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Emaze vision – to change the way people create presentations through a simple, fully automated process that generate powerful and engaging showcases.
Via Baiba Svenca, Gust MEES
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.
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....
The Art Of Storytelling In Business Communications And Public Relations... It’s hard to beat the TED Conferences when it comes to oral storytelling. It turns out the speakers – or the folks helping the speakers behind the scenes – craft the titles of their talks with the same quest for attention. Ten of my favorites...
Here are 21 questions you should ask yourself before every speech or presentation you ever deliver. This post could easily have included 137 questions, but I’ve limited it to 21 questions you should ask before every speech or presentation....
Many presentation coaches say that PowerPoint makes most speakers look worse. But new research challenges that assertion. Who's right? PowerPoint is an overused device used primarily by lazy speakers who are unable or unwilling to put together a more compelling speech.
Right? Well, although that line of thinking is increasingly pervading presentation best practices lists, not so fast.
Here’s a counterintuitive idea for you: using PowerPoint actually makes you more credible, not less....
In today's guest post, you'll learn six great ways to be funny in your next speech - without any of the negative consequences humor can bring. Here’s the insider secret that comedians don’t want you to know—delivering a line isn’t that difficult. Al Gore, who no one would mistake for a stand-up comic, opens his ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ presentation with a fabulous joke: “My name is Al Gore. I used to be the next president of the United States of America.” To paraphrase Larry the Cable Guy: “I don’t care what your politics are; that’s funny!” I promise you, if Al Gore can do it, you can do it.
Al Gore’s joke is extremely (and, I suspect, painfully) self-deprecating which is my first tip: Do be self-deprecating. Then, not only will you be seen as somebody with their ego in check, it’s also extremely unlikely that someone will take offense. I open my speech with jokes about being bald: “I don’t need conditioner. I dream of split ends…the very thought of one hair becoming two!”...
Public speakers can learn at least four things from stand-up comedians. You don't have to be a pro - or go for laughs - to learn important lessons from comics. According to surveys, people are more afraid of public speaking than dying. And, we’re not just talking about a conference with 500 people. We find employees are just as afraid to present to five people as they are to 500!
We’ve learned that through stand-up comedy training, offered as part of our proprietary Comedy Experience program, employees become better, more fearless speakers. We teach organizations great and small to employ storytelling techniques mastered by professional comedians. And, we walk the walk. Everyone at Peppercom – from management to interns – has performed stand-up comedy at least once, and many of us entertain comedy club audiences all over New York on a regular basis....
It is simply impossible to become a great leader without being a great communicator. I hope you noticed the previous sentence didn't refer to being a great talker - big difference.
One of the most important sentences in any speech often comes at the very beginning when the speaker says, “I’m excited to be here.”... But the majority of the time, the speaker utters that line without any discernible excitement. They’re saying that they’re happy to be there, but their voice and body language sends the exact opposite message....
...Obviously, you have to cover the basics: create compelling content; find out who will attend and why; understand the role each person will play; and learn what the participants think about the topic.First, define your ideal outcome. What result do you envision. Be sure you don't overlook three other aspects of your preparation, though....
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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
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....
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
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]
We didn’t go into business to hate talking about our businesses. We went into business for freedom, flexibility, unlimited income potential, a way to impact the world around us while making money and achieving financial success. The classic “30 Second Elevator Speech” in my humble opinion, is everything but freedom. It’s a structure that nobody likes and everyone dreads.... [A fresh look at elevator pitches by Nancy Marmolejo - JD]
Introverts can seize the microphone -- and bring the house down. By Susan Cain... [10 great speaking tips and How to thrive in a world that can't stop talking - JD ]
Snapseed is a powerful yet simple photo editing tool for all platforms including iPad, iPone, Mac and Windows. Very modest cost and you may never use photoshop for photo editing again. - JD Snapseed Home page and demo: http://www.snapseed.com/home/
Don't cram a lot of data into your presentation because you think your audience will read it later. They won't. If you cram a lot of detail and data into your slides and expect your audience to absorb it later when you circulate your presentation, beware.
A new infographic from Sales Crunch zeroes in on just how many of your slides people read after the presentation. The takeaway? People read presentations with fewer slides more than long ones, and for longer periods of time....
The final part of the series teaches you to open a speech through humor, by referring to the conference, or by referring to a newsworthy item. Over the past two days, you’ve learned that the opening minutes of a presentation are often the most important. And as you know by now, the authors of The Definitive Book of Body Language have found that the audience forms 60 – 80 percent of its impression of a speaker within the first four minutes.
Therefore, I hope you’ll invest time in creating an opening that’s better than “Good morning. Thank you for inviting me here today. I’m excited to talk to you. Today’s agenda will be… (zzzzzzzz)….”
Today’s post will cover three final ways to open a presentation or speech: building off the conference theme, mentioning something in the news, and using humor....
When telling stories, don't say things such as, the man was very rich. How old was he? How rich was he? Those abstractions kill an otherwise good story.
Joe Pulizzi shares 15 public speaking and presentation tips that will make all the difference in getting your message to stick. After my blog and my books, public speaking events have probably led more to growing the business than anything else I’ve done. Below are some of my presentation speaking tips that I try to integrate into every presentation I do (in no particular order). I hope they are helpful to you.... [Really great speakinbg tips from content marketing expert Joe Pulizzi - JD]
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Creative and cool... ;-)