PowerPointless

Sooner or later you will be asked to make a presentation.

After you get past the night sweats and churning stomach, most likely your next step will be to turn to PowerPoint.

You will use PowerPoint to create an outline of your presentation.  Like most people, you might add some pictures, maybe a sound effect or clever animation, and consider yourself done.  You really haven't begun.

I believe that many would be wonderful presentations are ruined by over-reliance on the PowerPoint crutch. All the thought and care and creativity that should go into the words that the speaker says instead goes into the slides he is putting up on the giant screen.  Then, because the slides are so brilliant, the speaker turns to enjoy them along with the audience.

Speakers would be well served if they thought of PowerPoint as a highlighter rather than a pen.  The slides flashing up on that giant screen should have images and words that emphasize or focus attention on key ideas and themes.  There is no need for them to contain the speakers entire outline.

Of course PowerPoint isn't the only culprit.  There are also a growing number of speakers who have turned to other presentation options.  While these might add some different features, I have not heard of any that help you make your presentation more audience focused.  Presentation software is designed to make things easier for the speaker...not the audience.  The presentation companies are in business to get you to upgrade from the free version to the pro version.  The last thing they want you to do is turn your back on the slides and focus on the audience!

I am intrigued by the PechaKucha formatof presentations.  In this format, which started in Japan, speakers get 20 slides which are shown for 20 seconds each.  Speakers do not have control over when slides change.  Speakers who are successful in PechaKucha let go of trying to time their comments to slides.  They have 6 minutes and 40 seconds to tell their story.  Obviously, this is not a format that works for every presentation, but it seems to me the slides have the proper prominence compared to the words spoken.

When I have a presentation to make, I still turn to PowerPoint to help me rough out an outline for the presentation.  I find that the format allows me to easily summarize my main points and then organize them in a coherent order (or at least that is the goal!) Once I have the outline done, though, I scrap that PowerPoint and start a new one.  No more than one image, word or phrase per slide.  Occasionally, I will allow myself to add a quote.  But I do not read the quote or make mention of the images on the slides.  I treat them almost like footnotes...additional information that adds to my comments but hopefully doesn't distract.  I am trying to get brave enough to do a PowerPointless presentation.

Regardless of the strategy you use, it is important to remember that the best presentations should be conversations with the audience.  Make sure you are speaking with your audience, not your slides.  Make sure you are using the audience as the guiding force of what you say and how you deliver it, not PowerPoint.  PowerPoint or any of the countless presentations support options are wonderful tools that can enhance and add some visuals to your presentation.  Just make sure your slides don't take over everyone's attention, including yours!

The strongest personality in your presentation should be YOU, not your slides!

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Talking together

Lately, we seem more concerned with having our devices talk to each other than we do with having our colleagues talk to each other.  With the explosion of wireless computing and the Swiss army knife of the 21st century, the smart phone, featuring more and more capabilities and tools, we have more and more ways to connect with colleagues and customers and fewer and fewer reasons to talk to people.

While I believe in the efficiency of webinars, conferences and conference calls, I also have multi-tasked my way through all of them enough times to know that they are not usually the best way to have an engaged conversation.  As with so many things related to communications, the closer you can get to face-to-face, one-on-one conversation, the more impact and persuasion you can have.  The closer we can get to one-on-one conversation the more likely we are to make a connection with the other party in the conversation.  

A friend of mine sends out emails about her business on a pretty regular basis.  She was telling me that she had recently started personalizing some of the emails to key customers.  The response from those customers was remarkable, she told me with a bit of amazement.  While not everyone made a purchase, many people felt the need to respond to her; to reconnect with her.  They saw these emails not as advertisements, which they essentially were, but as one-on-one communications.  As a personal message.  They felt compelled to respond.  They felt compelled to strengthen the relationship.

There are ways that technology can help us approximate the one-on-one conversation.  For a while, one of the biggest concepts in marketing was the idea of mass customization.  The theory was that technology would allow us to use the convenience of mass marketing but with the impact of a personalized, customized message.  While I suspect there aren't many people anymore who feel that a mail merged letter is the same as a hand-written note, it does make a letter seem a bit less like a form letter and a bit more like the sender wants to really communicate.  Technology allows us to customize what information a customer or prospect receives, essentially allowing us to customize our interaction on a one-on-one level.

We need to be mindful of what we are doing and not let the technology seduce us too much.  For example, think about how too many people use what is now a pretty dusty technology, PowerPoint.  Too many speakers continue to pour all of their energy into creating detailed, bullet-riddled PowerPoint presentations.  They end up giving their speech facing the slides because they don't want to miss any of the precious facts they have loaded onto each slide.  As Seth Godin says in his blog post titled "Really Bad PowerPoint," "countless innovations fail because their champions use PowerPoint the way Microsoft wants them to, instead of the right way."  Wordy, bullet-laden presentations rarely communicate as much as the creator hopes they will.  When a speaker is speaking to the screen, he cannot be talking with the audience.  Also, people can't see all the brilliance on the slide if their eyes are closed.

Similarly, some organizations confuse the use of social media as a strategy as opposed to a media option.  This results in companies focusing unwarranted attention on generating likes, or followers, or repins instead of focusing on the true mission of the organization or the brand, generating sales.  Getting someone to push a "Like" button is not a conversation or a connection.  It may be an invitation to start a conversation, depending what scheme you used to get that person to push that "Like" button.  We really need to be focusing on connections, real connections, with customers and prospects and other key audiences.  We need to be finding ways to talk together.

A colleague of mine told me recently that if an email exchange goes past three emails without the issue getting resolved, she picks up the phone and calls the person.  The issue rarely goes past one phone call.  There is nothing more powerful than talking directly with a person.

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Know Your Stuff

I once had a salesperson make an appointment with my boss and myself to tell us about his company and the product that he felt we could use.

He was on time, well dressed and did the required small talk very well.  But when it came time to give the presentation, he couldn't get the PowerPoint presentation on his laptop to work.  After watching him struggle with trying to get things to work for 10 minutes or so, it was clear that he couldn't give the presentation without the PowerPoint crutch.  He asked if he could reschedule the meeting.  We declined.

If you are going on a sales call or making a presentation, know your stuff.  Things happen with technology.  If you aren't prepared to move forward without laptop assistance, you aren't prepared. Be prepared!

Tell Stories

I have been working this week on a presentation I will be giving at a conference in a couple of weeks.  I found myself getting tired of putting together the PowerPoint presentation.

As I was discussing the presentation with the colleague I am giving the presentation with, I realized that our conversation focused mostly on the stories we were planning to tell, not the slides that would be flashing up on the screen.  The stories are what gave both of us energy.  What interested us most as presenters.

I know the same is true for me when I am in the audience.  Give me a pithy story or real life situation to make your point, and I am with you.  Tell a tale, perform a role play, spin a yarn and I am more likely to remember your point, or at least pay attention!

But if you toss up a bunch of overly wordy, hard to read slides...or even beautifully designed, pithy slides and just read from them...pretty soon I will be wondering what I am going to do for lunch and whether I remembered to turn off the coffee pot.  Use PowerPoint (if you must) to accent or highlight your stories, not to tell them.  People want to hear you tell them the stories and lessons, not read about it on a screen.

After all, there is a reason they call it a speech, and not a show.