I produce, attend, speak at and moderate panels at conferences many times each year, and while nothing is quite as bad as a horrible keynote address, time and again panel discussions prove the most challenging, bouncing-on-the-high-wire-without-a-net piece of each day.

Here are 3 things that make a successful panel:

1. Conflict. Just like you learned in high school drama class, all stories require conflict. This means different points of view, different objectives, and different ways of approaching them. And by  difference I mean actual opposition rather than gentle nuances of inflection. If you have presidents of different ad networks and a moderator onstage, there is NO conflict because while the networks may be competitors they all share a methodology and general business objective, and they’ll work together to have the rising tide lift all the surfboards. Put an ad network and a publisher who doesn’t sell inventory on networks head to head and then you might have something.

2. Fear. For trade conferences in particular you’re talking about trade, about money, and about somebody potentially losing business that they already have. We’re living in the middle of a global economic collapse with businesses closing and folks out of work. If your panel doesn’t embrace that and talk openly about it then it’s like like ignoring the booger peeking out of you dinner date’s nose… impossible to focus on anything else.

3. Greed. On the other hand, behind fear (see above) crouches opportunity. Shrewd companies will benefit from this climate, and on your panel either implicitly or explicitly talking about the money that might be left on the table will make the mental juices of panelists and audiences alike start to flow.

Myriad other tips and keys apply, and a good moderator can make even violent fits of consensus interesting by unearthing the hidden conflicts among panelists or between the panel and the audience, but if you start with these three keys you’re already ahead of the game.

The funny this is this:  I’ve given dozens of talks but I’ve never seen link love like this… dozens of blog posts.  That’s what happens when you do a talk at a search conference, I guess.

At the end of the talk, I made a bunch of predictions, and the one that got the most feedback was my notion that the right company to acquire Yahoo! isn’t Microsoft or News Corp but Sony.

Why do I think this? Sony is the only major studio without a broadcast TV network, and given the fragmentation and spread of the TV audience (I spent a lot of time on this yesterday), it seems to me that Sony could entirely bypass TV, keep its non-affiliated and powerful TV production team, and also use Yahoo as an alternative ad-supported distribution platform, online community, et cetera.

What do y’all think?

Note: This idea just came to me one night. I have no inside information from either of the companies.

The panelists had a series of interesting and useful answers, but one sub-event that struck me was that ALL of them quoted the words “pitchforks and torches” while answering. In formulating my question, I had unexpectedly created a mimi-meme that was sticky enough to infect the rest of that conversation.

A meme is an idea that easily translates from one mind to another or many others (see this Wikipedia entry).

But how and why had my casual turn of phrase proved sticky? It’s hardly an original metaphor– in fact, it’s a cliche from any Frankenstein movie.

Puzzling this later, I realized that the power of that turn of phrase lay in what I DIDN’T do… I didn’t close the metaphor for the audience. I didn’t, in other words, say, “… and sometimes they grab their pitchforks and torches and head for the town square to chase the monster to a barn and burn it down.”

Instead, by holding back, by letting everybody in the room MAKE the association with the Frankenstein story rather than merely receive it, I asked their brains to create a meaning, to close the loop, and that proved more powerful rhetorically.

I should hasten to point out that this is not a new insight. The poet Keats argued that this sort of “negative capability” as THE thing that made Shakespeare great. Shakespeare, Keats argued, was “content with half knowledge,” and therefore could easily remain “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” He didn’t close narratives, metaphors and the like. Instead, he let his audience do it for themselves.

As a writer, editor and speaker I need to keep this in mind: letting the reader MAKE connections rather than receive them is a powerful communications strategy. However, online this is a problem because doing so flies in the face of the commonly understood best online writing practices of laying it all on the table.

I’ll keep noodling this. In the meantime, here’s a good post on closure and hypertexts from Christy Dena.

The event is from 2:00pm to 5:00pm. Starcom MediaVest CEO Laura Desmond is the keynoter, and I’m onstage with Jon Fine of BusinessWeek, Brian Morrisey of AdWeek and Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence.

It’s free, but you need to RSVP.

• If you’re giving a research presentation that has an abstract component, start with a concrete example of the benefit that adopting the abstract method will give the audience. Audiences love both concrete examples and a clear understanding of the benefits that listening to a long explanation of something might bring them.
• Corrollary: DON’T start with a research methodology or description of the system, unless you want your audience to fall asleep.
• Be careful about using video in presentations. Any momentum that you might have built up in your presentation evaporates when you show video: video has its own rhythm and pace, different than yours. If the video is good enough, go ahead and use it, but realize that you’ll have to start over again momentum-wise.
• If you’re asking your audience to focus their eyes on slides, then don’t be afraid of moving around the room while you do so. I frequently hop off the stage and roam around the room if I’m going through slides. It keeps people in the audience on their toes and allows you to share their point-of-view.

More to come on this.

If you run a Google search on the phrase “two minutes per slide” you’ll quickly find yourself on a circa 1997 web page called “Oral Presentation Advice” by Professor Mark D. Hill of the Computer Science Department University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Here’s one relevant sentence: “This conference talk outline is a starting point, not a rigid template. Most good speakers average two minutes per slide (not counting title and outline slides), and thus use about a dozen slides for a twenty minute presentation.”

Somehow this advice — which may very well work for computer science presentations, although I doubt it — has managed to sneak its way out of comp-sci and into presentations that people are giving at conferences and in classrooms all over the world. This is sad news because two minutes per slide is at least 90 seconds too long if you’re trying to hold an audience’s attention in a dark room, particularly after lunch. However, if you’re trying to help people fall asleep, then this rule is effective.

I give a lot of talks and I’m trying to work out my own Powerpoint rules, so as I think about them I’ll share them here. Like a bludgeon, Powerpoint is a blunt but effective tool if you know how to use it.

Here are my first thoughts:

• If you put the same slide up on the screen for two minutes, then the people in your audience will stop listening to anything you have to say for as long as it takes them to read the slide. You’ll never get them back into the same rhythm again.
• Two minutes of data probably requires eight slides at minimum.
• You need to parsimoniously hand out a new slide with each new bit of data. That let’s you control the pace and rhythm of the talk.
• Don’t use any of the animations that Powerpoint makes so easy. If you’re an animated speaker, then you don’t need them. If you aren’t, they won’t help you. At all. Powerpoint animations are the public speaking equivalent of thinking that a weird font and unusual color will make your writing better.
• Don’t read your slides. The slides are a prop, an illustration, something that you, the speaker, are in dialogue with. If you simply read the slides, then why does your audience need you? Most of them probably know how to read already.

P.S. If you don’t believe me about this — and if you’d like to read a devastating critique of Powerpoint when it comes to depthfully dealing with data — check out Edward Tufte’s classic essay, “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint.” It’s worth the $7.00.

In both talks I discussed something I call “The Media Pyramid” (more on that coming here to Mediavorous.com soon), and in both I opened by attempting to illustrate the new relationship between media and the people who read or watch or listen to media — a relationship in which the audience has a much greater voice than ever before — by throwing approximately 100 soft plastic balls into the audience.

(Side note to public speakers: Throwing things at an audience, even soft things, tends to wake them up. The goal is not to turn them into an angry, pitchfork-wielding mob.)

With either the old marketer-to-consumer relationship or the homologous old media-producer-to-audience relationship, the marketer or producer sent the message to a passive receiver. Up onstage, I was the marketer or producer, hurling the soft plastic message at my audience.

In both cases, the audience got the first part of what I was driving at, which is that consumers or media audiences now can easily and actively respond to the creator of the message. So, at both talks after a few tense moments — where they were clearly thinking, “he doesn’t really want us to throw these things at him, does he… oh, I guess he does” — they started throwing the balls back at me.

Here’s the interesting part.

What they missed at first, both audiences, was that they should have been throwing the balls to each other.

The most interesting dynamic is not B2C or C2B but C2C. Whether you call them consumers or media audiences, the thing that’s important about the internet is that it lets them talk amongst themselves. Sure, the well-funded marketer or media producer probably has a louder voice, but the consumers can ignore the corporate speaker if they want to do so.

More significantly, it’s not what consumers say to a brand marketer or media creator that should keep the latter two up at night, it’s what the consumers say to each other about the brand or media property.

The marketers at HTMA, a bright crowd of people if ever there was one, didn’t get it. They half-heartedly tossed balls at each other, but didn’t pay much attention. It seemed emblematic of the problems that most marketers have changing how they think about the conversation in which their previously one-sided communications are taking place. “Markets are conversations,” the Cluetrain Manifesto said back in the late 1990s, but lots of marketers are still talking at rather than with. Media properties too. With luck, by the time I finished my talk they were more ready to see what I was talking about. Looking back, I should have tested them, gotten them to toss the balls back into the air, but by then I was in full PowerPoint mode, and resistance to the call of the slides is futile.
The USC students, another bright crowd and a lot younger, got it much more quickly. They kept an eye on me, but started throwing balls at each other with abandon. Later, I asked them if they had MySpace and Facebook pages. All but three of them did.

If you’re a marketer or a media property, a social media strategy isn’t a nice to have; it isn’t a secondary revenue stream or a vague way of communicating with your audience. It’s important to your brand’s survival.