Presentation Advisors Blog

Social Media for Business Takes Third in World's Best Presentation Contest

I'm quite happy to inform all of you that my presentation, Social Media for Business, was awarded third place overall in SlideShare.net's World's Best Presentation Contest!

In its seventh year, SlideShare.net's World's Best Presentation Contest fielded 1,822 entries in five categories.  First, second, and third place overall were awarded, as well as six individual category winners.

A big congrats to Empowered Presentations, located in the state of my honeymoon (Hawaii), for their incredible presentation, SMOKE - A Convenient Truth.  It was without a doubt worthy of first place.

I especially want to thank each and every one of you that voted for me, ReTweeted me, and supported me thorughout this contest.  I was overwhelmed by how supportive, helpful, and simply awesome my readers, colleagues, family and friends are.

Take a look at the full list of 2010 winners.

If you haven't seen it already, you can view my entry below:

Social Media for Business

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Chris Brogan Shines Up Your Mediocre Presentation

I recently came upon a post by Chris Brogan over at the AmEx OPEN Forum (a fantastic branded initiative, btw) about how to tune up your presentation.

Damn.

Not only is Chris a marketing and social media rockstar, creator of "your second favorite blog", and a sought after speaker, he goes ahead and leaps into my genre and writes a very useful post for anyone who presents.

The nerve!

Faux anger aside, Chris hits some super-important points to help presenters of all shapes, sizes, and experience levels create and deliver a memorable presentation.  And if you consider my writings to be any shred of useful, then his is pretty much gospel, as he has given close to a thousand presentation over the years to rave reviews and constant speaking requests.

Start with a Plan

One of Chris' tune-up tips was to start with a plan and know it by heart. He notes that while many people think they have a plan, that's not necessarily true.  Chris writes, "They have slides, and those are arranged in an order, but if I shut their laptop lid, there is absolutely no plan."

Your story structure is paramount in creating a memorable and effective presentation.  Always make sure your presentation boils down to a singular main point that may expand to two or three sub-points, but that's it.  Make sure you know EXACTLY what you want your audience to walk away from the presentation with.  You've got to know this by heart, because if your equipment fails, it's just you and your thoughts...

From there, work to create an effective but relatively brief introduction stating where we are now and where we will/can be.  Tie the presentation together at the end by recapping your main/sub points, and make sure to leave the audience with the final thought of what can/will be, or what's possible.  I'm greatly oversimplifying it, but even formatting your presentation (this doesn't just mean "slides" either) to fit this type of story framework will help you create a coherent and engaging presentation.

And of course, don't start your presentation in PowerPoint.

Below are the other three tips Chris covered, which you can read about in his article, so I've hyperlinked them to related posts of mine that you may find useful.

• Your part in the presentation (appearance matters)
• Structuring your presentation (including WIIFM?)
• Your promise to the audience (and this post too about loving your audience)
• Practice is EVERYTHING!

Let me know what you thought about the article? What points did you like?

Image courtesy of Jimmy Baikovicius on Flickr

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The Real Question: What's In It For Your Audience?

WIIFM?

What's In It For Me?

That's what you're audience is asking.  That's (for the most part) all they care about.  It doesn't matter what you're presenting.  Could be a presentation about your company.  Could be a new product release to your sales team.  Could be a new initiative you're starting.  It doesn't matter.  Your audience only cares about one thing - what's in it for them?

Does that sound selfish?  Yes.  Is it true?  Yes.  Is it selfish?  No.

Quite often when we sit down and start sketching out our presentation, we rarely think of it in terms of what we're offering the audience.  We think about what product features to mention, or which client logos to show, or how worthwhile our cause is.  But you're presenting to reach a certain goal, and if you want to reach that goal, your audience is going to have to take you there.

I just finished a presentation for a great client who is launching a revolutionary type of software.  It has awesome features.  It blows away the competition.  It looks slick.  Really, it's the cat's meow.

My client is presenting this to his national sales team - that's his audience.  So when we started the design process, one of my first questions was, "What's in it for them?"  How is this product going to change their lives?  The goal of his presentation wasn't to unveil this new software, though at first glance you may think it was.  There's nothing in that for them.

What we needed to do was craft the message in a way that gets the sales team excited about selling the software.  How will this software ignite their sales figures? How will this software help them solve the problems of their customers and make them look good?  How is this going to change their lives?  We had to connect the software with the things that matter to the sales team in order to empower them.

Think about your presentation and your audience.  Is your presentaiton about you or is it about them?  Is it about features or is it about how those features will help a business make more money?  Is it about your charity or how helping your charity will enrich your audience's lives?

I'd love to hear your approach to WIIFM in the comments.  How do you make sure it's all about your audience?

Image courtesy of Thomas Hawk

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Give Your Presentation Audience What They Don't Expect

As I was reading my way through the rabbit hole (which is when you're reading a blog post and you link through to another, then another, then another, and now you're reading a post from 2008) I came across a post by Lisa Barone at Outspoken Media about "The Power of the Unexpected."

Her post was introducing the "Wedding Entrance" video where the wedding party enters the church to the soothing sounds of Chris Brown's Forever.  By now, everyone and their brother has seen it (over 6 million views), and it's been spoofed in a variety of places, including NBC's The Office at Jim and Pam's wedding.

I'm not here to talk about the video, but how reading about how powerful the unexpected can really be.  Lisa writes:

Your customers will probably expect you to act a certain way today. The same old greetings, the same service, the same old promises, etc. Maybe today you should surprise them. Answer the phone differently. Offer them something extra.  Show them another side of you. Let yourself get carried away and swept up.

I imediately thought about presentations. One of the reasons I'm so damn passionate about this "new" way of presenting (simple, vivid, clean, + images, - text) is because we live in a culture where a great PowerPoint is UNEXPECTED! 

99.9% Presentations today are:

• Boring
• Text heavy
• Image light
• Lack creativity
• Lack sensitivity (for the audience)
• Copy the standard format
• Rarely entertaining
• Hardly interesting
• Underwhelming
• Did I say boring?

Creating a truly effective presentation can be SO POWERFUL for you, as a brand, as a business owner, as a job seeker, as an educator, or whatever you may be.  If you put in the effort to master your content and use vivid imagery to enhance and support your message, then you can be WILDLY successful because audiences have been subjected to bad presentations for as long as PowerPoint has been around.

I'm not blowing smoke.  I truly believe this because I see it happen every day. Give your audience something of value, something entertaining, something they don't expect, and you will have an audience that can't stop thanking you, calling for your business, referring you to others...you get the point.

Image provided by KhayaL

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Stop, Prepare, THEN PowerPoint

When you hear the term “presentation design”, what do you think of?

PowerPoint? Or perhaps Keynote if you’re a Mac fan, right?

When you take the first step in designing your presentation, how do you start? I believe most people sit down in front of their computers and open their favorite slide software (slideware). Sounds good, right? Wrong.

Read more about this in my guest post at the Six Minutes: Speaking and Presentation Skills blog.

My First Entry into the World's Best Presentation Contest - Please Vote

Author Note: As of this morning (Monday, October 18th) my Social Media for Business presentation is featured as one of the Top 3 Presentations of the Day on the SlideShare.net homepage!

Over the weekend I published my first entry to the 2010 World’s Best Presentation Contest, hosted by SlideShare.net. This is the first year I’ve entered, and I’m excited to show you what I’ve got and how I got there.

I plan to enter another presentation, but that one I’m going to keep under wraps for now.  I fear if I tell you too much, you might pass out from excitement. [roll eyes here]

For my first entry, I created a presentation that gives a high-level overview of what the emergence of social media means and how businesses can get started. I also included some real world examples of companies doing it right and a few cool stats about the most powerful tools out there.

I’ve embedded the presentation below, but I’d be SUPER APPRECIATIVE if you visited my SlideShare page and, if you like it, voted it up (free membership necessary) by clicking on the thumbs up button. The judges will only vote on the Top Voted presentations, and I’m hoping to be one of them.  You can vote up as many presentations as you'd like.

We’ll take a behind-the-scenes look at the making of this presentation after the jump.

Social Media for Business

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Framework:
I rarely use anything that resembles a template. I simply think they’re too restrictive and serve an unnecessary purpose – to feature a company’s branding. If you need to put your logo, website, and tagline on every slide to remind the audience who they’re talking to, then you have bigger problems.

Color Palette:
I chose to use a brown/orange/white color scheme, with brown as the default slide background color and orange/white as the default text colors. I seem to be a fan of orange. Just look around my blog. Both brown and orange are underutilized in my opinion, and I love when presentations go against the norm. They become more unique and memorable, and that starts with the color palette.

Icons:
I used two different sets of icons, the first being the hand-drawn icons on the title page and the second being the white icons on slides 35/36. The hand-drawn icons can be downloaded for free here, and the white icons can be downloaded for free here.  I love how unique the hand-drawn icons are, and the white icons are smooth and help add clarity to the slides explaining hub vs. spoke.

Fonts:
If you read my blog often, you’ll know I’m a huge fan of using non-standard fonts. The default font for the presentation is American Typewriter, which I believe is a Mac-only font (not 100% sure). It comes standard with PowerPoint for Mac 2008, but I don't see it used very often. The secondary, handwritten font is Handwriting-Dakota. Neither font will show up in SlideShare. To ensure the fonts transferred correctly, I saved the document as a PDF (Print > PDF > Save as PDF) before uploading it to SlideShare.

Images:
Using my favorite new site, Compfight.com, I found nearly all of my images on Flickr. Compfight is a Flickr search engine (better than the engine within Flickr) that can search text or tags while filtering for different copyright levels. This way I could search for photos that only offer Creative Commons copyrights. Other images not found on Flickr were purchased on iStockPhoto.com.

As many images as possible were used full-bleed, which means they extent to all four corners of the slide. Imagery is extremely powerful in aiding recall, but make sure you choose images that accurately convey the theme of the slide. I originally had a cool image of a blue door with keys in it for my “Transparency” slide, with the idea that the keys are unlocking the door. However, after having a few people review the presentation, common feedback was that they perceived the image as a locked door – completely opposite of what I wanted to convey. Since audience perception is reality, I went back to the drawing board to find a more appropriate image. That’s where I found the clear bottle, which both conveyed transparency and also fit my color palette – even better!

Length:
My topic was so broad that it would be impossible for me to cross every bridge necessary. A book could be written about the idea that social media is not new – it’s been around forever and only the tools have changed. I tried to create a presentation that was both useful, relevant, and could be consumed fairly quickly. If it were to be presented in person, there would be about 25% less slides. Which brings me to the text...

Text:
Because this presentation needed to live and convey all the necessary information on its own, I had to add more text than I normally would. This is particularly noticeable on the full bleed image slides, where you first see the one or two words that convey the meaining of the slide, but a second, handwritten sentence shows up to expand on the main idea. This second sentence wouldn’t show up in a live presentation. The presenter would provide this information in order to expand on the main educational point of the slide.

I hope you like it. It’s a pretty good representation of how I try to use effective design to entertain the audience and complement the information the presenter is conveying. I will certainly let you know when my second entry has been submitted.

Again - it would mean a lot to me if you voted up my presentation.  If you do, send me an email at Jon {at} PresentationAdvisors {dot} com so I can personally thank you for your support.

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Scott Stratten Proves PowerPoint is Not a Presentation Prerequisite

Photo courtesy of Sean Zinsmeister

Recently I had the priviledge of sitting in on a talk by Mr. UnMarketing himself, Scott Stratten, hosted by the Connecticut chapter of the American Marketing Association.  If you don't know him, you should - he's kind of a big deal on Twitter.  I drove through rain and crazy amounts of traffic for two hours (each way) just for the opportunity to hear him talk about his new book, aptly titled UnMarketing (seriously...I didn't do it just for the iPad raffle and free drink ticket, I swear).  I'll have a review of the book up very soon, along with a free UnMarketing book to give away so keep an eye out.

Be Like Walt Disney - Turn Your Presentation Into An Experience

Photo courtesy of Joe Penniston

My apologies for the blog silence this past week. You can usually count on two posts per week from me, but last week I was in the Happiest Place on Earth – Disney World.

It was an experience like no other. While my wife and I have yet to enter the joyous stage of parenthood, my two brother-in-laws both have young children ranging from 8 years to 6 months old. My goal for this post isn’t to document our trip (probably not what you’re looking for) but it’s important to note that we went with children, since it completely changed the way we experienced Disney, particularly the way they present themselves as both a magical place and a well oiled machine of a business.

We Were All Better Presenters in Kindergarten

Kids say the darnedest things, right?  I'm sure if you sit an think for just a minute, you can remember something quite funny or interesting a child has said to you recently.  Kids are quite unique, especially around the 5-7 year old range where they start to get really curious and outspoken.  Not to say that 15 year olds aren't outspoken - I pretty much knew everything there was to know at age 15 - but 6 year olds have a cute way of saying it.

But as we grow old, we lose some of that childishness.  We also lose our fearlessness, and our creativity (to a point).  Sir Ken Robinson has a wonderful presentation on the TED site where he talks about how schools kill creativity.  It's one of my all-time favorite presentations, and he brings up some valid points. 

5 Tips to Help Avoid Reading Your Slides

Whenever I speak to someone about presentations, especially those who aren't presentation designers, their biggest pet peeve as audience members is when presenters read directly off the slide.  Doing so is a pretty big insult to your audience.  You're basically telling them that you simply don't know what you're talking about and thus have to read.  However, unless you're a kindergarten teacher (and maybe not even then), your audience can read too.  So if all you're going to do is read your slides, why not save everyone time and email them the presentation?  That way they can read it at their own convenience and spend the time saved doing something productive.