How you can use smartphones for presentations

 

Here are 10 ways you can incorporate smartphone users into your presentation and become the topic of conversation online and off.

Encourage and reward people for using their smartphones

At Cause Marketing Forum’s annual conference in Chicago in June this year, someone asked people to use their smartphones. To show them how serious he was, he offered a copy of a book and a $100 gift card of donorschoose.org <http://donorschoose.org> to the person that mentioned him the most on their Twitter and Facebook pages.

Give your presentation a hashtag

 At the CMF, the person also asked people to use the conference, hashtag#CMF12, and the hashtag for his presentation, #CMLight, as he was speaking on ‘The Lighter Side of Cause Marketing’. That way they could see and interact with other people that were talking about his speech. His audience didn’t have to remember those hashtags as he included them at the bottom of every slide.

Give them suggested tweets

Between slides he gave his audience clever and funny things to tweet and Facebook about him: “That @JoeWaters is wicked funny… good looking too! #cmf12 #cmlight.” He also encouraged people to rant and rave about his Boston accent and love for the Boston Red Sox.

Give people your Twitter handle

This was a great way to answer people’s questions during and after his presentation. He also picked up a lot of new followers!

Talk about things that people can check out on their phones

He always mentioned his blog <http://selfishgiving.com/> and Pinterest boards <http://pinterest.com/joewaters/>, which are both optimised for mobile devices. If people are not listening to him, maybe they wil find something more useful on something else of his. At least they are still being engaged by him instead of ‘Angry Birds’.

Poll your audience via text

He has seen this a lot at conferences, most recently at the Cause Marketing Forum where the facilitators used mGive <http://mgive.com/>. The speaker asks a question and the audience can text their answers. The best part is that you can see the results live and instantaneously on the screen.

Tell people to ‘write this down’

Encourage listeners to use their phones and tablets as notepads to jot down those nuggets in your speech that they need to remember.

Encourage people to e-mail you for more information

Information Technology-savvy people love to do this once or twice during a presentation. They pick a juicy topic and ask people to email them for more details. So they won’t forget, they told them to do it right now. By the way, they do not give them a sales pitch. This is something they want and it is free.

Upload your presentation to slideshare

That way listeners can follow along on their smartphones and review past slides or jump ahead in the presentation. You may be thinking, ‘Why would I want to give my audience an excuse to tune you out?’ There is a good chance they will anyway. At least they are looking at your presentation and not updating their Facebook page.

This last tip is yours

Have you ever engaged smartphone users in a presentation? If so, how? Will you use some of these tips in your next presentation?

It is funny that when researching this topic, one found a lot of advice on getting people to turn off their phones during a speech. One tip was to stand near the offender to shame him into submission. Sorry, but some people think that ship has sailed. Smartphones and mobile technology are an inescapable part of our lives and we as speakers need to adapt or risk being unheard.