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There is plenty of advice out there on how to create a great presentation. Most of it centers on two pretty common pieces of advice: Tell more stories.Use bigger fonts. Neither is always easy to do, but the more events I attend – the more I realize a single fact that still manages to surprise me about why people do (or don’t) connect with you as a speaker. Having a good story or great visuals is not enough.
Via Gregg Morris
What you say in your interviews and speeches is incredibly important, but how you say it can make all the difference. When you listen to many of the most successful television and radio personalities, pay attention to how they alter their tempo or speak a little louder or softer when they want to emphasize a point. That change in their voice or pacing draws you in, signaling that what they just said—or what they are about to say—is something important you’ll want to remember....
Avoid making a great presentation by following these 11 tips from MarketingProfs for bad presentation slides... or do the opposite and have rocking good ones.
Creating presentations and slideshows is one of the needed skills for both teachers and students. Unfortunately many teachers still find it hard to arrange data into a catchy slideshow to share with students.
Below is a list of some of the best free tools teachers and students can use to create awesome slideshow and presentations. I have already reviewed all of these tools and therefore attest to their usability....
Use this content marketing checklist (and questions and tips) to help you proof and polish the SlideShare presentations you create using Microsoft PowerPoint.. The following checklist, questions, and tips form a system that can help you proof and improve the quality of the SlideShare presentations you create using Microsoft PowerPoint. Proofing is a crucial step in using SlideShare for content marketing, as it involves more than just simply checking for spelling errors or transposed numbers.... [Just the basics... ~ Jeff]
Created with Haiku Deck... Here is a simple presentation version of the last post I wrote on the connected story. Its in a tool called Haku Deck. Simple text and pictures on the fly using creative commons pictures. [A very promising, easy to use tool for better presentations and storytelling ~ Jeff]
Try out these 11 ways to use SlideShare for content marketing success. It's a powerful tool that can help you in every step of your publishing endeavors. SlideShare is more than just a way to share your presentations online; it can be a powerful content marketing tool that can turbocharge all of your publishing endeavors. Regardless of the reasons why you’re publishing — whether it’s to generate leads, build your list, educate your prospects, enhance user satisfaction, or promote your informational products — you can use SlideShare at every step of your process as you plan, write, promote, and profit from the content you create in the form of print books, eBooks, reports, tip sheets, white papers, and more....
To win people over, create tension between the status quo and a better way. After studying hundreds of speeches, I've found that the most effective presenters use the same techniques as great storytellers: By reminding people of the status quo and then revealing the path to a better way, they set up a conflict that needs to be resolved. That tension helps them persuade the audience to adopt a new mindset or behave differently — to move from what is to what could be. And by following Aristotle's three-part story structure (beginning, middle, end), they create a message that's easy to digest, remember, and retell.... [These are great tips for speaking or presentations ~ Jeff]
Via Gregg Morris
Most speeches end with a thud, or maybe a whimper. Yours doesn’t have to; this list of five ways to close a speech (with examples) will help you. [Great speaking advice from Brad Phillips - JD]
Via Janice Tomich
Discusses the benefits of speech pauses, techniques for pausing while speaking, and communications research. Effective use of speech pauses is a master technique. If you do it right, nobody is conscious of your pauses, but your ideas are communicated more persuasively. If you do it wrong, your credibility is weakened, and your audience struggles to comprehend your message.... [Andrew Dlugan speaks with authority - JD]
Presenting to your peers is (relatively) easy. The stakes aren’t high. If you screw up, they’ll usually let it slip. But executives are different. Executives get things done through delegating to other people. So, they are always looking for who they can trust – and who they can’t. Make a good impression and the exec is likely to give you more responsibility in the future. Make a bad impression and you earn a place on their “do-not-trust” list. Either way, it affects your career. Executives are a special audience for presentations. And the stakes are high. Here are FIVE TIPS to keep in mind to ace your next executive presentation....
Sparksheet is all about big ideas, but sometimes we need someone to tell us how the smaller things are done. Presentation guru Nancy Duarte offers some tips for engaging senior executives.
PowToon aims to enable you to create cartoon-style, animated presentation and video clips without professional illustration and motion graphics software. I test drove the beta version. When you look at many cartoon-style videos you see that they are actually not that complicated from a graphics point of view. Usually they involve a number of scenes (slides), they use static characters, basic entrance, exit, and emphasize animations and sometimes a cute hand that puts items on the slide, all accompanied by some simple music.... [Cool tool worth a test drive - JD]
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The 7 rules for creating effective slides include 1) slides are not documents; 2) picture superiority effect; 3) slides should be simple; 4) slides must have unity; 5) display data clearly; 6) use multimedia wisely; 7) don't forget your audience. ...
Susan Cain is the author of the New York Times bestselling book QUIET: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, which is being translated into 30 languages. Her record-smashing TED talk has been viewed more than 3 million times and was named by Bill Gates as one of his all-time favorite TED talks and by the New Yorker magazine as one of five key talks.
Susan is developing an online course on Public Speaking for Introverts (you can go here for more info). Here are six of her favorite tips....
This stunning presentation design guide will help rouse your audience to the edge of their seats. Check out these 10 slide design tips and take your presentation from Blah to Bam! There’s music so turn it up!
Want to “steal” this presentation to use as a presentation template? Signup for a free SlideRocket account, visit Templates, and select any of the free presentation templates....
Staying present is part of being a good communicator. To take mini mind vacations sends a strong signal to others that you don’t care enough to pay attention. It is like the “no comment” comment. “No comment” is one of the strongest comments you can make. Not being present is worse than not showing up at all. In Jonathan Gottschall's book, The Storytelling Animal, he quotes scientific studies that suggest an average day-dream is about fourteen seconds long and that we have about two thousand of them per day. Yikes!... Here are some tips for staying present...
How ideas go viral.... ...Significantly, we're finding out that what makes ideas contagious has more to do with how we think about ideas than what we want to achieve with them. The "virality" of ideas is driven by people liking and passing on information specifically because we think others will enjoy or appreciate it. Buzz is extraordinarily important because as social beings humans crave communication, and buzz spreads ideas like wildfire. In science, we like to use the word meme, a concept given to us by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Like genes, ideas must be replicated and passed on — or they die. When ideas become memes, they have the power to change people's minds, in fact to change our culture (and certainly a workplace). Consider how we think about the phrase "47 percent" now and a few months ago. Memes are ideas, and ideas aren't ideas without people.... It occurred to me that mentalizing this way is similar to what a DJ does when listening to music: He doesn't just think about which music he wants to be listening to, he thinks about how different groups of people would respond to the songs he is considering. He has their interest in mind, not just his own. Buzz happens because we're "information DJs": we take in information and enjoy it but at the same time we also think about whom else might like it as well.... [In the Harvard Business Review, Matthew Lieberman shares some intriguing ideas about "information DJs" and how to create buzz. ~ Jeff]
Pablo Picasso was one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century. His paintings are among the most recognizable of any great artist that has lived. However, Picasso was not just known for his art; he was also know for his wit and pithy sayings. [I enjoyed this speaking inspiration from Picasso ~ Jeff]
Via Bobby Dillard, Janice Tomich
It's not the software, it's you.... [Excellent suggestions to improve every presentation ~ Jeff]
Via José Carlos
A discussion of the necessary bond between storytelling and statistics, and how we can exploit the connection in our presentations. [There are some very useful ideas for using storytelling to make facts and figures come alive ~ Jeff]
Via José Carlos
The dangers of bad a PowerPoint presentation are manifold. It might just mean putting your audience to sleep, or running afoul of the High Council of Information Design. But if your presentations have wider reaching concerns, like those given routinely by members of the U.S. Armed Forces, bad slides can have far greater consequences. In the military’s hands, as Brigadier General H. R. McMaster explained to the New York Times in 2010, bad PowerPoint can actually be dangerous--it gives "the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control." It certainly doesn’t help when you’re making 100-slide presentations entirely in Comic Sans, as one Army aide submitted last year.....
Social science has determined that average length of an audience's attention span. Here's how you can use those findings to improve your speeches and presentations. Imagine you’re in a meeting and someone is presenting sales figures for the last quarter.
How long can she hold your attention? If the topic is of interest to you and she is a good presenter, you can focus on the presentation for 7 to 10 minutes at most. If you’re not interested in the topic or the presenter is particularly boring, then you’ll lose interest much faster—possibly you’ll tune out within 7 seconds instead of minutes.
If people have a short break, then they can start over with another 7- to 10-minute period, but 7 to 10 minutes is the longest block of time they will pay attention to any one presentation....
[Sound advice for speakers and presenters - JD]
Everything about your physical presence should convey the sense that you feel comfortable being in control of the room. Your posture contributes mightily to that impression.
Stand upright and avoid slouching. Square your shoulders with the audience – face them directly instead of tilting your body at a slight angle away from them (unless you’re soliciting audience feedback, in which case turning your body at a slight angle can help encourage audience participation).... [Speaking tips you can use from Brad Phillips - JD]
Everyone would agree that Steve Jobs was a pretty good presenter. But he is said to have practiced two to three full time days before a major product launch speech. Two to three full time days! I bet if you put in that effort before your next presentation, you would be pretty close.
Practice means real practice: standing up, going through the slides first to last without interruption or a quick skip back when you make a mistake, you cannot do this on stage either. Make a video of yourself if you can. Put your screen where your monitor laptop will be (so you do not have to look back at your screen to see what slide is on).
It may sound counter–intuitive, but you actually need to know your story inside out to be really spontaneous. There is no such thing as “winging it”. Your audience will notice, you will use “uh” and “oh” all the time, the key lines will not come out the way they should, you will repeat yourself all the time....
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Liked this, so to speak ;-) but then I'm partial to Twitter...