Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

In a previous post, we mentioned that people tend to nod off in conference calls and how it is important to learn to conduct teleconferences better to minimize loss of time. One suggestion was to use online meeting software where you have the added benefit of presenting slides to your attendees via screen sharing, to help better engage with your audience.

This raises the question: what should you present and how can you make awesome slides which will stimulate your attendees visually? How you go about displaying your material can play a crucial role in the success of your presentation.

Today, we look at how to build killer presentation slides that will keep your participants enthralled and engaged during your meetings. These principles can be applied to both traditional face-to-face presentations and online presentations.

In the introduction of the iPad Air 2 Apple presentation designers created a great example of using a simple visual to tell a complex story.

Some people might use the excuse, “We use PowerPoint in my company and it’s not as elegant as Apple Keynote.” Maybe it’s the story—or a lack of one—that’s the problem!

I asked Cory to re-create the Apple pencil slide a second time in PowerPoint. You can see it here. It’s simple and clean. Corporate America doesn’t have a PowerPoint problem; it has a storytelling problem.  Learn to tell a story and use visual comparisons to bring the story alive....

Are you a slow talker? If so, your sluggish pace may be turning your audiences off. Here's how to quicken your pace without sacrificing clarity.

If your conversational partner has mentally formulated her five-year business plan by the time you finish a sentence, or if your audience is tapping fingers and feet impatiently while you’re finishing the first paragraph of your talk, it’s safe to say you’re too slow.

A colleague told me he recently walked out of a lecture at a conference and demanded the return of his thirty-five dollar registration fee. The reason? He clocked the speaker at ninety words per minute—about half the average speaking speed....

PowerPoint is a handy program that can bring out the best and worst in information delivery: for every presentation that’s interesting and wow-worthy, there’s one (or maybe 10) that’s miserably unbearable.

No one wants their stuff to be the latter, but it happens all the time, from the smallest business meeting to the largest keynote.If you’re interested in keeping your audience engaged, engrossed, and enrapt (or at least awake), here are 7 PowerPoint tips that will help you grab and keep their attention....

The secret to bringing “old school” PowerPoint into the new age of presentation can be found in the concept of “picture superiority.” Information is easier to retain and more robustly processed by a person’s brain if it is presented in text and pictures. Deliver information verbally and your audience might retain 10 percent of the information. Add a picture and retention soars to 65 percent. Here are three examples of how to visualize data.

What if you could change your perspective of your presentation from a flat 2-dimensional objective to a 3-dimensional objective in which you are seeking engagement by the audience? Now, I’m not suggesting for you to add animation to your brand presentation. Rather this is about using different types of current visual technologies. Similar to the fashion industry, creative visual technology has to adapt to the changing needs of the audience

.Let’s reinvent the basic slideshow to become a marketing tool that really wows the audience to generate leads and do so easily. The tools mentioned below are not in competition nor are they for the same purposes. The objective here is to show how different industry segments have changed, the different types of tools available, and where to use these tools....

Let’s begin with a caveat: You can’t fake trust.“Words not backed by action are meaningless,” says Darlene Price, president of Well Said, Inc. and author of “Well Said! Presentations and Conversations That Get Results.”

“You can use the right words and phrases to sound ‘trusting,’ but language is no replacement for being a trustworthy person. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Who you are speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you’re saying.’"

Price says the word “trust” comes the Old Norse word treysta, meaning “to rely on or have confidence in.”

“The basis for a healthy, productive relationship is trust,” she explains. “As a professional, it’s critical to earn the trust of those with whom you work.”...

“When people trust you, they’re much more likely to believe in you, bond with you, and buy from you.”

Here are 18 phrases professionals use to get others to trust them....

Such storytelling isn’t easy to find.

When organizations and consultants go through branding exercises and come to be part of associating words with their brands, they rarely highlight “cold” or “heartless” (suppose someone selling ice fishing equipment might go for “cold.”).

After scouring the Web I finally found one.

Meet Nick Murray, a self-professed “premier speaker” on the financial services industry....

It was the ultimate professional dress for a girl with an hourglass figure. No cleavage, flattering, mid length, etc.

So, there I was, sitting in front of the class talking about Jungian archetypes when I realized the dress was feeling loose. I’d lost some weight so I was congratulating myself.

Then I realized I could actually feel the air conditioning…on my back. Yes, the zip had come apart and the dress was starting to fall off.