Question

describe public speaking as an interactive process

Answer 1

Don’t panic, but if you want to engage your audience in a presentation, you have about 30 seconds to make it happen. Recent studies show that the first lapse of attention happens about halfway through that first minute. If you haven’t caught their attention yet, there’s a good chance you’ll lose their focus to their phone, laptop, reading materials, daydreams, etc.

However, there are a few techniques that can help you hijack a person’s flighty focus and reset audience engagement. Then you can direct it towards hanging on your every word.

Over the years, Duarte’s studied thousands of effective presentations. These presentations kept audiences engaged, engrossed, and even on the edge of their seats. What we’ve learned is that your success in engaging the audience is largely determined by three key elements: how you structure your presentation, how well you understand your audience, and how you deliver the information.

Even if you craft a spellbinding, dramatic narrative, there’s still a chance that you can lose audience members as you talk – especially if those listeners can’t relate to you.

To ensure maximum audience engagement, make sure you find common ground with the people to whom you’re presenting. Common ground helps create empathy; if an audience can relate to the story you are telling them, they’ll empathize with you and may begin to care.

There are a couple of techniques you can use to get to know your audience before you present, so you can be sure you’re relevant.

One of the best audience engagement strategies is to divide the audience into many subsegments. Choose the subsegment which is most likely to adopt your perspective and appeal to them. There are countless ways to segment an audience, including by demographics, job title, geographies and more.