Focus, and Get Powerpoint Madness Under Control
While helping an association a few years ago to initiate a plan to attract more members, funders and media, I remember attending presentations where one SVP had Powerpoint presentations of as many as 80 slides, each slide containing more than 300 words and complex diagrams. Our eyes would glaze over.
Neither she nor her audience could read the fine print so she had her presentations printed and bound, using enough paper to lay waste to entire forests. Even then, so many words per page meant using 8 pt font or … mouse print.
Well, that style of Powerpoint was not an effective style then, and it certainly is not now. We live today in an era of brevity and … get to the point. Audiences want to figuratively know what time it is; they don’t want you go build a clock.
Carmine Gallo has written a terrific piece for BusinessWeek, “Twitter Changes the Game for Pitching.” Twitter is all about brevity and getting to the point because users are only allowed 140 characters, including spaces, for each mini-blog posting. Twitter has changed the communications landscape by forcing us to focus, and get to the point. I believe Twitter has become today’s most powerful social media communications tool. Hope to see you there – www.twitter.com/davidhenderson
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Category: Featured, Presentation Styles
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How I agree with you about the horrors of long PowerPoint presentations with tiny print. PowerPoint – or, preferably, Apple’s much better Keynote – presentations should reinforce the message one is trying to get across. That does NOT mean reproducing every word the presenter says. In fact, quite the opposite.
I’ve sat through so many boring government presentations that I groan when another one appears on the screen.
Steve Jobs is the king of effective presentations.
And twitter is tremendous! http://www.twitter.com/jbarnabasl
Barney,
You are so right about Steve Jobs as the king of presentations. Of course, he uses Apple’s Notes software which is better than Powerpoint, and each slide only contains a couple of words, perhaps an image.
David
Great post, David … I’m glad I was able to share the BW story with you.
I think other services like SlideShare take the idea a step further. Twitter forces brevity, but how does your presentation change when your audience can only see the visuals without your accompanying speech?
Both brevity and clarity are requirements for the most effective presentations.
Dear David:
Unfortunately those presentations are alive and well in US Business, and flourishing. I see about 1-2 of them a week. One a couple weeks ago had 182 slides. 20 minutes was the time limit allowed for their presentation
They ran over by 5 days.
Keynote is great. But I think the new SlideRocket.com blows away PowerPoint and Keynote. Agree with boring part of the presentations. But a lot of that is the PRESENTER not knowing how to present an idea properly. A while back Guy Kawasaki had a 10-20-30 rule for PPT presentions to him and his VC’s.
10 – no more than 10 ideas/categories (value prop-marketing/sales-hr etc,)
20 – no more than 20 slides
30- use no smaller than 30 font.
SlideRocket can turn that on it’s head. I now use more slide – but try to use 50-60 font – which forces you to use 3- 8 words. Sorta like a headline, shorter than Twitter even. What makes SlideRocket exeptional is the online management of digital assets, tracking, sharing, publishing and the ability to search Flickr/YOUTUBE/web live for clips, images, quotes and insert into the presentations. The transitions are powerful as well.
I did one on Web 2.0 communication tools and inserted a clip from the movie Apollo 13. Check it otu.
http://bit.ly/19sdv2 – check it out full screen.
Slide 3 loads a little slow – it’s a movie clip. You could autorun it at 1 sec per slide clips and it takes about 2.5-3.0 minutes
It was put together to help normal people try to get a look (from a geek-safe distance) at some of the emerging tools, services and principles of this new and evolving communications media.
Lot of pictures. Not many words. You’re head won’t explode. But it might get close. Takes about 2-3 minutes to go through. It was used in a recent article for friends about the Wild and Wacky World of Web 2.o presentations. As a WEB 2.0 101 for normal people about to dip their feet in the web 2.0 waters
http://bit.ly/2bfnY9
Best
Steve
And … I just got the domain names and Inmotion hosting. should be active shortly.
Steve,
You got it … lots of relevant images. What was that old saying about a word being worth so many words?!
I am trying to learn Apple’s Keynote for an upcoming conference because I have seen some terrific Keynote presentations. But it is like learning a new language.
David
I love Keynote. It is a wonderful app. A well-designed Keynote presentation (plenty of images, using the presentation to support, rather than to repeat the words that the presenter uses – as is all too often the standard style used by government offices and too many businesses) can be a joy to behold.
Sliderocket.com looks good, but to get the best out of it one would have to go for one of the paid versions. I’m too mean. I’ll stick to Keynote.