Maverick Indonesia

An Intern: Encountering Maverick’s CSL session

One week into my stint as an ITB intern at Maverick I received an invitation to sit in at a lecture that is part of the PR firm’s Corporate Social leadership (CSL) program. The program aims to help non-profit organizations conduct their own PR programs by running them through a 10-month course on public relations and communications skills.

The lecture was to be about online PR and presentation skills so I had two expectations. Firstly, I hoped to learn how to use what’s happening on the Net and online to help me communicate more efficiently. Secondly, I could benefit from skills that would enhance my presentations.

I was not disappointed.

On of the useful things I learned from the online PR session was about street creds. In the net, where its all about the conversation, street creds are very important. The more creds you have, the more authority and credibility you’ll have. But street creds s something you have to earn, like good karma. You do this by posting often in your own blog and others’ blogs, truthfully and with openess. It also helps if you have an interesting point of view.

Companies should realize how important the online world is today because there is virtually a whole world of customers that are be plugged in to the Net. So if a company has lots of street creds then chances are that it would be more trusted and accepted by its potential customers through their contact with it on the net.

In the second session, the one on presentation skills, I learned that passion and confidence are vital if you want to present well. Your passion will oftentimes inflame your audience with excitement about the subject you are speaking on. If the speaker appears confident then the audience is likely to accept what is said. On the other hand, audiences would not take to a speaker that seems to lack confidence.

Apart from passion and confidence, body language is also an important ingredient in delivering a strong presentation. Here I picked up two nifty tricks. One has to do with hand gestures. It’s OK to use large hand gestures but small hand gestures are usually perceived as signs of nervousness.

The other trick was eye contact as an instrument to control the audience. If the speaker constantly makes eye contact with his audience by constantly sweeping the room with his eyes then the audience feels compelled to pay attention.

One useful trick for bringing someone in the audience who is not paying attention to your presentation is to move slightly toward him/her and make eye contact with that person, as if you’re telling them: “I’m talking to you right now.”  Most times that person would snap back to the present and start paying you the attention you deserve as a speaker.

There was also a cool tip about using PowerPoint slides. Most times speakers use PowerPoint slides for their own convenience rather than the audiences. But, unless you are showing complex, information-rich slides it is better not to use PowerPoint slides all together.

The reason?

The main objective of a presentation is for you to sell yourself to the audience. You want to impress the audience with what you have to say and how you say it. If you can do that then the audience decides that you, and by extension your company or organization, seem to be on the ball.

The problem with most PowerPoint presentations, however, is that the speaker usually uses the PowerPoint as a cue card – only that it is projected on a screen for the entire audience to view. The audience can read faster than you can speak so they will read the points on the slide and become bored or distracted. So most times it is best not to use a PowerPoint slide show at all.

But what happens if you need to show graphics or other information-rich slides? This is where a Black Slide comes in handy. A black slide is just a normal slide, only you put a box around it and color it black.

You can insert these slides in between your graphs and information rich slides. Put on a black slide when you are talking and move on to your informative slide only when you want the audience to study it. After that bring in another black slide and you can see how the audience’s eyes, and attention, immediately travels from the screen to you.

Then there is the verbal pause. We tend to think that if you want to attract attention we should speak louder but I learned at that session that the best way to focus attention on what you say is through a moment of silence, a pause.

By using a pause…you psychologically heighten expectations of what you are about to say next because of the break in the rhythm of your speech. Say a few words, pause and then…BAM!!! Say that one important word with a little bit of drama and it would lodge in the heads of your audience for some time to come.

Wow!

Was what I thought after leaving the lecture. Within a week of interning I’ve learned all these nifty new tricks. I wonder how many more tricks of persuasion I will learn when my internship here ends in three week’s time. Watch this space for an update.

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written by: Arif Pranoa, intern, Maverick - June 2008     

Tags: Arif Pranoa, Civil Society Organization, CSL, intern, Maverick, NGO, online PR, presentation skills