The Media Supermarket

I gave a presentation about the basics of Web 2.0. I discovered several important things, and experienced important learnings. Thank God I made some good mistakes!

1. Forget about the time, and look at the faces: Give your breaks when you feel the audience needs it. Never mind about what time you planned to give the time out. When they are listening intently and following you, it’s meaningless to stop this. After all, you have spent some good time on building and maintaining their attention. Don’t waste it. It’s like the ace in your hand. Use it wisely.

2. Magnify the relevant comments only : Most of the time you will have some people commenting on what you are saying. Some of it will be relevant and useful, and some will just be people saying whatever comes to their mind. Your response to these comments magnifies their importance to the audience. The audience is yours, and they will pay attention to whatever you tell them. Don’t try to please everyone by attending to whatever they are saying. Make sure you reward the good comments.

3. Talk to faces, not the “audience”: Try to make good use of eye contact. This means that you should connect with as many people as you can by looking in their eyes several seconds and making sure you “attract” them and keep them with you. You need to have this backed up by a logical flow of arguments. The people in the front rows can be powerful anchors for getting others to pay attention too. You can easily look in their eyes.

4. Relax!: Don’t try. Just talk to the audience. Having a loud and clear voice is essential to keeping them with you. But when you talk in a relaxed manner, you convey your confidence and you send out the message that they should listen to you.

Here is the Web 2.0 presentation.

Be like the Internet!
The Internet is definitely one of the main forces, adding to the complexity and uncertainty in our lives. Although it is giving us unprecedented opportunity and threats, what it equally provides to everyone is an increase in the size and number of interactions that we make (with humans and machines).
I can’t understand why many people say that with the advent of the new technologies, the world is becoming smaller. I think the world has become huge, and unintelligibly larger, because of technology. We send and receive hundreds of messages every day, to tens of people, and in several different formats. Each person is the center of their own world, or universe if you will. My world at least is definitely not smaller.
So how do we deal with all this, and what does it require from us as people to do? What kind of attitude do we need to have to thrive, or at least survive, in such circumstances?
The name of this presentation is a part of the answer: Be Like the Internet. The first thing that came to mind when I read this, was that we should be widespread, flexible, scalable, shapeless, and vague.
This presentation is much better in explaining this, especially with creative and descriptive photos that clearly tell you how to “be” like the Internet.
Enjoy!

Question it!
That was the most important lesson I learned from the seminar I attended today, by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, the founder of The Art of Living. He gave a one-hour talk about several issues, and gave some tips for life. The idea that really struck me was the following:

We only question the things that are given to us in the positive. We never question the negative stuff.

When someone says, “You were great!” or, “I really admire you!”, we usually reply, “Really??”. But when someone says, “You are really bad at handling things” we immediately believe, and feel the need to defend ourselves and try to prove something.
The next time I am confronted with a negative idea (by anyone or by myself), I’ll face it with the not-so-obvious question, “Are you sure? Do you really think so?”. I’ll keep questioning until they (or I) really start to rethink that idea. And whenever I get a great positive idea, I’m not going to question it, just for a change.
An important thing that this does, is that it immediately interrupts the attacking person’s assault. You give them a totally unexpected response, and you really make them wonder and think about the validity of what they are claiming. A very good sales technique!