One of the sessions I’ve submitted for DDD is "So you want to be a speaker"; which has the following abstract;

Is being in the audience no longer enough? Do you long for the fame, the glory, the groupies that come with being a DDD presenter?

Then come along to this discussion/Q&A panel with some of the UK’s top speakers; we’ll cover topics like "How do I get started?", "Am I good enough?", "Is bad feedback the best feedback?", "Powerpoint, is it the work of the devil?", "When good questions go bad", "My demo code worked earlier" and "Swag acquisition; how to steal stuff and get away with it"

I sent out a plea for participants at the same time; and one of the victims potential participants highlighted "Is bad feedback the best feedback?" as a good idea. So to beat him to the punch I thought I’d ramble in a blog entry on it (although I have no doubt he’ll be able to express my sentiments better than I can).

The first time you speak the nerves are terrible. You will go too fast. You will get mixed up. You will stumble over your words. Your demos may well break. Once it’s over you breathe a sigh of relief until an email arrives a week or two later with your feedback. There will generally be a bunch of praise and then you stumble onto your first bad rating. I know it’s hard to believe, but I get bad reviews <g>, for example

DDD6 WCF Session: Very disappointed - the presentation was so disjointed that I didn’t get much from it, and I suspect the subject matter could be very useful in the future.

DDD6 WCF Session: This one was a joke! I bet the speaker started preparing for the talk the night before, really late at night with plenty of Whiskey at hand.

DDD3 ASP.NET Controls Session: Too jokey with the clique members of the audience.

DDD3 ASP.NET Controls Session: Very irritating presentation manner. Calm down a bit and don’t spend 50% of the time speculating on whether it will or wont work. Prepare in advance and aim more for an impression of quiet confidence.

The WCF session was admittedly bad; it was the first (and only) time I attempted to code live during a session and it went horribly horribly wrong. Interestingly people also the sessions that garnered the feedback above as well; but it’s the feedback that says "You suck" that is more important that praise. Yes, you will feel unappreciated, the audience just didn’t understand how much work goes into setting an hour’s worth of slides together, they don’t realise you don’t get paid for this, nobody loves me, everybody hates me, I’m gonna go eat worms... Wrong. The examples above are not examples of bad feedback, they are, in fact, examples of negative feedback and there is a big difference.

Bad feedback is "I didn’t get anything out of this session"; this tells you nothing useful, instead it leaves questions unanswered; what was the attendee expecting? What did they want out of the session? Bad feedback is feedback which gives you nothing to go on, no pointers on how to improve.

Negative feedback is feedback where an attendee didn’t like something and was kind enough to express and explain what they didn’t like. Good negative feedback tells you what you missed or what was wrong, it gives you pointers on how to improve your session for next time (and when you’ve done it once you will want to do it again).  It is constructive criticism, this is good for you, even if it does give you a hollow feeling in your stomach and you don’t know how to deal with it. If you are downhearted about it look at the positive feedback you have; people did like your presentation. Remember the questions you got? They weren’t just because you forgot to cover something but because you made people think (my own view is that if a single person takes something away from a session they can use then I did an OK job).

You then need to critically evaluation the negative feedback. For example my presentation style attempts to be lighthearted with (hopefully) enough self deprecation to make the audience feel it’s a discussion rather than a lecture. The majority of feedback I receive on this likes this approach, but as you can see above it doesn’t work for some people; feedback like this raises the question of how you balance things; do you average things out to a lowest common denominator in an attempt to not offend, but not please either or do you carry on with the things that you are highly praised for and accept that some people will also be negative about them? This is something only you can decide.

Remember that evaluations are subjective; it’s hard to please all of your audience for a a number of reasons including;

• People have certain expectations of your session; if you don’t meet them you will get panned (I had feedback on my hacking talks complaining I didn’t cover how to hack a bank). Expectations can be managed somewhat by an accurate session abstract.
• People may not like your presentation style, or your voice, or the fact that you move about. It’s very hard to break your habits on stage (I have a tendency to walk about with a water bottle if one is available; someone didn’t like this at DDD Scotland). Presentation style can be improved upon with practice; you may want to consider joining something like Toastmasters International; like Colin Mackay. 
• People will probably expect you to have all the answers. Unless you’re ScottGu this is unlikely, especially when you’re a "simple" volunteer speaker, however you should should at a minimum know the area on which you’re speaking. If you are stumped take details of the question and the person asking, promise to follow up and keep that promise.

With practice you should be able to address the issues raised. The anonymous nature of speaker evaluations means that generally people won’t hold back; don’t take it as a insult, don’t let it put you off, instead accept it, take it as an honest attempt to help you improve and to help you meet the needs of the audience; and the audience is who it’s all about. Well the audience and the groupies.