Blogging: Analogy with Presenting

Lately I have been reading tons of blogs to get inspiration on how to write. I never had the motivation to write not even a diary, despite the thought that my mom would find the diary, I always preferred the dialogue with someone whose reaction I could see and maneuver the discussion to evolve in a common understanding.

I have been reading blogs where there were no comments left. This is quiet horrible I guess for the author as horrible as standing in front of hundreds of people presenting and no one shows any facial expression. Believe me I was there. I was as happy as a child when someone raises a brow during my presentation. Even thought that brow raising was not positively meant, I was so thankful that someone was reacting on what I was saying. I was then just focusing on this one person, which of course is not a good idea.

Going back to those blogs without obvious reactions; my thoughts were drifting away trying to imagine what the blogger would be thinking on writing the next blog and still no reaction. He or she maybe sitting in front of the pc asking „is anybody out there? …there?… there?“ (echo). Ok, getting really drifted by imagination here….

So how do you really get more attention or more reaction on your blog?

This question seems to come more frequently, judging on all the advice you can find on social media. Some points are helpful, some points rather not.

One thing they have in common though is to be authentic and oh, don’t forget the storytelling. Then I thought, wait a minute, this is how I have been holding up my presentations.

With 15 years of presentation experience, with a lot of terrible ones I need to say, I myself developed a way to present those quiet boring company presentations to get more reaction at least from the front row.

Here is how I have done it:

Authenticity:

Accepting, speaking and writing with my trilingual challenges.

I was raised with 3 languages, sometimes we even spoke all 3 languages during dinner. The tricky thing about raised with different languages is that you can get rather confused and you don’t really have a focus on speaking and writing on one language.  To keep the story short; I myself make a lot of mistakes, specially around grammar. Luckily I do look foreign, so I thought people would pardon some of my mistake during a presentation.

In other words I am not perfect, I do not speak perfectly.

Simple vs. Sophisticated:

I thought working for some world leading companies I need to speak their language with lots of technical terms and of course with rhetorical brilliance.

It was really hard keeping up with colleagues, who seem to have swallowed the entire band of an encyclopedia and had German philology studies and spent some time as an exchange student at Oxford University.

Until the day I needed to help a customer understand a presentation of one of my colleagues. You see our customers felt left behind during such presentation. Some did not even try to ask question, maybe because they really didn’t understand what has been presented or maybe they couldn’t think of a way to ask the question in a sophisticated way.

Either way I guess a lot of presentations gave the presenter more of an arrogant touch and gave more distance to the listener.

Using simple everyday terms helped my customer understand me and gave me a status of a trusted advisor. I got more attention, more nodding and more raised brows  when I used my own words on presentations rather speaking those sophisticated terms just to sound professional.

Visualization

I am a huge fan of Whiteboarding. Whiteboarding is a presentation technique that has been copied from school. Remember when your science professor explained the weather cycle, drawing the different kinds of clouds etc.? Yes that is practically white boarding. Explaining technical terms or complicated things with drawing helps your audience understand the topic faster, because our brain processes pictures better than words. Now you might think, yeah, however you also have pictures on your slides. That is true, however, the difference is that the whiteboard is developed during the presentations. AND the best thing is this way you pick up your audience. They practically develop the whiteboard with you. This also results into a great dialogue with the audience.

With blogging you can visual a part of it with videos or some series of picture showing a process.

Storytelling

The everyday life tells the best story. Why? Because almost everyone experiences those things that happen to you too. They can relate to these things.

The most successful presentation on a technical summit had the title: A Day in the Life of Mr. Smith.

This presentation was about Business Mobility, so it has a lot to do with Software Applications that are used in business.

Why did I think it was successful? Besides that I had some laughs to my build in jokes, the people were already lining up to ask more questions while I was still on stage.

So I try to tell some examples out of my life or other analogies to explain something. These are small stories you can tell. This is how you can build some highs and lows to your presentation/blog.

I wonder if some of you can still tell with how many languages I was brought up? Anyone?