We perform in public. Preparing for your first conference talk

Greetings, colleagues in the shop. I'll start with a disclaimer. I myself am not an experienced storyteller, but only learning. Perhaps that is why my experience will be of interest to other newcomers. Experienced presenters, who have something to add - please unsubscribe in the comments or in a personal - what could be done better.

It all started with the fact that our company failed to speak at the RIF + KIB, for various reasons, and for a long time it has been wanted. The next interesting industry event is “ E-Commerce Week ”, and our reports included in the program of the event (not without the help of razmolot ).

Having read articles on Habré ( one , two , three , etc. ), I began to prepare for my first public appearance.

So. First: Goals. As smart people wrote correctly on Habré - the presentation is not “ about what ”, but “ why ”.
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My goals were as follows:

Presentation objectives

1. Experience
2. Karma
3. It’s just okay to perform, having packed time (30-40 minutes), without having lulled the audience.

Now more.
1. Experience - the only way to learn how to perform well is, you won’t believe, to do it again and again. Books, articles, trainings - will help you accelerate, learn faster, but no more. In the end - you still need to go on the "battlefield". To err, stutter, blush, but to gain invaluable experience. Where do without funny mistakes!

2. Karma (do not laugh) - to convey to the consumer information about rakes and underwater mines, which are set by web studios. And on which the unprepared Customer can run into. Yes, confidence in the market as a whole is an important task, even if right now it does not lead to profit.

3. It is normal to speak - the task is minimum, but also maximum. For the first time is something.

Directly the task of promoting the company, get customers - was not intended. Not all at once.
To set real, not transcendental tasks - it turned out to be good ideas in practice.

Preparation of the material and the performance itself

Step one is intelligence. Who performs in the section with me? What companies? And google them? Theses co-rapporteurs.
Based on the topic of the section, theses of the co-rapporteurs and what I can tell about myself - the topics were chosen.

(!) Error at this stage - he gave theses too late to the organizers, and they did not have time to include them in printed handouts.

Step two - googling, collecting preliminary information, interviewing colleagues to clarify details on the topic of the presentation.

Step three - planning the performance itself, the sequence.



At this stop in more detail. For this, I personally use the ideology of mental maps ( Mind Map ). Armed with good paper (for photo printing) and a set of 20 gel color pens - I drew a mental map of performance . Chur for the quality of the graphics do not kick, I draw as I can.

Branches arranged in a clockwise direction, from "Introduction" to "Completion", and numbered the sequence of presentation of the material.
Then he armed himself with excel, made a table of the stages of the performance - so that the total time could be summed up conveniently, and scattered in stages the time that can be given to this stage. Next, we google the average speed of speech - about 100 words per minute. Here's what it looks like:


The time allotted for a separate stage of the performance entered in the branches of the mental map.

Slide preparation

Armed with the freshest OpenOffice.org 3.2 and Impress (I can’t stand for PowerPoint) and minidmaps, I sat down to draw slides. This is what guided:

1. Respect for the guys who organize the seminar - on the first and the last slide you need to show the logos of the event, the logo of the organizers. What is there, and our own logo.

2. Usability. Do not force the user to once again understand what is where. All slides are made on a simple tracing paper. In my case, this is the title at the top, and the content is centered.

3. If someone suddenly gets bored, he brought down the progress bar at the bottom, where he marked the START, the Finish and the intermediate stages. As the finale approaches, the bar fills.

Everyone is immediately aware of the scale of the disaster, and there is no feeling of “well, when will he finish, how many more slides are there?”.

4. Save the presentation. Yes, yes - do it in all imaginable formats, from pdf to ppt. And check right there! Copy all this to a USB flash drive, add the original images there in a separate folder. Sometimes presentations can “lose” pictures.

0. You can still protect the USB flash drive from infection - there are a few who will visit this public laptop with the projector. I use Panda Vaccination myself. After all, then insert it at home!

The presentation itself (1 Mb, pdf)

Performance

Before the performance, the wise section moderator gave a couple of tips, which I will share.
Try to engage the audience - ask them questions, ask to raise their hands, let them know - that their opinion, their interests are important.

Yes, another hint - you need to constantly keep the microphone at the correct distance. Some speakers are too close to hold, and you can hear the sniff of breathing. On the contrary, I constantly took my hand away, and it was audible badly. The second option is more common. But it will probably only come with experience.
(UPDATE: Here the pros say that some microphones should be kept strictly horizontally, while others advise the microphone-hands free, the second I like)

Be sure to make a coffee break BEFORE you start speaking, go with a local technician to the projector, check how your presentation works, copy materials, learn how slide switching works.

In total, the preparation took about 6 hours. Enough for now. If interested - I can tell you more about the topic of the speech, or about the Mind Map.

I learned the mental maps from Nikolai Nosov and from Tony Buzan's book “ Supermind ”.

PS Thanks to section moderators Natalia Chanysheva and Dmitry Sudakov , and to unknown authors of illustrations.
PPS I liked the performance in the same place Usability ( Dmitry Satin ), the best speaker from those whose reports I saw personally.