Nine times out of 10, this mystical “connection” comes down to presenting to your audience instead of presenting at your audience. I’m talking about basic presentation techniques — ones that sound painfully obvious until you watch an actual live presentation and see things going horribly wrong. Today, I’d like to talk about one of the biggest offenses: ear prompter abuse, which is a problem so prevalent it should actually be criminal, as in, haul that guy off the stage and put him in solitary so he can’t hurt anyone …

If you’re using a prompter and you’re just repeating lines being fed into your ear, then here’s what you have to do to be successful:

1. Avoid eye contact with attendees at all cost, because it might distract you from the voice in your head.

2. Don’t stray from the script because you might miss something you’re told or get off track.

3. And don’t move or act in any way that might distract you from the instructions of your puppet master.

And 4. If you want your audience to remain conscious, ignore the first three instructions.

When it comes to trade shows, “live presentation” is synonymous with “live performance.” It’s more important that you’re captivating your audience than it is to say anything in particular. Engage in eye contact at all times. React to bad (or good) body language with constant course corrections. Change your cadence, timbre and points of emphasis based on the energy of the crowd.

Believe me, blank stares are a lot worse than going a little bit “off script.”

As in most areas of life, change can be very good — even if it comes in the middle of a live trade show presentation. As an actor back in the early days of my career, I did a lot of live theater, including one show that ran for almost two years.  I had to go into each performance reminding myself: “You’re not reciting these lines; you’re creating them.” I had to perform the words every night as if it were the first time they were leaving my lips — as if the situation I was in was brand new.  Each performance had to feel fresh and unique and alive …

The trade show environment is no different. An audience wants authenticity and engagement.  They want to feel that you actually give a damn about what you’re talking about and that you’re passionate.

If all you’re doing is delivering a staged recitation of a marketing white paper … then your audience might as well be reading it online (where no one will see them sleeping).

One final tip:

If you want to use an ear prompter the right way, be sure to buy the best equipment available and get training from an expert. In my mind, the best ear prompter guy in the business is Brian Collins at Ovation.

Do you have an industry-related question you’d like answered on “Hey Newman”? Send him an e-mail and get your inquiry answered on the blog.

This is a message for trade show vendors: At your next show, sneak up on your own booth. That’s right, pop out from around a corner about 10 yards back and take a good, honest look at your investment.

Do your booth staffers look like sad little wallflowers?

Do they look like kids at a high school social afraid to ask someone to dance?

Is there a guy sitting expressionless in front of a glass bowl of Hershey’s Kisses, wondering why no one is coming up to talk to him?

This “condition” is more common then you might think, especially with the smaller booths. At one recent show, I walked around and paid particular attention to the 5 x10 and 10 x10 booths. Often they’re manned by just two or three people who are so uncomfortable they’re burying their heads in books or dabbling with smartphones — just sitting there waiting for it all to be over.

I looked at these people and found myself thinking about Neil Strauss, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone best known for penning a book called, The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. This was the inside story of guys who despite NOT being the most attractive males out there, pick up women with absolute ease. Strauss not only researched this “secret society,” he became arguably one of the top pickup artists in the world and actually started conducting workshops for the undesirable and uninitiated.

At the heart of this book is a philosophy about “how to engage people.” He argues that if you’re going to try to pick up a woman in a bar, you don’t say, “Can I buy you a drink?” You don’t ask anything that could elicit a “no” response. Instead, you “engage” her. You contrive a story seemingly playing out before her eyes and ask, “What do you think?” Yes, it’s an opening line. But it’s an opening line that’s not clichéd or overwrought; it’s a question that pulls this woman into a story with you through her advice or involvement.

Strauss’ philosophy is hardly limited to the world of pickup artists. “Engagement” is something that most certainly can be applied to trade show marketing. I was observing the booth staff at this recent trade show, and they weren’t engaging anyone. First of all, they’re sitting. Rule No. 1: No sitting! Secondly, even when standing, they look positively miserable. If you’re spending that kind of money at a trade show and you’re planning to go there with the attitude that you’d rather be anywhere else, then don’t go! And before you say a couple of staffers don’t represent the “enthusiasm of the company,” remember that these faces are your company for the purposes of these crucial three trade show days. They are the representative image of you and the images that attendees will remember.

Honestly, if I had some sort of magisterial banishment power, King Newman would have sent home half the people working this particular trade show. If you’re going to look bored — if you’re going to feel miserable — find another way to market your services.

Here’s the ironic thing: A lot of these same people will spend a fortune on search engine optimization, which is designed to drive traffic to their site. But they don’t spend any energy driving traffic into their booth. And that doesn’t necessarily mean hiring a trade show presenter like me but perhaps a crowd gatherer — at least someone with people skills! If the person in your booth is not the type who can go up to a perfect stranger and strike up a conversation, then they’re the wrong person to be at the show.

You need to find someone who is not just a technical expert; you also need your company’s best pickup artist.

Have an industry-related question? Send “Newman” an e-mail and get your inquiry answered on the blog.

We all know that digitized scalable monitoring can offer a compatible WYSIWYG Intranet or a horizontal, even-keeled knowledge base. But for an extended fault tolerant matrix or for ameliorated scalable process improvement, you really need extended systematic software. In fact, a vision-oriented actuating migration or a right-sized, bottom-line help desk can provide the kind of eco-centric customer loyalty for which we all clamor.

Something tells me that opening paragraph didn’t do much for you. In fact, if you were a trade show attendee listening to THAT presentation, I suspect you’d fake an “important phone call” just so you could get up and leave. Yet, many trade show presentations sound just like this.  Many of them (most?) are little more than a staged reading of a marketing whitepaper — without any emotional connection at all.

Specs and high-tech talking points don’t sell products and services; enthusiasm and passion do.

Connecting with your audience is key. They need to hear the passion and energy in your voice, and they need to hear how that product will change their lives (or the world at large). How is this going to help people? Why should they care? What are the benefits for them? And why are you so excited about it? For some reason, answering those essential questions is most often lost in the development of the presentation script.

Whether it’s an enterprise-class server or a new baby formula, you MUST find a way to be passionate when you’re talking about it.

I recently represented a solar power company at a large home and garden show. The company had given me the basic data points about solar panels, which I incorporated into my presentation. After just a few shows, it became very clear to me that attendees weren’t paying much attention to those details. What they responded to was the way I talked about solar power. They could tell that I really believed in this technology — that it was good for the homeowner and good for the planet — and they flocked to me after the presentations with their technical questions.

They just figured if I was that passionate about the product, I must know all the nitty-gritty details. So, clearly what stayed with them wasn’t the technical info. It was the way they connected with me and my presentation OF that information.

I was getting qualified leads and signing people up for free in-home consultations based on the feeling the people had about the product and how it could help them … and the feeling they had about the “energy” of the presentation.

That energy — that passion — needs to be there all the time. If you’re the presenter, you have to find something about that product or service that you can really get behind. As a presenter, you owe it to yourself and to your audience to be genuinely passionate about your subject. The audience will pick up on that … or they’ll just be lulled into a coma by a barrage of corporate jargon.

If you’re not hiring a professional trade show presenter, then find someone in the company who is genuinely passionate and has the facility to deliver that passion on stage. Eight minutes is long enough, so long as that enthusiasm comes through. More than the size of the booth, more than the thickness of your carpet pad, this passion level really matters. The alternative isn’t pretty:

“We offer you a 24-7, mission critical, best-of-class, paradigm-shifting solution that will proactively enable cross-platform deliverables in a synergistic, distributed LAN/WAN environment.”