Next week I am going to be giving a presentation to Sioux Falls Up & Coming - a group of young professionals that meet weekly to "pursue common goals and inspire great change." Luckily, I know most of the members of Sioux Falls Up & Coming and follow them on Twitter. I say lucky because of what I was able to do - get feedback before my presentation.
Audience adaptation is a big part of giving a speech. If you know what your audience wants to hear, you can adjust your speech to fit that audience. Politicians try to do this all the time. When they are in Iowa, they will talk about Ethanol subsidies and Farm subsidies. When they are talking to business owners in New York, they will talk about tax policies and business investment. Unfortunately for most of us, we only have a small view of what our audience will be before we give the speech. We usually know some of their background and an idea of what they would like, but a lot of times, we have to generalize things because we don't know as many specifics as we would like.
So what I did was simple: I asked the members of SFU&C who are on Twitter what they would like to see. The feedback I got from them was great. It gave me some ideas that I might not have covered when giving my presentation. This is going to ensure that my speech will be a success.
If you can do something like this you absolutely should. If you can get a better idea of what people are looking to learn from you - you can focus in on those aspects. While sometimes you can't cover everything people want and you have other things you want to cover - having some idea of what people want is going to help make that speech a success.
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