When you attend lectures, seminars, and guest speaker events, do you listen to the speaker's short bio normally read prior to the speech?
If you are like me, you probably can't remember any of them. Most likely though, you were listening and it made an impression on you. What I found our recently is that the short bio presentation is more important than I ever knew.
I belong to a local BNI group (Business Network International) that meets each week to help members grow their business. Each week one member of the group is given the opportunity to do a ten-minute presentation to educate the other members about what they do. If you want to be a better public speaker, join a BNI group!
Before the 10-Minute Presentation, a member of the leadership team introduces the speaker and then reads that member's bio. The content of the bio is the responsibility of the speaker. Unfortunately, it is often neglected, just something written up quickly, or once in a while simply skipped. What a mistake. Let me explain why...
Some readers may remember the articles I wrote about Herd Theory and Herding As A Survival Technique about how individuals in a group act based on the actions of others in the group. In other words, input from the "herd" strongly influences the way we see the world around us.
I recently came across a study originally done in 1950 by H.H. Kelley and duplicated numerous times with and without variations by other researchers ever since. In this study, how a group of students perceived the speaker was greatly influenced by the bio handed out to the students prior to the speech!
One half of the students were given a bio before the presentation that described the lecturer as "a rather cold person, industrious, critical, practical, and determined." The other half was given an identical bio except it described him as "a rather warm person, industrious, critical, practical, and determined". Each group sat in on the same speech together and then rated the speaker. The students given the "cold" bio rated him distant, self-centered, and humorless. The students told he was "warm" rated the speaker as approachable, friendly, and funny. Remember, each group was sitting in on the same speech together as the speaker was giving the presentation. Later studies showed that the same set of introductions even affected the group’s feelings on the intelligence of the speaker.
The conclusion of the study was that people form their first impressions based more on socially provided input (like a short bio presented by someone they know) than external fact (what they actually heard and saw).
Okay, I'm going to go really work on the bio for my next presentation now.
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