We spent a fair amount of time reviewing, crunching and analysing the numbers from the 2010 Business Presentation Survey…and then pulling together a webinar to explain to the hundreds of interested parties on quite what the results meant.
If you were one of the unlucky ones who didn’t quite get on the webinar invite list (we were over-subscribed – sorry!), then fret no more. Using the wonders of PowerPoint Repurposing, we’re able to bring you the edited highlights of both webinars here on YouTube.
So grab a coffee, sit back and enjoy the show (we’d also respectfully recommend having a pen and paper handy as you’re likely to want to scribble down a lot of the findings and suggestions).
If you’re a regular reader of the Eyeful Blog, you’ll be aware that we get very animated (excuse the pun) when it comes to getting the most out of your PowerPoint.
Panic not!
This is not some clumsy, heavy-handed way of selling our wares. If you’re a regular here, you’ll know all about the wonders of Presentation Optimisation, the glowing testimonials of our ever-growing customer base and the magic we can weave with the most basic of presentations. Let’s not get into that now…
Nope – we’re talking about Repurposing PowerPoint. Taking the hard work you’ve put into creating your masterpiece in PowerPoint and repackaging it for other mediums.
From PowerPoint to Podcast…to video…to interactive PDF…and finally to web presentation. The choice is yours.
To help explain how this works and the options available to you, we thought we’d repurpose one of our own presentations originally developed for a RIBA conference.
We think the Beeb’s film critic Mark Kermode is rather marvellous. We like his pithy, insightful and downright passionate reviews. He seems like our sort of bloke.
We also think Pixar are nothing short of brilliant. Wonderful films with compelling storylines, engaging characters and eye-popping animation techniques.
Mark has got himself hot under the collar about the growing trend of 3D cinema for a while now. He’s sick of having aliens, cars and body parts “flying” out of the screen just because the technology allows.
We tend to agree with him.
It’s a bit like using every PowerPoint animation and transition available to you (even more in PowerPoint 2010!) on your slides. Yes – it’s clever technology but frankly it’s distracting and not helping you tell your story.
Now onto Pixar’s Toy Story 3. Mark loves this film for many reasons but the key one for us is that he didn’t notice the 3D.
It was there but did all the right things – helped the story along, engaged the audience and supported the characters. But at no point did it detract by being used inappropriately simply because they had the technology to hand.
Here’s an idea we’ve adapted from a man we admire at Eyeful – Seth Godin (something of a bald-headed genius).
Next time you have to prepare a presentation try this – put together a slide deck that has a slide for every 10 seconds.
Sounds tough, I know, but try it.
Think how little each slide can have on it – maybe one picture or one idea. Instead of 4 bullet points a slide could only have 1.
Now if you take this to it’s logical conclusion, you’ll have a 180 slides for a 30 minute presentation. Each slide designed to share information, move your story along or simply underpin your message.
That’s a lot of slides, a lot of content…and huge opportunity to mess up.
If the presenter and their slides are not in sync, chaos reigns and the only message delivered is that the babbling madman on stage doesn’t have a clue what they’re talking about!
OK, so the concept of a 10 second slide isn’t really that practical but it does highlight the need to have an enormous amount of synergy between your talk and the slides.
And by synergy WE DO NOT MEAN READING THE SLIDES (sorry to shout but we find that rather upsetting) – we mean working in tandem with the slide deck to support and punctuate your message.
Get this right and PowerPoint magically transforms from a teleprompter into an effective presentation aid.
Get in sync with your slide deck – your audience will be forever grateful…and it may save you a few grey hairs along the way.
It seems like only yesterday that we celebrated our 5th Birthday…in reality it was back in October.
It doesn’t seem like 5 minutes ago since we moved to our fancy new offices, Eyeful Towers…in reality, it was back in April.
And it feels like we’ve just started working with the good people at Peak Software…in reality, it’s been over 3 years.
During that time, we’ve worked on any number of fun and engaging projects with Clive and his team, from audio packed product launch PowerPoints through to HTML Flash conversions.
As with any relationship, we’ve worked hard to keep it fresh by offering new ideas and maintaining an enthusiasm for each new project.
We’ve enjoyed every minute of it and it would seem Clive is of the same opinion… To learn more, listen on.
We’re extremely grateful to the hundreds of you who took the time to complete it - your feedback and experiences have provided an amazing insight into how businesses approach presentations in 2010.
The task now ahead of us is to process the hundreds of responses and draw insight from them. And then, as promised, we’d like to share the results and analysis with you.
So is Death by PowerPoint really killing businesses?
Are new cloud-based applications like Slide Rocket and Prezi having an impact?
Does Apple’s Keynote software hold the key to a better presentation experience?
And are companies changing their approach to business presentations in line with their social media and online strategies?
All these questions and more will be answered in our webinars on the 3rd August (UK & Europe here and US & Canada here).
We have limited spaces so please click here to register for one of the following events to ensure you have a front row seat as we share the results, provide the latest insight and offer analysis of how businesses really view presentations:
The late great Charles Mingus was not just an amazing jazz musician (cue obligatory finger click), he was also a wise man.
“Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple”
We could leave this blog there – this single line sums up our approach to building slides rather nicely. However, let’s embellish this idea slightly:
When you are putting together a slide within a presentation (having done a storyboard first naturally…) think about how you can best get across the information to your audience and invariably the best way is the simplest way.
Take for example trying to describe the offside rule in football (who says we’re not topical). There are many, many ways to describe this rule particularly taking into account some of the changes over the years but in essence it boils down to 3 key things happening:
To be offside a player must be in the opposition’s half
There must be fewer than 2 people from the other team between the player and the goal
The person must be in front of the ball to be offside
We’re naturally ignoring passive, active and all that for the purposes of this demonstration, but how best could you describe this with a PowerPoint slide(s)?
It could be that you simply list those 3 points although people will read it before you can talk through it – but simplest would probably be 3 simple pictures demonstrating those 3 actions. On the other hand, there are at least 100 ways (and we’ve counted them) that you could describe this and leave even the most ardent football fan bemused.
But back to our man Mingus and his visionary quote.
It’s interesting to note that Mingus was a pioneer of his craft and his example parallels nicely with presenting. If you present complicated areas simply and get people to understand them (without being condescending) then you have created a powerful connection.
Don’t waste your opportunity to make a connection by over-complicating your message.
For those of you who like a challenge then do send in your best PowerPoint interpretation of the offside rule – the best one gets some a PowerPoint Amnesty Action Pack!
Some time ago, we conducted an online survey to understand just how companies were using PowerPoint.
Time and technology wait for no one, especially in the world of presentations. Indeed, as presenters it sometimes feels like we’re exposed to new technologies and thinking on a daily basis!
With this in mind, we decided that it’s now time to survey again and see quite how things have changed…
We’d really appreciate your time (3 minutes maximum) to answer a few short questions on when, why and how you use presentation software.
As an extra incentive to ensure we get as many people involved as possible, we’re giving out 25 PowerPoint Amnesty Action Packs to a randomly picked sample of respondents. So what’s stopping you?!
We’ll be running the survey through until the 18th July so please don’t delay – your response and feedback is important!
Very occasionally we avail ourselves of the local pub on a Friday evening. Normally the conversation veers from finding out what people have planned for the weekend (it would seem DIY and shopping are very big with Eyeful gang at the moment) to chatting through work related topics.
The hot topic over our most recent pint was “how do we get people to think differently about creating a presentation?”
You see, we recognise the frustration that many presenters face – they know what they should be doing but rarely have the time implement this best practice.
It’s all too easy to click on the PowerPoint icon and start filling slide after slide up with bullet points. We needed to create something that would prompt them into action immediately rather than trying to fix a problem when they were in the thick of it.
As Matt carefully placed his pint down on a beermat (he’s a man who shows a lot of care for a pint), it came to him. The Eyeful Presentations beermat!
So that’s exactly what we’ve done – printed up thousands of them for distribution around the offices of the world.
Every morning, as you place your precious mug of coffee or tea onto your desk, you’ll be reminded of the 3 key checks you should be considering every time you create a new PowerPoint presentation.
So drop us a line if you’d like us to stick a handful of these handy coasters/presentation saviours in the post to you. We respectfully suggest that to ensure Life after Death by PowerPoint in your business, you apply liberally across as many desks as possible.
We’ve said it before and no doubt we’ll say it again – we truly feel a lucky bunch to be working with the great and good in business today.
For example, take our recent work with OI Software. They had an urgent requirement for an important event and called upon Eyeful to help them out.
Urgency is often part of the deal when dealing with presentations for events so we took it in our stride and delivered what we believe was a top notch end product. As the interview below demonstrates, they thought so too.
What made it all the more special was the gratitude shown by OI Software up to and after the event.
We’ve had the pleasure of working with them since and, to a man, they’re an extremely nice bunch. Oh, and their new presentations are rather fancy too…
