Fight phubbing with conversational presenting

Phubbing. You might not know what it means, but surely you’ve experienced it a time or two. To phub is to maintain eye contact while texting, and today’s audience members could make an olympic sport out of it. If you’re a presenter, this bad habit is especially terrible. After all, during a time when people require an almost constant rotation of content to remain engaged, how can you earn their attention, let alone keep it?  

Conversational presenting to the rescue

Imagine how you’d feel if you had to read every bit of content on every website you ever visited. Every about page, every mission statement, every press article, every blog. It sounds like the kind of thing you’d never wish upon anyone else, but this is exactly what you’re doing every time you present with slides. It’s no wonder audience members reach for their phones. 

Enter conversational presenting. This new approach to delivering information lets you present as much or as little as you want, in any order you want, so you can keep the focus where it should be. 

Instead of relying on fifty slides and a rehearsed script to describe them, conversational presenting allows a presenter to only share what’s relevant to the audience. He or she can go from a statement to a question back again to determine what’s important in that moment, and from controlling the order of the presentation to allowing the audience to drive it. All that activity combined with the content that matters creates an engaging environment— one the brain won’t want to phub. 

Stay on their minds

When you allow space in your presentation for your audience members to have a say in the way it’s experienced, you invite them to connect with the content. The deeper the connection, the stronger the emotion associated with the presentation, as well as the memory of it. 

In a world where competition is high and time is short, standing out and being memorable long after the conversation is over is a much needed edge.

Get more tips on fighting the phub with our in-depth ebook, “Better Your Business With Conversational Presenting.”