How to be a moderator ?
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Answer:
How To Be a Great Moderator

How many times have you watched a panel and thought that it was entertaining and informative? Your answer is probably a small number. Moderating a panel is deceptively hard–harder, in fact, than keynoting because the quality of the panelists is usually beyond your control. Here’s how to be a great moderator.
Don’t over-prepare the panelists. The more panelists prepare in advance, the more likely they will be boring. If you provide all the questions in advance, many panelists will prepare carefully-crafted, devoid-of-content responses–in the worst case, even tapping PR people for help. The most you should provide is the first two or three questions to make panelists feel comfortable and “prepared.”
Do prepare yourself in advance. Moderators need to prepare more than panelists because they need to be able to stir up the pot with questions about the latest industry controversies and hot issues. It’s hard to do this in real time, so prepare the questions in advance using multiple research resources. If you don’t have enough industry knowledge to stir up the pot, then decline the invitation to moderate the panel.
Never let panelists use PowerPoint. Even if the panelists are CEOs and Nobel Prize winners, never let them give a “brief” PowerPoint presentation. If one panelist uses PowerPoint, everyone else will want to. Then the session will encounter the technical difficulty of making multiple laptops work with the projector or the challenge of integrating presentations into one. Forget it.
Never let panelists use anything special. Suppose everyone accepts the no-PowerPoint rule, but a panelist comes up with the clever idea of showing a “brief” corporate video. Again, the answer should be, “No can do.” Frankly, if a panelist needs either a PowerPoint presentation or a video, he’s probably not articulate enough to be on the panel, so get rid of him if you can.
Make them introduce themselves in thirty seconds. Give panelists thirty seconds to introduce themselves. The moderator shouldn’t read each panelist’s bio because he will inevitably (a) mispronounce something (I didn’t know I was Polish until I was introduced as “Guy Kowalski”); (b) get some fact wrong “Oh, you didn’t graduate from Harvard Business School, you just attended a one-week executive boondoggle there;” or (c) fail to highlight some crucial part of the panelist’s background.
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