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Slide decks are a powerful way to back up any type of presentation from team meetings and sales pitches to conference keynotes and workshops. We've all seen presentations with poor design that takes away from talks, and at worse, completely distracts the intended audience. However, most presenters aren't graphic designers. Slide decks can be frustrating to build, and great slide decks help communicate what an audience needs to hear.
At Moz, I've had the pleasure of working with many speakers on their decks, whether for a biweekly webinar or for MozCon. And while you aren't going to turn into a god of slide decks overnight, there are some easy ways to go from terrible to decent. Decent won't get you heaps of praise for a deck, but it also won't leave a sour taste in someone's mind about your slide skills and will allow them to focus on what you actually have to say.
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....
Haiku Deck Picks for Decks of the Year
It’s one of my favorite times — when we look back at the most inspiring presentations created in 2014 and select our favorites to be honored as Decks of the Year.
Previous honorees and new ones, stylish decks and informative ones, beautiful Creative Commons images and custom collages — there’s a bit of everything in this year’s list, and we hope you’ll find something that inspires you....
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....
If you're in business, you need to know how to create captivating presentations. Whether you're trying to convince your boss to support a new campaign, talking with a prospect to close a deal, or building a new piece of marketing collateral, you need to know how craft a presentation that won't put people to sleep.
The best (and easiest) way to do that? Use the right tools to create and deliver your presentation.
If you're not sure which tools to use, look no further than this blog post. We’ve compiled our list of the top presentation tools for sales and marketing professionals. They’re listed below, in no particular order.
Empowered Presentations: Award winning Presentation Design Firm: Creating visually engaging decks that resonate with your Global audiences.
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....
Most 16-year-olds are focused on sports or cars or maybe even the SATs. For Tyler Millis and Arjit Kansal, two teens from Fort Meyers, Florida and New Delhi, India, respectively, their passion is PowerPoint. Yep, you read that right: PowerPoint.
The two 16-year-olds beat out 400,000 candidates from 130 countries to be named Microsoft Office Specialist World Champions— Millis in PowerPoint 2007, and Kansal in PowerPoint 2010. The 13th annual competition, sponsored by Certiport, holds a series of tests and interviews for students to show off their knowledge of Microsoft Office products. Only 123 students made it to the final round, with Millis and Kansal taking home the PowerPoint titles and $5,000 scholarships....
I recently worked with a client who was presenting about a "boring" topic. It turns that all we had to do was unbury a huge headline.
...With some quick math, we determined that the new program saved the organization about 3,000 hours per month—a staggering 36,000 hours per year. That’s the equivalent of 18 full-time jobs. Assuming each person filing expenses earned $65,000 in salary and benefits, that represented an annual savings of almost $1.2 million....
“Stories are the way our teams get excited, aligned, and rallied around the same goal,” says long-time IDEO Project Lead Nicole Kahn.Kahn, along with a team of fellow storytellers, has helped champion this philosophy through events they've held at IDEO offices across the country. The goal: to provide a model for what good presentations look like, while also giving designers a chance to talk about what inspires their creativity, and get solid feedback from an audience of their peers.
At First Round’s recent Design+Startup event, Kahn shared lessons she and her teammates have compiled, which have become a set of best practices for giving high-impact presentations....
...Of course, it’s common practice to circulate decks of slides before meetings, but often they’re too opaque to be understood without guidance from a presenter — or they’re so packed with“teleprompter” text that people have a hard time digesting them. Asking everyone to decode your cryptic bullets or plow through a lot of verbiage before you meet is setting yourself up for disappointment. Nobody has the time, and your ideas could get lost in translation. So give people a document that’s meant to be read, not presented. One they’ll grasp quickly and easily on their own.
You can create a slidedoc by re-chunking your message into key points and illustrating them with pictures or diagrams, along these lines:
Studies show that this combination — concise text paired with visuals — helps people understand and retain concepts more easily. As clinical psychologist and author Haig Kouyoumdjian points out, “Our brain is mainly an image processor (much of our sensory cortex is devoted to vision), not a word processor. In fact, the part of the brain used to process words is quite small in comparison to the part that processes visual images.” So, pare down the wording, but leave enough context to allow your deck to live on its own without your voiceover....
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.
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We’ve been compiling a list of top presentation resources that will help you become a master presenter.
Check out the resources below nicely divided into categories of articles, infographics, Quora and videos. There’s something for every presenter!
Read (or listen or watch) on and let us know your #1 favorite in the comments below....
It's time to unveil the winners of the First Annual Prezi Awards— the best prezis of the year! We at Prezi have spent the past few days combing through your nominations.We could not have made our selection without your help.
Earlier this month, we invited you to nominate and vote for your favorite prezis of the year. Thank you to everyone who nominated a prezi, and congratulations to all the nominees. Picking just one winner in each category was very difficult, there were so many terrific prezis from which to choose.... And now, let's get on with it — we are pleased to present the best prezis of 2014:..
Professional PowerPoint templates are a great way to look your best and impress your audience the next time you give a presentation. Here's an excellent set of 16 PowerPoint templates to impress in your next marketing presentation.
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.
Prezentt is a web app that helps presenters to get a 1000% better interaction with their audience through a range of tools. Share your slides with your audience immediately, track questions and follow ups, save time and get much greater audience engagement.
Via Baiba Svenca
Created with Haiku Deck, free presentation software, these tips will help enhance your content marketing strategies.
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....
Those who are experienced with some of these functions may find them a bit mundane, but I still remember how cool it was to find and use them for the first time. While many may be aware of some of these techniques, I think most readers will find something fun and new here.
Following are 10 pretty cool things you can do with the popular presentation tool. Some are really easy, others will take more time and effort to get familiar with. Just be sure not to go overboard with these – use them sparingly for emphasis and to keep it interesting, not to create a kaleidoscope of visual chaos....
"No offense." "I got to be honest."
Those types of phrases, known as “tee-ups,” can be signs of deceit or uncertainty.
If you're a language geek like I am, you’ll enjoy this interview.
So you called a cab, but no one’s showing. The only thing the cranky dispatcher will say is “He’ll be there in 15.” You call back in 15, and he now says, “Driver’s on the way. Any minute now.” Click. It’s cold, it's getting dark, and you’re already late.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was an app that let you tap into an unused supply of empty cabs and cars to get you where you want to go, perhaps with a little style? So goes the legendary inspiration behind Uber, a story now encapsulated in a single tagline: “Everyone’s private driver.”
When it comes to persuasion, companies have traditionally appealed to the left side of the brain — logic, pricing, specs. Emotion, however, has proven to be the better marketing tool. As Daniel Pink, author of Drive, writes, “Right-brain dominance is the new source of competitive advantage.” Appealing to the right side of the brain allows for deeper engagement by uniting an idea with an emotion. The best way to do this: Tell a story.
That said, the way you tell a company’s story is (and should be) quite different from the way you’d tell a story at a party. While the same techniques for success apply, too often business stories fall flat or set unnecessary fires, particularly in the domain of start-ups. You see it all the time. But in my experience, you can’t teach a company how to tell its story — just like you can’t teach someone to have a certain personality. Instead, I’ll give you the big don’ts....
I received a phone call recently from a PR professional who is struggling with a frustrating and all-too-common problem.
He read my book and is trying to implement some of the messaging suggestions I wrote about—but he’s running up against executives who are so scared of potentially alienating any stakeholder that they hedge every statement and water down the messages to the point where they’re not even remotely engaging.
He wondered what someone in his position can do when they know the right thing to do but keep getting thwarted by overly cautious colleagues....
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....
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Savvy Slideshare tips to help you get better presentation results.