1.) Don’t take yourself seriously – even if you’re telling people the world is going to end, do you really want to bum people out as the wave hits?
2.) Don’t find your own jokes funny, let the audience do that – that’s their only job. Nothing is worse than someone trying to force a bad joke down your throat.
3.) Know your stuff. If you’re seriously going to read the powerpoint to me, just mail it out – we probably read better than you in our heads. Besides, if you’re reading, you don’t know what’s coming, someone else has phrased it and ultimately it means you don’t care, so how important is this?
4.) Stop being so nervous – with all the really bad stuff going on the world, do you really think that standing up and talking is such a big deal? Put it in context – you could be a blue fin tuna trying to get laid in the Gulf of Mexico right now. Overestimating the risk is so Republican.
5.) Sweat is creepy, unless we’re in bed with you – the more you think about it, the more it happens, see – you’re sweating just reading this.
6.) Use as few words as you can to get your info across – nobody wants to waste precious life as you knot your sentences so they entangle you like deadly kelp. Brevity is more important than most people will ever understand.
7.) Read the crowd. So many suits get up, drop their chin into their collar and bore people to death for the next forty minutes. Pay attention to the people, and respond to them – once we sniff that you’re just wading through info, we feel your pain and tune out.
8.) Make the material alive by caring about it, finding the salient and vital info and spinning it somehow so we care about it’s future.
9.) Keep reminding us that you are one of us – we will give you more chances if you are one of us.
10.) Take a hostage – if all else fails – hold a life in the balance – just make sure it’s someone most of the audience like.

Let’s say to prove a point you wanted to ask a group of small business owners if they find running their own business quite a lonely thing to do – it should be a homerun – everyone should agree. There’s two ways you could ask the audience:

The first, and most commonly used technique is to say, “By a show of hands, how many of you find running your own business a lonely affair?”.

You’ll get a scattering of hands raised which kinda takes the wind out of your sail. I see this frustrate presenters all the time.

Our method is to ask , “Hands up those of you that don’t find running your own business a lonely affair.” If you get one hand raised I’ll be surprised.

Basically, if people can avoid stepping out they will, and it’s amazing how often audiences lie by not raising their hands to obvious questions.

Avoid this by always asking questions where the answer you’re looking for relies on keeping your hands down.

I told you it was simple, but don’t take my word for it, ask your audience…!

More preso tips on twitter.

Adage says: Shyness is ‘I’-ness. If you think everyone’s going to be focused on you and how you engage, you’re wrong. They’re typically quite focused on themselves!

A tense and anxious brain doesn’t work well. It causes your body to produce cortisol, which negatively affects short-term memory. Be prepared to be adventurous. Have fun.

Read the full list here…!

Well worth the 5 minutes it’ll take you to read it…!

This makes sense when you consider that people receive information better when they’re talked to like people. I can see this working. How can we use this, not only in presentation, but also in video?

The other day I had a discussion with Toby Touby a freelancer where we both agreed that the keywords in her video needed more text to humanise the point and inevitably make more sense – not just an isolated phrase, but a sentence. Not just the word as it appears, but the interviewees key point in a nutshell. Overall, we found they were more digestible, as they were easier to identify with.

What do y’all think?

You owe it to your message not to be one…!

Slideshare is a site where presenters can upload their slides for others to view. This angers me.

People, generally speaking if your audience can understand your slides without you present, the slides are over-populated (and you’re obsolete).

Slide shows with too much text are the killer of good presentations. If you want people to read, send them home with the book, you’ll be saving everyone time.

A video (or even audio) clip featuring the speaker is a far better idea, and If you really want to include your slides you could consider the c-box.

What worries me the most though is that intelligent people that I have the utmost respect for, think it’s a good idea.

Scary…!

Approximately three days ago, I put together a PowerPoint briefing for my commander. It had the right info, but was not displayed in the proper manner. It’s a lesson I have learned on this staff, and over the last six years in general: How you present information is often just as important as the information you present. When it comes to this job, if your audience, be it your boss or soldiers under you, don’t understand the information you are trying to send across, they might make a decision based on the information they thought they heard, and it can cost lives.

In case you missed it:

How you present information is often just as important as the information you present.

There’s a joke in here about bullets, but I’m going to leave it for someone else.

Thanks VisualBeing.

This style is not for everyone, and probably not for all occasions, but is well worth looking into. Garr has a write-up here, and you can view samples of Lessig himself (well, his preso as an audio driven flash file) and Dick Hardt applying the method. I also had the pleasure of watching Seth Godin brilliantly applying the thinking (as I don’t think he knew about the method as such) at TED Global in Oxford last year.

It’s quite a leap from the traditional, but one we’d really like to help you take…!

Thing is, and I say this a lot, blaming PowerPoint for the bad preso, is like blaming the pan for the shit food.

Learn to cook…!