The European Meetings & Events Conference (EMEC) is quickly approaching (still time to register!), and I thought it would be interesting to learn why certain speakers were chosen for the event.

The opening general session, for example, features two great speakers: Bertrand Piccard and Doug Keeley. 

"When we were going to Switzerland, his [Piccard] name came up right, front and center as the person everyone would really like to see as the keynote speaker of EMEC13," said MPI Knowledge Manager Miranda van Brück. "I personally missed seeing his speech when I attended EMEC in Brussels (MPI’s PEC-E was what it was called back then) and started to check videos on him online and read interviews with him and articles about him and was sold immediately." 

She says that Doug Keeley was introduced through networking. 

"Samme Allen (our U.K. and Ireland Chapter president) had seen him speak at the introduction of the Mark of the Leader in the U.K. and enthusiastically introduced us, and the rest is history," van Brück said.

EMEC also offers several sessions that will elevate your professional and personal lives.   

"I am enormously looking forward to so many of the sessions," van Brück said. "It is hard to put a spotlight on some when one has been so closely involved in the whole process. I am really happy that we have been able to persuade Alexander Osterwalder to join us in Montreux. I had try to bring him to one of our conferences in the past, but agendas never matched, till now! 

"I am also very happy that Alise Long and her husband Roger will be presenting the session 'Connecting Your Global Company in One Single Event'," she continued. "Alise is a long-time MPI member and the 2012 RISE Award winner, and I find it fantastic that we can feature Alise, who is a corporate planner for DSM in her daily life at our conference. And again the power of connectivity. The connection with Alise goes back many years, when I worked as a sales manager for a conference hotel in the Netherlands and Alise was one of my main clients. We have delivered many great events together in the past, so I know how valuable it will be for our audience to hear her story and be able to learn from her."

There are also some chapter sessions that are sure to spark engagement.

"I am very proud that we will be able to feature some of the Best of the Best education of our chapters," van Brück said. "MPI The Netherlands and MPI Spain are sending their top scoring speakers to Montreux to have the EMEC13 participants experience where their local community back home was raving about. And to see the creativity that one of these chapters will be putting into the onsite promotion of this session is truly amazing. What a passion for MPI and their chapter!" 

As I mentioned, there is still time to register for this great conference, and as a bonus, check out this video from 60 Minutes about Bertrand Piccard and his goal of flying a solar-powered plane around the world.

Consider the last presentation you heard at a conference. Was the speaker's speech emotionally charged? Or was it neutral? Do you remember the content? 

The reason I'm asking you these questions is because according to Annett Schirmer and colleagues from the National University of Singapore, emotion helps us recognize words quicker and more accurately straight away. In the longer term, however, we do not remember emotionally intoned speech as accurately as neutral speech. When we do remember the words, they have acquired an emotional value; for example words spoken in a sad voice are remembered as more negative than words spoken in a neutral voice.

In anger, sadness, exhilaration or fear, speech takes on an urgency that is lacking from its normal even-tempered form. It becomes louder or softer, more hurried or delayed, more melodic, erratic or monotonous. And this emotional speech immediately captures a listener's attention. Schirmer and colleagues' work looks at whether emotion has a lasting effect on word memory.

A total of 48 men and 48 women listened to sadly and neutrally spoken words and were later shown these words in a visual test, examining word recognition and attitudes to these words. The authors also measured brain activity to look for evidence of vocal emotional coding.

Their analyses showed that participants recognized words better when they had previously heard them in the neutral tone compared with the sad tone. In addition, words were remembered more negatively if they had previously been heard in a sad voice.

The researchers also looked at gender differences in word processing. They found that women were more sensitive to the emotional elements than men, and were more likely than men to recall the emotion of the speaker's voice. Current levels of the female sex hormone estrogen predicted these differences.

"Emotional voices produce changes in long-term memory, as well as capturing the listener's attention," Schirmer said. "They influence how easily spoken words are later recognized and what emotions are assigned to them. Thus voices, like other emotional signals, affect listeners beyond the immediate present."

The study, looking at the role of emotion in word recognition memory, is published online in Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience.

If you're a speaker, do you strive to present as neutrally as possible? Would you prefer people to remember you for your emotionally charged speech or your content? How can you achieve both? Please let us know your thoughts in the comments. 

Very interesting find over on code site github--a post/manifesto by a professional speaker, for professional speakers and meeting professionals.

"Open Conference Expectations," by Paul Irish, itemizes what speakers reasonably expect from event planners and what planners should reasonably expect from speakers.

I love this.

Everything cited is based in common sense and, it appears, significant experience in the meeting/event industry. It's nice to see it spelled out, though.

Excerpts below, but you REALLY should read Paul's entire post.

Recordings: Organizers should prioritize recording all talks and sessions. Now, ideally this would involve video recording, but hey, we acknowledge that quality video recording is both expensive and time-consuming -- audio recordings paired with the slides is a decent compromise if video isn't possible. Recordings should be made available under a permissive license (CC-BY-*) within six months of the event, information can get too stale after that. (If you're worried that releasing video will depress ticket sales, other conference organizers will vouch that, to the contrary, recordings are an excellent tool for driving ticket sales in future years, and are also an excellent sponsorship opportunity.)

Lodging: Conferences will offer to obtain and pay for lodging for speakers for at least the night before and the night after a speaker's talk. Again, a speaker may opt out of provided lodging, and those saved costs can be put to good use.

...

We will respect our audience. We will rehearse our talk in front of a small audience in order to ensure we are prepared. We will ensure that our talk does not go over the allotted time. We will think about the people in the back row, and think about whether the room will be light or dark, when we design our slides. We will say "um" as little as humanly possible. We will deliver talks that are current, correct, and of genuine interest to attendees; we promise not to make our talks a sales pitch. We will refrain from language, images, or behavior during the conference that may reflect poorly on the conference, and will adhere to a conference's code of conduct if one is established. We will post our content and demos on the web within 48 hours after the conference.

Image (CC) Kmeron

It’s rare that my podcast-listening choices lead to a post here—there’s not much room to include genre film reviews and potty humor. However, following a recent episode of Skeptoid (“Left Handed Myths and Facts”), host Brian Dunning mentioned that you can have Skeptoid live at your event.

Scientists, researchers and philosophers of various disciplines regularly grace the stages of meetings and events worldwide. Dunning may not have a New York Times bestseller burning through the charts, but he does have a critical mind, a professional delivery and an audience—176,000 listeners per weekly episode. And when you consider knowledge of the medium—podcasting—Dunning is a master: Each episode is between 11 and 15 minutes in length, the perfect, digestible size to deliver one tight story. And the Skeptoid podcast is always free.

Consider two of the topics for which Dunning is ready to speak about:

1. The Secret Weapon You Already Own. The same patterns of thought that encourage us to believe in unscientific therapies, products, and phenomena also skew our perceptions in the workplace.
2. Health Scams Are Your Friend: How You Can Use Them to Promote Skepticism. Health scams are your friend. At least, they can be, if you're trying to spread the message of critical thinking to those who need it most.

Imagine having a professional skeptic debunk some myths, legends and misunderstandings related to your industry. As long as you’re not selling patent medicines such as Lucy’s Vitameatavegamin or medical devices found at the Museum of Quackery, Dunning could be a great fit for your next gathering.

Okay, maybe not every presentation. But a lot of them. More than we would like to admit. It's funny because it's true. 

The PowerPoint presentation is so dreaded nowadays that I'm surprised there hasn't been a horror movie made about it. Maybe there has: I haven't seen any of the Saw movies, where people are tested with how much torture they can take. Is PowerPoint one of the tortures? 

If you don't want to agonize your audience, though, take some advice from Enrique Garcia Cota, who offers some guidelines when choosing shapes, colors, font sizes and lines for your presentations. Consider these tips a way of softening the pain of PowerPoint.

Attend any conference presentation nowadays, and you're likely to see half the audience watching the speaker. The other half have their heads down, most notably reading their smartphones, tweeting or reading websites on their laptops/tablets (but let's not rule out the possibility that they could be sleeping, too). 

This audience distraction is a given and something that a lot of presenters and planners work with or embrace. Two app developers noticed this trend and built an app for it called Donahue. 

In an interview with Jenn Webb on O'Reilly Radar, Tim Meaney and Christopher Fahey discuss why they created the app and how it works.

"Donahue is a presentation tool built upon the premise that certain conference presentations are best delivered in conversational format," Meaney said. "The app allows the presenter to construct their points as a series of portable ideas, delivered through Donahue into a number of views. Donahue also works by acknowledging that the audience wants to have a conversation. It's pretty standard today that the audience tweets during a talk, and then hours later the presenter uploads their slide deck to SlideShare, and then later elaborates their thesis or ideas in a blog post. With Donahue, that wall between audience and presenter, and the abstraction of a slide deck, is removed. The content and ideas are immediately shared, and the audience can immediately begin discussing them. People insist upon discussion, and instead of fighting that trend—'please close your laptops'—we went the other way and joined the conversation."

Webb asked the app's creators how they think conferences should evolve and improve. 

"You just can't come to understand and master a complex topic through listening to a lecture alone," Fahey said. "Learners need to read and study at their own pace. Conferences and lectures augment and inspire those materials. But most of all, conferences should connect both speakers and audiences with the subject matter and with each other. This enables learning by empowering people to pay attention together, think about ideas together, and most importantly, talk about them in the same energized moment."

Well said, sir, well said.

A new University of Michigan study shows some intriguing insights on how to convince someone to do something.

The study examines how various speech characteristics influence people's decisions to participate in telephone surveys. But its findings have implications for many other situations, from closing sales to swaying voters and getting stubborn spouses to see things your way.

"Interviewers who spoke moderately fast, at a rate of about 3.5 words per second, were much more successful at getting people to agree than either interviewers who talked very fast or very slowly," said Jose Benki, a research investigator at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR).

For the study, Benki and colleagues used recordings of 1,380 introductory calls made by 100 male and female telephone interviewers at the U-M ISR. They analyzed the interviewers' speech rates, fluency and pitch, and correlated those variables with their success in convincing people to participate in the survey.

Since people who talk really fast are seen as, well, fast-talkers out to pull the wool over our eyes, and people who talk really slow are seen as not too bright or overly pedantic, the finding about speech rates makes sense. But another finding from the study was counterintuitive.

"We assumed that interviewers who sounded animated and lively, with a lot of variation in the pitch of their voices, would be more successful," Benki said. "But in fact we found only a marginal effect of variation in pitch by interviewers on success rates. It could be that variation in pitch could be helpful for some interviewers but for others, too much pitch variation sounds artificial, like people are trying too hard. So it backfires and puts people off."

Benki and colleagues also examined whether pitch influenced survey participation decisions differently for male compared to female interviewers.

They found that males with higher-pitched voices had worse success than their deep-voiced colleagues. But they did not find any clear-cut evidence that pitch mattered for female interviewers.

The last speech characteristic the researchers examined for the study was the use of pauses. Here they found that interviewers who engaged in frequent short pauses were more successful than those who were perfectly fluent.

"When people are speaking, they naturally pause about four or five times a minute," Benki said. "These pauses might be silent, or filled, but that rate seems to sound the most natural in this context. If interviewers made no pauses at all, they had the lowest success rates getting people to agree to do the survey. We think that's because they sound too scripted. People who pause too much are seen as disfluent. But it was interesting that even the most disfluent interviewers had higher success rates than those who were perfectly fluent."

(Story materials provided by the University of Michigan.)

Bad presentations by speakers continue to happen. Wordy PowerPoint slides continue to populate boardrooms. Jargon continues to pop up in conversations like turbid pimples. 

It's a never-ending battle educating people on how to effectively speak and present. 

"People approach their presentations the same way they do a research paper, and they shouldn't," said Nancy Duarte, author of slide:ology and CEO of Duarte Design, during a recent chat at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, California. "Presentations should really be about story and about human-to-human connection."

Duarte says that even though there's an otherworldly ability for a human to connect to another human, it all gets left on the table during a presentation. 

"We use our slides as a barrier to protect ourselves from having to connect at a human level," she said. "There's a lost opportunity to connect deeply to people. People hide not only behind their slides, but behind their jargon—people stay in their industries for years, and there's this other weird language that develops around their own subject matter, and that makes them unaccessible and not human. They have to break that down. People won't be able to identify if they don't."

Please check out the video below for her full chat with O'Reilly Media.

How many of these mistakes have you made (or still continuing to make)?