PowerPoint Can Help You Be Funny

I would like to be allowed to see more PowerPoint slides. Ok, not really. In fact I could probably live the rest of my life without seeing another PowerPoint slide – I think that I’ve seen my limit! Since I probably can’t avoid seeing more slides, then perhaps at least we can talk about what we can do to make them more fun…

It’s All About Fun

The purpose of a PowerPoint slide is to enhance your speech. Malcolm Kushner is a speaker who has spent some time looking for ways to make this happen. His thought is that we can all learn to get along with PowerPoint better if we can find ways to make our audience laugh. Malcolm has done the heavy lifting for us by searching the web for different sites that we can use to create images that will cause our audience to chuckle and warm to your main message.

A Little Help From Albert Einstein

The nice thing about Albert Einstein is that everyone knows who he was. If only there was some way we could get him to help us out with our next presentation. Well good news, we can. Take a look at this image:

Albert Knows What He's Talking About...

The web site http://hetemeel.com/einsteinform.php allows you to add any text that you want to to the chalkboard that Albert is writing on. I’ve given you an example, I think that you can take it from here…!

Try A Bumper Sticker

Or a movie marquee, or a bar of soap. Taking a phrase that your audience will recognize and putting it in an image that they aren’t expecting is what will capture their imagination and help you to recapture their attention. Here’s an example:

Guess How Much This Promotion Cost?

Over at http://www.redkid.net/generator/sign.php they have 50 different images that you can overlay your company name / product name / main message. Check it out!

A Wanted Poster Always Works

Malcolm has one final suggestion for us. Once again everyone in your audience knows what an old-style wanted poster looks like. Here’s an example of what you can include in your presentation:

Look Who's Wanted!

This is a great way to include an image of the person who arranged your speech or the CEO. Once the audience recognizes them and sees the context, they’ll either laugh or at least have a good chuckle.

Final Thoughts

One of the fundamental rules of life is that we all like people who are like us. As a speaker we all have the challenge of finding ways to get our audience to warm up to us within the space of our speech. Getting our audience to laugh is a great way to make this happen.

Since we all use PowerPoint slides, finding a way to use our PowerPoint slides to make our audience laugh is a great way to connect with our audience. Customizing images with a dash of either our information or some part of our audience is a great (and easy) way to do this. Spend a little time with the sites that we’ve talked about, and you’ll be able to intimately connect with your audience and make an lasting impact in their lives.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If you really want to connect with your audience and make an impact in their lives, then you’re going to have to discover out how to speak with power. The trick is that power is a tricky thing – you can’t touch it, you can’t buy it, you’ve got to find it and hold on to it. The good news is that I know how you can do this…

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When Is Too Little Information On A PowerPoint Slide A Problem?

Hopefully by now everyone at least knows that you can seriously damage your audience if you create and use poorly designed PowerPoint slides. The number one offence that everyone seems to be able to agree on is that a slide that has been overloaded with text and numbers (a) doesn’t work, and (b) puts your audience to sleep. Good news – this problem has been solved!

Olivia Mitchell who is a speaking coach out of New Zealand (was there ever a “Zealand”?) discovered a blog posting by Laura Bergells in which she laments the current state of PowerPoint presentations as we move into 2009.

Laura’s main point is that most people have gotten the message that too much information is a bad thing. However, she objects to the way that we are currently solving it – by removing basically all of the information from our PowerPoint slides and replacing it with pretty pictures.

She’s got a good point – I’ve started doing this over the past year or so. However, in my own defense, I only started doing it because I saw that Steve Jobs was doing it and everyone was just raving about his presentations.

I sorta don’t have the heart to tell Laura that it’s probably going to get worse (in her opinion) before it gets better. A new presentation format in which you only get twenty slides and can show each one for “only” twenty seconds (for a total of 6 minutes 40 seconds) is catching on. This presentation style is called Pecha Kucha, and was started by two architects in Tokyo as part of a designers’ show and tell.

So what’s a presenter to do? First off, I think that we all need to sit down and have a quick reality check. Why do we give presentations? These are actually pretty poor ways of teaching new material. Adults learn in all sorts of different ways and listening to spoken words (and looking at PowerPoint slides) doesn’t do it for most of your audience (especially the younger ones raised on multimedia).

What this means is that you’ve got to decide why you are REALLY there. The list is pretty short – convince the audience that your view is correct, get them to agree to take some action, educate them on some new piece of information, or simply to amuse them.

Keeping the “back to basics” concept in mind, we should remember that PowerPoint slides don’t deliver the presentation by themselves. Instead, their whole reason for being is to help the presenter. It’s when we rely on our slides too much that we start to lose our audience.

So can you use a slide that has a lot (but not too much) information on it? The answer is YES. However, you can’t spend too much time on it and your certainly can’t read the contents of the slide off to your audience. Remember, the slide is a tool, not the presentation itself.

As we enter 2009, what should the ideal PowerPoint presentation look like? In a nutshell, it should look like it was designed to support the words that are being spoken. This will involve a lot of visual imagery (“pretty pictures”) and SOME detailed slides if they are needed.

It’s how the detailed slides are used that will differ from presentations of old. Show the detailed slide, make your point in an unhurried manner, and then move on. Additional information can be provided on your web site, in handouts, or in pod-casts that your audience can use to learn more AFTER your presentation. Welcome to 2009!

Have you gone to the minimalist approach in your presentations or are you still using a lot of words and bullets? What do you think of presentations that you sit through that only use pretty pictures and few words? Do you remember more or less from these presentations? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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So you can find self-help info on how to deliver better presentations just about anywhere on the web (including this blog!); however, where can you find guidance on how to really deliver a disastrous presentation? Well fear not, that’s what we’ll cover today…

Monica is one of my friends who is a professional speaker by trade. She is very good at what she does which is to teach retail sales folks in the wireless industry how to sell more. She appears to be about nine feet tall when you meet her for the first time, has an enormous amount of blond hair, and speaks with a Texas drawl that makes it almost impossible to try to not picture her wearing a cowboy hat. Naturally I went to her to get answers to my questions about how to give a bad presentation.

As you can well imagine, Monica was quite surprised when I asked her what I needed to know in order to give a bad presentation – “… but why would you EVER want to give a bad presentation. Who do you hate that much that you’d force them to sit through that?…” Once I explained that I was trying a bit of reverse psychology here and that if I understood what made up a bad presentation, then I’d know what to avoid she calmed down just a bit. She is from Texas you know so calm is always a relative thing with her.

If you really want to do a poor job of presenting, please consider this to be a checklist provided by Monica. If you’d like to do a good job of presenting, then don’t do any of these things!

1. Don’t Rehearse. What me worry? Why bother to practice – you know this stuff inside and out, you’ll just go up there and wing it and the crowd will love you because it will seem more natural and less rehearsed than all the other presenters. Yeah right. Look: actors and musicians practice, practice, practice in order to get good enough to perform. What makes you think that you can get away without rehearsing? No matter how silly you look while practicing, you’ll look much better when you go to do the real thing!

2. Don’t Tell The Audience Why They Are Sitting In Uncomfortable Chairs. When you take the stage, you have everyone’s attention. When you open your mouth to speak, you will start to lose them. Since you’d really like to keep as much attention as possible, you really should explain why you’re there. Don’t launch into your detailed presentation on how to optimize an Oracle 11g database using only a ball-point pen and a roll of aluminum foil until you connect with the audience by explaining why you’ve come to tell them this information.
3. Tell Them What You’re Going To Tell Them, Tell Them, And Then Tell Them What You Told Them. I’m not sure if this was ever a good idea; however, it has become a cornerstone of public speaking courses and books. Too bad it’s really bad advise. We live in an age of text messages, Blackberrys, and TIVO time shifters. Nobody has the time or the energy to sit through a presentation where the content is just being summarized and represented three times over. You always want to lead up to your closing – end with a bang not a whimper. If you are summarizing for your audience, then you’ll lose them. Instead tell them that the murder was done by Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick.
4. Use As Many Slides As Possible. No matter how you feel about PowerPoint you have to admit one thing: it’s made creating slides very easy to do. As with most things about PowerPoint, this can be a bad thing. Look, your presentation is all about you and what you have to say, it’s not about the slides. Every new slide that you show to your audience will cause them to take their attention away from you to look at the slide. You will then have to fight them to get their attention back. Slides should complement and enhance what you are saying. Try this: use one slide for every 5 minutes of your presentation.
5. Use Your Slide Deck As A Speech Outline. We’ve all seen this done: the presenter turns either 90 or 180 degrees from the audience and stares at the slides on the wall during the entire presentation. The audience spends it’s time thinking that they could just read the slides and not have to sit through this entire presentation since the presenter is just reading them to the audience. In a nutshell, this just shows that you didn’t take any time to prepare.

Monica told me that she could go on and on (and I believed her), but that these were the top 5 tips that she would provide to anyone who really wanted to do a bad job delivering a presentation. I’m not sure if she’s ever going to talk to me again, but at least I got the info that I had asked for.

So how many of these little gems have you seen in action? Anyone care to confess to actually doing any of them (I’ve done them all, just not all at the same time). If you did any of them, what made you stop doing it or why haven’t you stopped?

Tags: presentation tips, rehearse, public speaking, purpose, PowerPoint

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I was asked to give a speech for a local company’s “high achievers” group a little while back. It had been quite some time since I had actually had to sit down and think long and hard about what message I really wanted to get across to an audience. This made me go do some research on how good speechwriters find ideas that really shine.

Everyone who writes speeches for a living seems to agree about one thing: just get the first draft done. There are countless stories about folks who get hung up on trying to write the perfect speech and who spend so much time editing word after word that they never complete the speech. Just let the words flow and resist the urge to edit. Once it’s all out there, then you can go back and have at it.

Write for the ear not the eye. What sounds great on paper probably sounds stilted and awkward when read aloud. For example, we use a lot of contractions when we speak (can’t, won’t, shouldn’t) but we don’t use them as much when we write. This difference will show up as a wordy, formal tone in any speech. Solve this problem by reading your speech out loud and actually listening to how it sounds. Then go back and rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.

PowerPoint is not all bad. Dr. John Medina’s book Brain Rules discusses how audiences lose focus after 10 minutes, so shifting gears, telling a story, etc. every 10 minutes will keep them focused and awake. Another rule is that a combination of both auditory and visual stimuli make your message 6 times more memorable than auditory alone. What this means is that if you use it the way that it should be used (as a helper, not a crutch), PowerPoint can boost the impact of your speech. But be careful — it’s easy to go overboard. My favorite saying is “There is a reason that you never see PowerPoint used during an eulogy.”

Writing a speech should be an adventure. Often where we think that the effort will take us ends up not being where we finally arrive. However, doing a good job of speech writing will pay dividends that will have a value that lasts long after the speech is done.

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Ok, so you’ve got a big presentation coming up and you know that you want to make a difference and have the audience walk away with a good understanding of the complex info that you are going to present. What can you do to really make sure that you key points get hammered home? Setting yourself on fire halfway through the presentation or using trained animals both would be great, if impractical ways to accomplish this. How about two simpler ways that us technical folks always seem to forget as we pull together our presentations?

Audience Attention is drawn to LARGE differences that are perceptible.

Let’s say that you’ve got a slide that contains one of the key points that you want to make to your audience. There is probably other things on that slide (like a title?). You need to make sure that your key point, be it a number, a comparison, a figure, etc. jumps out at your audience. Background images, scrolling text, clipart, video clips, etc. are all swell; however, if they distract from your key point then they need to go away. Keep in mind that PowerPoint’s ability to have items join the slide via animation might be a good way to lead up to and introduce the key point.

People group elements into units automatically, which they then remember

The human mind is an amazing thing. We can quickly take in large quantities of information and rapidly make decisions about it. You can make this talent work for or against you in a technical presentation. Things that you place close to each other on a slide will automatically be considered to be related by your audience. A good example of this is labels and the thing that they are labeling. A bad example of this would be a graph that shows that both the price of copper ore and the price of apples have both increased by 25% in the past 6 moths. Both items would be shown closely together on the same graph and the audience would associate them. However, they really have nothing to do with each other (unless you are trying to talk about the cost of copper apples…).

Just a few things to consider when you are making that last pass though the big presentation that you’ve created — do your main points jump out or are they buried?

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