Wake up the Audience!

It’s tough these days designing content delivery that will meet the needs of an audience that crosses multiple generations.

• Generations that remember watching TV when there were only 3 channels and having to stand up and walk to the TV if you wanted to change the channel…so you really must have wanted to change the channel, you did watch the commercials and no one knew the phrase “product placement”.
• Generations who not only use remotes, but fast-forward through the boring parts or commercials and also channel surf to one of 150+ other channels.

And no matter what their generation, we’ve now trained adults to have an attention span of 7 minutes before they need a change…basically the length of a television program between commercial breaks.  Of course, that study was done a couple of years ago, so it’s probably less than 7 minutes now that we have Twitter, IM-ing,  and texting at our fingertips, in addition to news feeds crawling across the bottom of our TVs.

So how do we keep our audiences engaged when so many distractions are begging for their attention?  Modify the method of content delivery every 7 minutes from pure powerpoint to Q&A to simulations or exercises to ???  The “traditional” panel discussion can incorporate audience response systems to engage the audience, provide mic runners in the audience for Q&A, place the Twitter feed on screen where people can pose their thoughts on the session or potentially pose a question for the panel if the moderator refers to it.

I’ll admit, I fell in love with “Eddie the Eagle” at our recent e4 conference, the animated character voiced by an actor backstage who interacted with the session speakers. (See right-hand sidebar.)  Any time you can bring humor into a session I know I’m more apt to stay awake.

I want to know what everyone else is doing to keep their audiences engaged? Whether it be in large general sessions or individual breakouts. And possibly even more important, what are you doing to re-train presenters on how to keep their audiences engaged?