaviors change? How do internal operations change? What kinds of intelligence can we gather in order to increase marketing relevance and consumer interest?

I’ve got a few keynotes now in negotiation for 2013. Keep an eye on the website for upcoming dates. And have a fantastic holiday season!

- Eric

Eric Weaver speaking at the 2010 Cruise3Sixty Conference – June 2010 from Eric Weaver on Vimeo.

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA – June 6, 2010 – My presentation to 1400 cruise industry professionals on “Why Social Media Marketing, for Beginners”.