This is important. Perhaps the worst possible result after giving a presentation is to have your message be forgotten. You spend hours outlining your points. Days (or dollars) getting the deck put together. You do breathing treatments and yoga to try and relax before speaking, and then you get up there and put it all on the line in front of a staring audience.
To have all this work and anticipation end in not just embarrassment but oblivion just sounds incredibly depressing. So how can we create a memorable presentation?
We have to start by defining memorable. Basically, we mean unforgettable. But what is unforgettable?
Typically, we remember that which fails to blend into the minutia of everyday life. We don’t remember what someone is wearing when that someone is one of a hundred people we pass on a busy sidewalk. But boy, oh boy do we remember the semi-naked guitar player at Times Square. Same environment, but a guy who is really and truly apart from the crowd.
Now, you could be memorable this way. You could wear only star-spangled underwear and sing in front of the board. They’ll never forget it. But of course we’re talking about positive memorability.
The core principle is that unique is memorable. Never seen before is memorable. That which is out of the ordinary is memorable. But there are lots of ways to be these things and still fall within the comfortable boundaries of professionalism and preserve your “no HR violations to date” streak.
It can be as simple as engaging the audience. Many of us go from presentation to presentation being talked at, lectured to, moralized upon, and in general treated like caged cattle. But as Dale Carnegie and many, many others have pointed out, people love to be heard. Taking the time to ask the audience questions about where they are and what they are experiencing can make the presentation you deliver seem extraordinary. They’ll feel like they played a part in it, and that ownership translates to memory.
Another common go-to is the hilarious video clip that serves as a poignant analogy for what you’re talking about. Ever noticed how people will remember YouTube videos they’ve loved from several years back? They can even remember what words they googled to find it and repeatedly use the same search phrase to share it with friends.
When you use a great clip and attach your message to it, they’ll recall the clip often, but when they do they’ll think of the message that went alongside it.
A third possibility is to make extensive use of silence. To do it well, you need truly thought-provoking content—paradigm shifting stuff, really. But when you’re presenting this kind of information, or these kinds of ideas, you can actually “over-sell” them. When a thought is truly profound, you do damage to it by rambling on and on as if you’re trying to prove it to them. Great presenters know what it looks like when an idea has suddenly but surely shaken an individual’s previously held viewpoint. When you see those faces, it’s time to shut up, take a few seconds, and let it truly sink in.
Of course, memorability has many avenues. But these three may be immediately applicable in your next presentation, and help you stay in and on their minds once the pitch is done.
Question: What is the most memorable presentation you’ve ever seen?
