Whilst I am a fan of the intelligent and sparing use of PowerPoint and other presentation tools I am always on the lookout for great examples of presentations which use props to bring their messages to life.
I recently came across this short 10 minute video on TED and I commend it to you. Hans Rosling is an inspiring and creative presenter and I love how he uses a simple and readily available prop to help his audience understand some mind boggling numbers.
Seminars are a powerful business building strategy when done right. They are a great way to strengthen relationships with existing clients and showcase your expertise to new ones.
If done well you can also create an environment where existing happy customers “sell” your services to prospective customers naturally and unobtrusively.
Recently I was privileged to attend such an event run by one of my clients, a large accountancy firm. I had been helping one of the partners put together a presentation including developing powerful visual aids rather than boring bullet points
The event was a great success and here are some of the key things that made it so:
They started with a clear outcome for the event.
They created content that was relevant to their target audience.
They invested in professional advice on how to present the content in the most effective and memorable manner and then implemented the recommendations.
The speakers rehearsed their presentations in advance, sought external feedback and adjusted their presentations as a result.
Their presentations were clear and concise and used examples and case studies to help audience relate to the strategies being discussed
They ran a short panel discussion with 3 clients who gave concrete examples of the approaches discussed in the presentations
They invited a mix of existing customers and prospective ones.
They had sufficient staff present to ensure that registration went smoothly and that there were people on hand to answer questions afterwards in the drinks reception.
In conclusion:
Seminars are a great business development tool but you need to invest a little time and effort as well as money to create an effective event.
If you are not prepared then my advice would be to steer clear as the risk of creating a poor impression to a large number of people is real.
Seeking professional advice to ensure that the content is relevant, interesting and well presented can make all the difference.
If you have any questions or ideas please post your comments below.
Gavin Meikle
The Presentation and communication doctor.
I recently had an inquiry from a reader regarding the embedding of my avoiding death by PowerPoint video. This got me thinking. I quite often use video clips within a presentation for a number of reasons.
They are great for demonstrating a particular technique. Ever tried to explain how do do something using only words? It’s very difficult and a short demo video does the job much more effectively.
They can be used to compare different things. I use video clips of Steve Balmer and Steve Jobs to illustrate how different presentation styles can and are equally effective. It’s a case of finding your own authentic style rather than trying to be something or someone you are not,
As a presentation skills trainer and coach I sometimes use a short video of an unknown speaker as a primer for analysing and feeding back. Rather than ask participants to comment on each other initially I show them a video of an average speaker and ask them to comment on what the speaker did well, what the speaker didn’t do well and finally what they could do to improve.
You are probably getting the picture by now that there are lots of uses for video in a presentation. I would however counsel against over use of video. I have listed three of the most common pitfalls below:
Too many video clips. Less is more is always my mantra. Ask yourself, do I really need a video clip here? Remember you are your own best visual aid and anything else should add value.
Clips are too long. I find that about three minutes is the upper limit if used within a presentation.
Use of irrelevant clips. Sometimes I have seen people use funny video clips as energisers or mood changers during a workshop. These can work well but if they are seen as being irrelevant to the main content of the presentation you risk alienating your audience pretty quickly.
In conclusion, video can be extremely powerful and is very easy to embed within a PowerPoint, Keynote or Sliderocket slide deck. Just use them sparingly and think first.
After giving a talk last night in which I used a lot of images and very little text, one of the participants emailed me with the following question:
“Dear Gavin,
I attended you very helpful presentation at the Basingstoke Country Park Hotel yesterday. There is a 13th tip that I would find helpful. When I put photos into my presentations the file size grows massively and it becomes difficult to manage. I have real difficulties e-mailing presentations with lots of photos in for example.
How do I insert photos in a PowerPoint presentation and yet keep the file size down? I know there must be a way of doing it.
Posted in PowerPoint Tips on February 12, 2009 by Gavin Meikle
Today I had a response to my 7 minute video on preventing death by Powerpoint. The poster, a student teacher asked the following question:
As a future teacher I will be using PowerPoint (e.g. for teaching grammar).
As a topic for a course it could be useful for many people in my field of education (English) to learn how to link a powerpoint to a written text (e.g. poetry; if you want to link visual images to support your story about poetry, in what way could you incorporate them into your PowerPoint). Obviously the bullet point approach won’t work as you made clear in your presentation. Any suggestions?
Now I’m not an expert in teaching English grammar but my first thought was to use quotes from famous people which illustrate the rules you are teaching and then design a power point slide with a picture of the person with the quote in a Speech bubble. I’m sure that there must be other ideas out there so I thought I’d open it up to the group. Please respond using the comments form below.
My recent post about a bullet point heavy Web 2.0 presentation on slideshare tickled one of you to write in and say that, although they agreed with me as to how dull and wordy the slides were, they wondered why the presentation was getting lots of hits.
Well I think you have to remember that a stand alone presentation is a very different animal from a presenter lead one. In a live presentation, most of the content should be communicated verbally and non verbally by the human presenter rather than the slides. In a slideshare presentation, you don’t have the presenter in either audio or visual mode so you have to rely on the slides, hence they need to contain more information. Also you can read the information at your own pace.
If you use one slide deck for both uses, the live one will almost certainly fail because of the interference and overload that occurs when your audience are trying to listen to your words and read the script on the screen at the same time. When we read words, we turn them into an internal audio sound track which is almost certainly out of sync with that of the presenter leading to confusion and dissonance.
So in summary, don’t design your presentation to be all things to all men. If you need to have a version viewable on the net, make sure it’s different from the one you use to present from. Your audience will thank you and so will I.
Recently I have been looking at a couple of free on-line alternatives to Powerpoint for producing attractive and effective visual aids to support a presentation. There are now a whole host and how many will survive only time will tell. Thankfully this morning I found a great post that gives you links to 13 great looking alternatives.
So far I have only really played with Sliderocket and I have to say I really like it. If you have tried any of the others, how about posting a comment here and sharing your experience with your fellow presenters.
Posted in PowerPoint Tips on September 7, 2008 by Gavin Meikle
Have you ever had the need to jump to a live website whilst in the middle of a Powerpoint presentation? It is possible by inserting a hyperling to the site you want, within a slide or image. The problem is that doing so results in you having to come out of Powerpoint and into your web browser and then you have to close the web browser to return to Powerpoint.
All you need to do is download the appropriate version of this clever little visual basic add in and it will allow you to display a live website within a powerpoint slide. I just tried it out and it works a treat!
