Thoughts on Public Speaking

I gave my first public speaking engagement today, presenting a talk called What We Know About You: Getting More From Web Analytics at the Remix Australia conference here in Melbourne.

The fact that this was my first real public speaking gig surprises people when I tell them, given I ran the Web Standards Group here in Melbourne for at least four years, and was always the guy on stage who introduced the evening’s speaker. But being the friendly MC who says nice things about the speaker and announces the bar tab is a very different job from preparing a 45 minute presentation of your own, and that was something I’d never done.

I recently decided that it was time for that to change. Today I got up on stage in front of 100 people and talked about web analytics — how you can interpret them, and how you can use them to improve your site, specifically with data-backed personas — something that we’ve been doing a bit of at SitePoint recently (I wrote an article about the process we followed a while back).

Now that I’ve had some time to reflect on the experience (a few hours, anyway) here are the lessons I learned from my Remix10 experience:

• Preparing a presentation forces you to really think about things — not just ponder over some stuff, but really consolidate your thoughts on something and arrange them in a way that can be communicated in a compelling fashion. There is too much noise out there and not enough signal — the last thing anyone needs is another half-arsed presentation.
• There is no such thing as being over-prepared. I don’t know how many hours I spent preparing my presentation, but it was a freaking lot. Converting Webalizer logfiles to Excel spreadsheets, crunching and combining and combing those data files for patterns worth talking about, restructuring the story I was telling, refining the transitions between every slide, trawling for the perfect image that didn’t breach any copyright restrictions, writing out my notes word-for-word, reading them out loud and re-reading them, testing myself on my notes when looking at only the slides, shuffling the order of slides … I haven’t slept much in the past four weeks, but it was so worth it. I forgot a couple of minor things on the day, but nothing crucial, and I had been over my slides so many times that it didn’t matter — the story was firmly ensconced in my head, so the talk flowed naturally and I didn’t get stuck at any stage, which was my biggest fear.
• Giving a run-through to my colleagues at work was invaluable. Not only did it boost my confidence that they laughed at my jokes and gave me some encouraging comments afterwards, they also spotted some minor structural issues which I was then able to rework before the big day.
• Similarly, I’m glad I attended the scheduled technical rehearsal the day before (apparently most other speakers didn’t show up for this). I was presenting from my Macbook Pro at Microsoft conference, so not surprisingly there were a few issues (mostly to do with colour calibration on the projector). But we worked it out, and it was stress-free, because we tested it the day before, not 5 minutes before.
• Live demos are impressive, but pre-recorded demos can still impress the crowd. I had a few demos that I opted to pre-record and run as videos, and I’m glad that I did. It meant that I could walk around the stage and talk about the demos while the movie was playing, rather than have to concentrate on running the demo. Other speakers bravely wrote live code during their presentations, and I applaud them for it. But there were also some speakers who experienced major technical hurdles with their demos, and didn’t have backups (apparently one presenter asked his audience to go take a 5 minute break and come back). I was perfectly happy not having to stress about whether my demo would hit any technical hitches.
• Positive feedback, whether it’s face-to-face or online over a channel such as Twitter, is the ultimate reward. Having someone grab you after a talk and exclaim “That was awesome, dude!” or shout to the Twitterverse that you’d given a “brilliant talk” is a massive ego boost. Not that I’m going to dwell on that as I can see how it could become an unhealthy motivator, but there’s no denying that it’s nice hearing people tell you that you rock.

I’ll be plain old Matt again tomorrow in the office, but today, I felt like the man. It’s a good feeling. Perhaps I’ll do it again some time.

posted: 02.06. 2010, 22:23 (0)