SlideMagic Blog

Switch-overs of technology during a presentations are always tricky. That is why I hardly ever recommend clients to use videos played in different software and live demos in short presentations. The worst case scenario happened last night at the school Hanuka event of my daughter.

After the performances of all the groups had been completed, this series of events unfolded:

1. Mic: “After all the songs we already sang, we will just sing one more, really, only one”
2. Full lights on in the room, everyone blinking
3. Mic: “ There are huge amounts of donuts waiting for you outside the room!”
4. People struggling to put up the small PowerPoint projection screen again with lyrics (you can see it behind the band)
5. People running around the stage looking confused at papers with lyrics, pianist and guitarist flicking through pages
6. Kids are heading for the donuts…

Happy holidays to everyone!

I am just looking at pictures of myself while presenting and realize that I forgot to take of these huge white name tags that you always have to wear in conferences… Well, it happens to the best of us.

Another situation where this produces poor pictures: group photos. A nice scatter of bright white, flash-reflecting squares smiling back at you. When you are posing in a group picture, ask everyone to put the tag in their pocket for a second.

A politician in a television interview can sometimes get away with giving an answer to a different question than the one that was asked her. Or filling time with some meaningless generic statements, after which a smile indicates that she is ready for the next question.

In a VC fundraising pitch (or an interview for a position) this does not work. If you think you need more time to get to an answer, think before speaking. You cannot parallel process coming up with an answer and speak coherently (both will be bad). If you hope that by repeating something what you said before you might manage to skip the difficult question, it will just bore the VC and make her impatient.

Sometimes it might be best to admit that you do not know or do not want to disclose it.

A story from the early 90s. Back then I had recently joined McKinsey as a Business Analyst and got involved in recruiting presentations at Dutch universities to try to convince more engineers to apply for a  position. The slide deck covered it all: our offices, our expertise, our clients, our selection process.

Until one day we did a survey asking the audience to rank how useful this presentation was. The outcome: people already knew that we were probably very smart, worked with prestigious clients, were unlikely to starve because of lack of financial resources, and were very professional.

The questions the students had were: are you guys human or nerds, do you really have to work 80 hours a week, how on earth can a physics engineer be useful there? These questions you cannot really address on a slide, so we cut the introduction presentation to the minimum (to re-confirm what people already knew), and then switched off the projector and started talking about us as a person, and opening up the discussion for questions.

Preaching to the converted is a waste of time. Instead, use your presentation to address the issues the audience has.

I am linking to 2 posts related to venture capitalist Vinod Koshla today.

The first is about brutal honesty in investor presentations by Michael Arrington. He argues that indirect polite language because people are afraid to turn down a startup is not helping anyone (including the pitching startup).

The second is a blog post by speech coach Jerry Weisman: the 5 second test. If your (test) audience fails to produce the point of a slide when you hide at after 5 seconds, the slide is too complex. An audience trying to figure out what a slide means is not listening to the audio track.

(Thank you Wouter Deelman for pointing this out to me)

How do you convince an overly confident, highly senior executive that it makes sense to rehearse tomorrow’s presentation? “Me, hey, I have given thousands of presentations in my career, I will wing this one!”

Winging does not work, you need to know your substance in-and-out in order to be spontaneous. A presentation without rehearsing produces of one of two possible results: a poor performance, or a replay of the presentation you gave last time without emphasizing the new content in the deck.

I do not have the ultimate answer. You can say that Steve Jobs took days to rehearse a keynote. You can scare her and say that the analysts in the audience tomorrow see hundreds of presenters each year, and you better stand out. Or sometimes, people agree to go through the presentation with an outsider like me, the presentation designer, in a closed room where non of their subordinates have to hear the corrections we discuss.

What does work for you?

I now did a few online webinars and I found it a great way to connect live with an audience without the need to travel, and without the requirement to get a large group of people together in one physical location.

Having said that, the experience from the presenter point of view is far from optimal. You are talking into a microphone, staring at your screen without any feedback. Here are some suggestions to make better webinar software and make the webinar experience a bit closer to that of a live presentation.

1. Avatars. Encourage people to upload avatars when joining a webinar as an audience member, and more importantly, have these avatars show up on the presenter’s computer. In that way you get a sense of a real audience in front of you. I am sure as technology progresses it would be possible to create a virtual audience shot of live video avatars
2. Kill presenter distractions. Applications that I use show statistics of people online, people leaving, people joining, people that are active, versus people that are checking their email in another browser window. Some applications require the presenter to let people into the session during the presentation. This information is useful, but there should be a way to switch it off, enabling the presenter to focus on her story. In real life, the presenter on stage does not need to open the back door to let someone back in to the room.
3. Find a better way to moderate questions. At the moment, questions get punched into a small chart window. There is a constant flow of information, and chart windows are too small to be able to read the text. In a real live presentation setting, people do not shout their questions at the presenter all at the same time. There should be a 2-stage process: 1 audience members need to indicate that they want to ask a question, then the presenter need to give them the floor, and only then can the question be asked. Either through a live voice, or through a text box that has big fonts and can easily be read by everyone.

If you are reading this blog, you are probably already part of the tribe of people that want to change the way the world present ideas to each other. The problem is how to convert the other 99% of your co-workers. I see two routes.

Robust PowerPoint templates. Leaving aside the discussion of what is a beautiful PowerPoint template, and what is not (you know my preference for the white page), and assume that the design has been agreed. Usually, people stop here, but there is important programming work to do afterwards. Setting the fonts and the colors to the right default, removing the standard bullet point opening framework from the slide master, etc. This is a computer programming, not a design job that should make the PowerPoint template “idiot-proof”. This is the technical route.

Low-risk events. It is hard to experiment with a new way of presenting in a high-stakes external presentation (i.e, your next earnings announcement). Instead, pick an internal presentation. Maybe the annual sales conference? Have an employee who is converted to the tribe give his presentation in a new and unusual way. Give unusual restrictions for the slide decks to be used in the internal conference: instead of telling people not to exceed 5 slides, tell them that they are not allowed to use bullet points in their deck. As people get exposed to a different way of presentation, the confidence might be getting stronger for the next generation of people to join your tribe, and bit by bit, take the new presentation culture to external presentations as well.

Rock bands use massive monitor speakers to hear themselves play in a concert. When you run a virtual presentation, you need something similar. Slide transitions can be delayed especially when you use high res images. You are on the next page, but your audience is not.

To prevent this, log into your own webinar with a second computer, or even an iPad or internet-enabled smart phone to see what your audience is seeing. The really skillful presenter switches slides on his own computer but continues to talk about the slide that is still in front of the audience.

Image by Anirudh Koul

Presenting to an audience is no different than having a one on one conversation with someone. You can read the signals. When are people surprised, amused, intrigued, bored, confused? Pick up the non-verbal feedback and try to adjust.

You will be in for some surprises. I have been surprised many times. Slides that I thought were funny, were not. Points I thought were clear, were in fact confusing. Stories that I thought were somewhat dull (and I was considering cutting them), got people interested.

If the lighting in the room is poor, the people in first-row will probably end up being your focus group.