Techniques

• Presentation
• Creation
• Delivery
• Venue
• Technology
• Products

Labels: General, Performance, Presentation

A few tips

Labels: General, Instructional, Performance, Presentation, Tips

Start with the end in mind

"Before you even open up PowerPoint, sit down and really think about the day of your presentation. What is the real purpose of your talk? Why is it that you were ask to speak? What does the audience expect? In your opinion, what are the most important parts of your topic for the audience to take away from your, say, 50-minute presentation?


Remember, even if you've been asked to share information, rarely is the mere transfer of information a satisfactory objective from the point of view of the audience. After all, the audience could always just read your book (or article, handout, etc.) if information transfer were the only purpose of the meeting, seminar, or formal presentation."

Labels: General, Instructional, Performance, Presentation, Tips, Tutorials

Review before you're reviewed

• Speak their Language (Know the Audience)
  
  
• Be Utterly Prepared (No excuses)
  
  
• CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT (Have some)
  
  
• System Setup (Be unique, but don't be nuts)
  
  
• Speaking (Um ...)
  
  
• Accessibility (Two words: Font Size, and this means YOU!)
  
  
• Demos and Tools
  

Labels: Performance, Presentation

Audience antagonizers

"According to the survey, conducted on the CommunicateUsingTechnology.com web site, the most common complaints are:

• Speakers reading their slides to the audience (62% of respondents cited this item),
  
• Text on the slides is too small to be readable (46.9%)
  
• Slides hard to see because of color choice (42.6%) and
  
• Full sentences were used instead of bullet points (39.1%).

This survey is one of the first to investigate how presentations are seen from the audience point of view. Of those respondents who see 100 or more presentations per year, more than half said that 50% or more of the presentations they see suffer from one or more of the annoying traits. The costs of poor presentations are in the time wasted by those who attended and in the extra work that must be done to communicate the intended message again since it was not done properly the first time."

Labels: Performance, Presentation

Eavesdrop on the pros

"A group weblog dedicated to sharing resources that can help anyone involved in any aspect of the presentation process achieve better results."

VisualBeing.com

One of the recent topics explores the possibility of converting a PowerPoint show in a form that can then be used in a podcast:

Podcasting PowerPoint

I believe that the Lee Potts, is also the force behind:

The Eyes Have It

"A weblog devoted (mainly) to visual communications in the pharmaceutical, biotech and healthcare sectors."

Labels: Performance, Presentation

Suggestions included

... (the) CEO of Whole Foods Market, John Mackey, gave a presentation called "Past, Present, and Future of Food" for an audience of 2000 in Berkeley, California.

... (he) was there to make a presentation and have a conversation that would . . . (show) a skeptical Berkeley audience that his large company still has the credibility to lead the food movement into the future.

. . .(the) 45-minute talk "aided" by 67 text-filled slides followed by an on-stage conversation

. . . Most people felt that the evening generally was successful given Mackey's sincerity, honesty, and general likeability, but John Mackey's "multimedia presentation" as it was billed, could have been so much more.

. . . (the) presentation in Berkeley is a wonderful example of a presentation by an intelligent, personable, and passionate leader that easily could have been insanely great but was not. "[He] raced through the slides like a Ph.D. student presenting his dissertation," said the UC Berkeley reporter in the audience.

. . . it's a shame the presentation itself was not better planned and delivered given the importance of the topic and the profile of the speaker. Frankly, when you're trying to change the world, there is no excuse for being dull.

• It's a story. This topic screams "Story" yet there was no story that I could follow.
  There were bits and pieces (some of it interesting) and way too much history and data-without-purpose.
  
  
• Make it shorter. Cut the presentation part of the evening to 20-25 minutes and spend more time discussing on stage with the host, taking questions from the audience, etc.
  
  
• Make it visual. There are no boring topics, but this topic is especially interesting and provocative.

Labels: General, Performance, Presentation

Worth a try

If you have a slow machine, these tips from the Help file may speed things up:

If your presentation seems to be running slowly, try one or more of the following Settings

Reduce the resolution for the slide show presentation display.

1. On the Slide Show menu, click Set Up Show.
   
   
2. In the Slide show resolution box, click 640x480 in the list.
   

1. On the Microsoft Windows Start menu, point to Settings, and then click Control Panel.
   
2. Double-click Display, and then click the Settings tab.
   
3. Under Colors, click High Color (16 bit) in the list, and then click OK.
   

Labels: Performance