Vote: Don’t talk to your audience – fascinate it!

The ability of the speaker to captivate and fascinate his audience is never easy to achieve particularly when coupled with the need to actively involve the listeners or spectators who are not only the main focus of attention but also, invariably the most critical of judges.

If you think back to previous events, how often have you observed or felt an atmosphere of frustration because the participant’s attention was no longer focused on the topic under discussion or the problem in question? How often have you come across a situation where a question addressed to the audience appears to be ignored by 50% of the audience on a rough hand count? Psychologists will bombard you with vastly complex communication techniques based on behavioural and psychological studies but all too often what the audience really wants is to be involved, consulted or simply just to be recognised as real people rather than numbers on a delegate list or payroll computer. In many such cases this is primarily a lack of insight: The conference organiser may be the one that everybody looks at if everything falls flat, but in reality the speaker is the person ultimately responsible for whether his audience has to endure one-way communication (i.e. being talked at) or can enjoy the experience and dynamism of true two-way communications created through Interaction. Through the use of Interaction conference organisers can help themselves and their speakers create the type of environment and atmosphere that customers or management have asked them to create and to facilitate the delivery and feedback in a dynamic fashion.

Interaction in the context of a conference or meeting can be described as a two-way participative process to facilitate transmission of information, collection of feedback, action planning and data/ collection through the involvement and participation of the audience.

Participation, retention, empowerment, entertainment, motivation and data collection/analysis can all be facilitated by introducing interaction. However to illustrate what this means to the organiser and his audience, listed alongside are just some of the uses that we at BR