Share your speaking tips and tricks

[Former Member]

Please share your speaking tips and tricks that SAP TechEd '07 speakers can take advantage of when they present in Las Vegas, Munich, Bangalore, and Shanghai. Also, if you ever watched an excellent speaker, please share what you thought made him/her so effective. Hopefully, with all these great tips and tricks SDN and BPX communities will have some of the best public speakers out there!

[JimSpath]

There are some obvious (or should-be-obvious) tips, such as being prepared, being on time, having a backup plan and being a subject matter expert, and some fairly common speaker faults (too quiet or too formal), but here are the top 3 goals I strive for when I speak:

1) Time management. Having too little material for a 1 hour session, or trying to do a 2 hour lecture plus a 30 minute demo, or speaking up until the next session, are annoyances to avoid. I like to have too many slides so I can skip some, but my rule of thumb is about 1 slide per minute. Leave time for questions at the end, and for the spontaneous hallway conversations to erupt.

2) Rehearsal. It's not a sermon, or a strict one-way lecture, but I am normally more relaxed if I've given the material to several smaller crowds ahead of the bigger event.

3) Empathy. In a presentation class I took last year we learned how to tell if your audience is engaged. Telling a joke is great, but it is always helpful when people nod their heads, raise their hands or evoke body language showing they have been there, done that with the pain points of software and hardware management.