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I often ask my clients a deceptively simple question: What is your big, shiny object? Until they can answer that clearly, they're not ready to present.
If you tell an audience everything, you’ve told them nothing. People can only take in so much information in any given amount of time, and loading them with too many new facts can prevent them from absorbing your most important one. That’s obvious, I know, but many speakers—even some of the smartest, most thoughtful people I know—try to put too much content into their presentations.
As a result, the main point they really want to shine through gets obscured by an overabundance of rhetorical clutter. So I often ask my clients a deceptively simple question: What is your big, shiny object?
Most of us have suffered from a brain freeze. So what should you do if you’re caught in an interview, debate, or speech, and you forget what you were saying?
Drawing a blank during a debate for an excruciatingly painful 47 seconds. Although that moment became rather infamous (I rated it the worst gaffe of Election 2012), Mr. Perry is far from alone. Arizona governor Jan Brewer suffered a similar fate during a gubernatorial debate in 2010, when she went blank for 13 seconds. It was even worse for Jeanine Pirro, a candidate who briefly ran for Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate seat in 2005 but who quickly withdrew after misplacing a page of her announcement speech and going silent for 32 seconds. The truth is that most of us have suffered a similar—if less high profile—brain freeze. So what should you do if you’re caught in an interview, debate, or speech, and you lose your place?...
Are you planning on hiring a keynote speaker for a corporate event, industrywide conference, or executive summit? I've scored you some helpful advice for you here, because I know that hiring someone to speak can be disorienting.
As a presentation trainer, audiences expect me to be a darn good public speaker.
So I’m guessing that one audience had high hopes for me a couple of years ago when I was invited to speak at an industry conference.
Everything was going well until an audience member challenged one of my points. Instead of taking my own good advice by answering his question and moving on, I began to debate him. The moment I did, I lost control of my own presentation. And in so doing, I elevated the audience member to the role of co-speaker....
At our TNW Conferences we see a lot of presentations and I have given a fair share of presentations myself. I often see people making the same mistakes and cringe when I hear them ....
Should you use quotes in your presentation or has that been done to death? I imagine you’ve noticed that the people who deliver effective presentations will more often than not use famous quotes to get their message across.
Why do they do that?
Well… it’s appropriate for me to quote Sophocles here, who said “A short saying often contains much wisdom.”
... As anyone who has studied in the fine art of Giving Presentations That Aren’t Horrible can tell you, the first step in giving an engaging talk is getting the hell away from your computer. You want to talk with your audience, not at your laptop. That means using a remote control. And using a remote control, of course, means stepping into a world of pain. Oh, you’re using someone else’s laptop at the last minute? Better track down some compatible USB drivers and hope that they don’t explode in your face. Oh, you forgot to swap out the batteries with fresh ones? Hope you didn’t want to go past the third slide. Presefy wants to kill off the uni-purpose remote control, instead pushing the responsibility of steering to your smartphone. But here’s the special twist: because it’s all done through the browser, no special drivers or apps are required. Here’s how it works...
What you say in your interviews and speeches is incredibly important, but how you say it can make all the difference. When you listen to many of the most successful television and radio personalities, pay attention to how they alter their tempo or speak a little louder or softer when they want to emphasize a point. That change in their voice or pacing draws you in, signaling that what they just said—or what they are about to say—is something important you’ll want to remember....
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...I recently had an opportunity to put my column’s techniques into action for this 18-minute keynote presentation at one of the world’s largest events for startups and entrepreneurs; LeWeb in Paris. The ‘stakes’ are high for two reasons. First, speakers share the stage with some of the most influential leaders in technology and social media (Marissa Mayer, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Guy Kawasaki are among repeat speakers). Second, the audience is made up of thousands of entrepreneurs and bloggers who all seem to have a Twitter account and aren’t afraid to voice their opinions.
Since I’m often asked for a “method” for creating a talk, pitch, or presentation, here are the steps that work for me. I’m certain they will help you, too....
Whether your audience is your boss, your banker, a small team of direct reports, a ballroom full of conference attendees, or thousands of people worldwide connected via teleconference, your success depends on being able to make a great presentation. Great presentations are well-organized, flow logically from one idea to another, and ultimately leave the audience leave feeling rewarded and enlightened. All well and good, but if you don’t hook your audience in the first 30 seconds, all your careful preparation may be for naught. Therefore you have to begin with a bang! A television commercial has only 30 seconds to grab your attention; the same is true for you and your presentation.
The following steps will help you up your game...
This business professor explains his no-fail solution for pitching your startup idea in record time.
You can’t control all these factors but one thing that you ought to learn how to do very well is to deliver what is known at Babson College, where I teach strategy and entrepreneurship, as a Rocket Pitch.
The Rocket Pitch is a three-minute; three-slide presentation that focuses the start-up team on its main opportunity and helps convey what makes the business idea better than the other ones competing for an investor’s checkbook. The entrepreneur has no way of knowing what other ideas the investor is considering, but the Rocket Pitch should do the best possible job of covering three topics....
Here's how to get a global marketing team all on same marketing and presentatations page.Start with the substance. Have each business unit Frankenstein together a deck of existing slides, and use that first presentation as a basis for a discussion what the business unit actually wants to say. What matters here is the sound track, the verbal story, not the actual slides. You need a trigger for them to start talking to you....
Haiku Deck's Education Case Studies Pinterest board contains 76 examples of Haiku Deck being used by students and teachers. If you're not familiar with it or haven't tried Haiku Deck, here's what you need to know. It's a free iPad app for creating slideshow presentations.
There are two features of Haiku Deck that stand out. First, Haiku Deck intentionally limits how much text that you can put on each of your slides. Second, Haiku Deck helps you find Creative Commons licensed images for your presentations. When you type a word or words on your slides you can have Haiku Deck search for images for you. The images that Haiku Deck serves up are large enough to completely fill your slide. You can also upload your own images from your iPad or import images from Instagram and Facebook....
We’ve all endured “death by PowerPoint.” It’s a painful experience for the audience and probably not all that fun for the presenter either. To help my students deliver effective presentations—free of those deadly bullet points—I have my go-to applications.
Via Baiba Svenca, Rui Guimarães Lima, massimo facchinetti
...Instead of forcing you to sift through my site, page after page, or trying to search my site with keywords just to find the best posts, I have aggregated 20 of my best blog posts to help you become a better PowerPoint presentation designer. Post types include specific presentation design techniques, book reviews, tips, methods, and more. So without further ado, here are the best PowerPoint presentation design posts from Presentation Advisors to make you a better presentation designer in 2013....
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Less is more. Superb speaking and interview training advice from Brad Phillips, AKA Mr Media Training.