I always wondered what percentage of speakers who ask the audience questions prior to their speech, actually fine tune their speech at that moment.

So what are some of the reasons presenters ask audience questions?

(1) Cheap and fast market research
(2) Grasping level of audience knowledge in subject
(3) Discovery of demographic of audience
(4) Waking up the audience and gaining their attention

I am sure there are other reasons, but those are the four I can think of at this moment.

Numbers 1 and 4 do not suggest to the audience that the speaker will be changing his/her speech for them. But when you ask a question that falls under numbers 2 and 3, it may suggest that the presenter will be adding, removing or going in more or less detail on certain slides they have.

Example question of number two would be, "Do you know what an API is?" If not the speaker needs to first explain that an API is an application protocol interface that allows developers to gain access to data and/or write data to a 3rd party application, in some type of uniform fashion. Jeremy Zawodny did just that in the Search APIs session, kudos.

Example question of number three would be, "How many of you are advertisers?" "How many are you are publishers?" "How many of you are agencies?" etc.. Now that seems to me, that if more people are advertisers, the speaker may add more detail to his or her slides on that topic?

Anyway, do you feel that some presenters ask these questions but make no effort to tailor their presentations after asking? Sometimes I do...