KEEPING AUDIENCE ATTENTION

CATCH 'EM AND KEEP 'EM

You're going to give a speech. The audience has shown up, silenced their cell phones, and is giving you their full attention. In this ideal scenario, the audience has accomplished their job.

Now you've got to fulfill your end of the bargain and give them what they've come for. Thankfully, there are several ways to do this, and before we give our attention to Berkun a bit later in this lesson, let's discuss a few of the best practices for keeping our audience eating from the palm of our hand.

Not literally—unless the topic of your speech is "How to Convince People to Literally Eat Out of Your Hand."

Which: ew.

The Span of an Audience

Take a second and ask yourself: what's my attention span like? Are you able to focus on a single task for extended periods of time? Or are you more of a multitask-er, splitting your focus between numerous small projects?

In our fast-paced and technology-driven society, prevalence has been placed on being able to accomplish a billion things at once, all while taking selfies, checking the POTUS' latest tweets, and creating a grocery list.

Needless to say, these days, attention span is limited. Half a century ago, you might be able to talk for a handful of hours to a group of captivated individuals who were interested in learning the long form logistics of mechanized farming from a well-seasoned pro.

Not so much anymore.

Communications experts have slightly varied opinions on what constitutes a "proper" length of time for a speech, but the consensus is to keep it short. Management professor and speaker Alf Rehn gives us his thoughts on the subject on his blog post, "The 20-Minute Rule for Great Public Speaking — On Attention Spans and Keeping Focus." Rehn writes about the importance of limiting the amount of speaking topics you attempt to convey in a single speech, and planning for what he calls the "optimal attention span."

When you're finished with Rehn's post, read "7 Tips for the 7-Minute Attention Span." This author believes that twenty minutes is a bit much to expect from our contemporary audiences, and recommends condensing presentations even further—to a mere seven minutes.

After you've read both of these articles, consider these questions:

• Do you think a twenty-minute or a seven-minute presentation is a better bet for keeping an audience's attention?

• Are there different scenarios where each length of presentation might be best suited? Why? What are those differing occasions?

• Are both authors right? Are they both way off the mark? Do you have a wholly different take on how long a good speech should be?

Now you can check that text message you got while reading this section (and see how many likes the pics of your new puppy garnered).

Keep up the Pace

Pacing.

When it comes to giving a speech, pacing can be many speakers' Achilles' heel. On one hand, nerves and anxiety to just get the speech finished and over with might cause you to speed up the pace to a point where your audience misses your point altogether.

On the other hand, if you know that you tend to rush when giving a speech and slow things down too much, you can run the risk of losing your audience's attention entirely. You've got to find the perfect pace—and even this won't work for every single speech you ever give. The topic about which you're speaking, the size of the audience, and even the day on which your speech is being heard can all factor into the relative pacing of what you're going to say.

Have a look at "Quick and Easy Tips for Speaking Rate," by blogger and word enthusiast Susan Dugdale. The post offers strategies for identifying if you're a "too-fast" or "too-slow" speaker, then offers six specific ways you can work to set a comfortable and engaging pace that will work for both you and for your audience.

Are you feeling at pace with yourself?

We'll see ourselves out.

Audience Involvement

The last part of engaging your audience is to actually involve them in your presentation. Sound scary? It's less so than it might seem. Plus, there are many different ways to involve an audience in your speech, so you can utilize the ones that work best for you.

Now, more than ever before in the past, interactive audience participation can be done with minimal effort by the speaker. Read Kristi Hedges' Forbes article, "5 Easy Tricks to Make Your Presentation Interactive." This article spans two pages, so make sure you click through to the second page when you're instructed to do so.

Do any of Hedges' suggestions feel as though they might be ones you can implement? If not, never fear—we've got more.

Read Lisa Marshall's very short article, "How to Engage Your Audience." Again, this article requires that you click through to a second page once you reach the end of the first one, so don't neglect to do that.

You'll see that some of the tips Marshall suggests are comparable to—or pretty much the same as—the ones that Hedges mentioned in the previous article…think there might be a reason for that? Yep: these are important because they work.

We're only here to give you the info on what works, folks. We've got loads more on audience involvement coming up; in fact, that's the topic of our next lesson.