Perfecting Crowd Work
If you’ve ever watched a stand up comedian, you may have noticed that often they will talk to the audience. Those audience interactions can lead to amazing comedic moments, where the comedian jokes around with the audience members and may even tease them slightly. This technique is called “crowd work.”
Skilled speakers know how to engage a crowd, and being able to do so directly, doing this “crowd work,” can elevate a speech or a presentation. Audiences like it when the speakers seem to care about them and want to know them. When your audience members feel seen, they are engaged and more open to what you’re saying.
The key is knowing how to work the crowd. Sometimes you can start by asking for a show of hands. You can ask “how many of you have ever...” and see how many raise their hands. If you can get almost everyone raising a hand, you’ve engaged the crowd. If you’re feeling bold, you can then ask direct questions to the people raising a hand and get their story. You may need to prepare questions ahead of time so you get the answers you want. Plus you need to keep the audience members on point so they don’t take too much focus from you.
When you get those answers, you then work them into your presentation. If you can find small ways to adapt your presentation to the answers you received, if you can sometimes directly refer back to what was said earlier, you’ll be more engaging. The audience will like you more because it shows you aren’t just giving any old speech, you’re giving a presentation directly to them. They’ll be on board.
While you might not directly work the crowd in a more formal presentation, that doesn’t mean you can’t make reference to audience members. Talk to people beforehand. Do your research. Find out who is in your audience and try to make specific references to them and what you know they care about. The effect will be the same and you’ll have a more engaged audience.
Crowd work, when done well, will make your speech more engaging. And an engaged audience will make your speech that much more successful.