How do you engage with integrity and instill a sense of intimacy with a big audience?

At an event we produced, I noticed a few smart, simple aspects that truly changed audience perception. Here is a tactic to perhaps employ yourself.

They say the eyes are the window to the soul. But we also know that eyes are the beholder of integrity - why else would someone say "look me in the eye and tell me that"?

There are reasons that many speakers use a script or a teleprompter: to stay on message, to be consistent, to remember their points or to keep their message concise. But it's actually when the speaker disengages from the script and engages individual audience members that the speaker becomes more real, more present It would be ideal to have rehearsed a speech enough to have it memorized to be able to do this all the time, though this requires lots of work.

So try this: if you only concentrate on the 2-3 points that are most important in the presentation... the "money moment," the key message that MUST stick... try to do it off-script.

Look at individuals in the audience. Show them that it's coming from your heart and soul and let them feel your integrity. You'll find the results are far more profound and even palpable.

When I first joined broadstreet, my friend Paul was using this word combo all the time. It sounded a bit jargon-ish, a bit B.S., and it was even funny the way it came out of his mouth, "Agg-NOSS-tic." I love Paul. But I've come to understand why this description is important.

When developing marketing or communications initiatives, it's important we "plug-in" to our clients' culture, policies or back-end technology. Adapting the message, media or technology to suit what will work best for the client is true partnership.

In an event, this might translate to partnering with an internal team or other vendor to drive an experience that is "familiar enough" while "different enough." In an interactive solution, this translates to building a website that can plug into our clients' backend of ASP/.Net (Microsoft), JSP (Sun) or Apache.

Say it with me: "PLAT-form Agg-NOSS-tic."

During a quick lunchtime "loop" as we call the walking path around the Charles River in Watertown, I saw that I was coming upon a hopscotch spray-painted on the asphalt. I was expecting 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10... But that's not what I got, exactly.
As I got closer, instead of the configuration I thought it would be, I discovered something different. Kind of sweet. Unexpected: 1 - 2 - I - L - O - V - E - U.

Because it was unexpected, I've told people about it. I even went back and took a picture.

But the point is this:

Because what I saw flew in the face of what I was expecting, it made an impression on me.

When you want your audience of learners to remember something, surprise them. Make it unique, novel, humorous...even wrong. This works for content - make it easy to understand; and it works for the delivery of the content - make it unique. If your content has to be very straight and narrow (now think about it - does it really have to be?), then deliver it in a surprising way. Maybe it's a comic strip. Or a podcast. Or an electronic scrap book.

This isn't bullshit - lots of studies and papers and conferences and people talk about all of this as Adult Learning Theory. But you don't have to know all of that to understand one simple thing: Surprise me and I'll remember.