Get the ROI RSS Feed 
Subscribe to the ROI podcast in itunes 
Return Home
Keep It Simple, Stupid!
I have been working on a lot of presentation as of late. BarCamp Albuquerque is coming up in a few weeks, and thats not lightening the load. I guess I shouldn’t complain, no one else signed me up to present. I’m actually looking forward to it, but as I sit here working on another presentation I think of all the presentations I’ve seen lately. There seems to be four kinds of presenters. One is bad. Thats it, just plain bad. No reason to spend any time here. Another kind is at the opposite end of the spectrum, there are good. Nah… increadible. Steve Jobs, Al Gore and Mitch Joel awsome. No real reason to spend to much time here either. Let get to the meaty middle.
There are two things that make a good presenter. Good Material and Good Presentation. In the middle you find people who have one or the other, but not both. Most recently I experienced the variety of presenters that had the Good Material part covered. The Presentation part, not so good. I really made me think as I stirring my coffee waiting for the hour to be over. This person I am listening to really knows what they are talking about. You can tell they have tons of great experience and a deep well of knowledge about their subject matter. But they were dead boring.
I saw many presentations that day, some good and some bad. Here is the conclusion I came to. What you know isn’t what makes a good presentation. Sure you have to know what you are talking about, but that doesn’t win the day. Engage your audience. Tell a story with your presentation. Introduce conflict. Be excited. This comes easier to some than to others but I have a way to help with the transition to better presenting for those of us who slept in the day the presentation skills were handed out.
Take your presentation. Now go through all 50 of your slides and reduce them all down to have no more than seven words on each slide. Try for three, but settle with seven. Now take the clip art out of your presentations and replace the slide with nothing but a full screen image. Now try presentation again.
We just accomplished (hopefully) two things.
- We made your slides better
- We made your presentation better
Most people fill there slides with tons of bullet points. I think at one point I saw a presentation that had 25 points on one slide. STOP IT. This is not a reading document. Think billboards. When you fill a slide with bulletpoints you can’t engage with the audience… they are too busy reading. You probably are too. Additionally, people can read faster than you can talk, so if you read from your slides, everyone is done before you and waiting for your to catch up. If you whole story is on the slides, just print them out and give a copy to everyone attending and then you don’t have to present at all.
With your slides whittled down to only a few words per slide, you now have to tell a story, not read a story. That is a lot more engaging to an audience. You will also no longer be battling with your audience for attention. They will look at your slide, see everything they need to in a few seconds and come back to you. This will increase their recall because they were actually listening instead of reading.
No fancy presentation tricks or gimmicks today folks. Just a few simple steps that everyone can follow. So go do it. I’ll try to do the same.
Tags: presenting