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Trendy Talks: 7 Public Speaking Trends To Follow

These trends will certainly help you connect with your audiences and bring your presentations to the next level.

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Times are evolving, and to be a master at public speaking, you must evolve as well. Although it’s important to have your own speaking style and learn the fundamentals instead of blindly following trends, it can be helpful to know what audiences are currently expecting and responding to. This allows you to keep connecting with your audience as a public speaker. Here are seven current trends in public speaking, for your consideration.

Increasingly Informal Presentations

The days of buttoned-up, austere presentations are fading. Speakers are frequently dressing informally, which makes them seem more approachable, genuine, reliable, and likeable. Speech venues are likewise becoming informal, with a transition from large auditorium-like venues to more intimate lounges and even bar tables. You can adopt a more easygoing strategy by exchanging your suit for a smart business casual outfit, or by shifting your setting from a large room to a bistro.

Participation and Connection

Audiences are increasingly demanding participation and connection from speakers. Your audience members will likely want to give feedback and remarks during the presentation, and you should provide them with opportunities. Incorporate live surveys, urge your listeners to tweet their thoughts and inquiries, or essentially approach or “cold-call” individuals to remark and answer queries.

Webinars

The popularity of webinars is developing. Anyone can reach a more extensive audience by planning and creating a webinar event — as opposed to adhering to just live presentations. A webinar is a cost-friendly approach to connecting with people since it doesn’t require any travel or direct setup charges.

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Presentation Slides

Drop the exaggerated PowerPoint slides along with over-produced videos. Instead, go for a casual, instructor-like approach. Utilize digital whiteboards and smartboards to take notes or draw pictures while interacting during your presentation. This dynamic approach is more visually interesting and can keep the audience members locked in throughout your entire presentation.

Focused Presentations  

Along with improved interaction, conference planners are requesting that speakers convey more engaged keynotes along with breakout sessions. Effective speakers today concentrate on three significant, backed-up ideas with the goal that a small audience can recall these ideas and get a genuineassessment from their speech or presentations. Likewise, audiences are becoming smaller. Smaller audiences are being welcomed to more personal settings to foster the deepness of connections both amongst participants and between the presenter and their audience.

Amateur Movies

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Nowadays, amateur videos are by and large increasingly used as a straight forward affirmation of the topic a speaker is conveying, or as a facilitator for a future forum. With the capacity to rapidly create and effectively use videos, we are certainly observing more videos used in presentations. Get on the trend by becoming familiar with consumer-level video-editing software, or perhaps consider investing in a freelance video editor or even a video production team.

Group Technology

Small meeting rooms require progression in small gathering technology. For instance, we’re currently utilizing large screens, iPhones or iPads as clickers, and pocket projectors. These adjustments in innovation require more individuals to improve presentation skills. While PowerPoint still is the king, people are fanning out for Keynote, SlideRocket, Prezi, and Google Slides, which offer new and exciting tools.

Whether you try one or many, these trends will certainly help you connect with your audiences and bring your presentations to the next level. Although you may not want to incorporate every single one of these trends into your talks — and you definitely shouldn’t try to cram them all into your very next one — it’s worth trying these out and seeing what works for you. Staying on top of the latest public speaking trends is an important part of developing your own style and growing as a speaker.

Olga V. Mack is a blockchain strategist, public speaker, and adjunct professor at Berkeley Law. She is Vice President of Strategy at Quantstamp, the first decentralized security auditing blockchain platform. Most recently, she served as General Counsel at ClearSlide and she has held legal and operational roles at Visa, Zoosk, Pacific Art League, Wilson Sonsini, and Yahoo. Olga founded the Women Serve on Boards movement that advocates for women to serve on the corporate boards of Fortune 500 companies. You can email Olga at olga@olgamack.com or follow her on Twitter @olgavmack.

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