Archive for November, 2009
Visual Resume – Carl Pullein from Keynote User Group on Vimeo.
Above is a video of my recent talk at TEDx Myeongdong, Korea.
In this little video you will be able to see how you can utilise the native language, with your own language.
You can get the full version of my visual resume here
And my personal visual resume can be viewed here:
Here’s a trick I have used a lot on my presentations. I teach my audience a new language.
I live and work in South Korea, and so I have picked up quite a lot of the language during my seven years living here. Many of my presentations involve introducing new teachers to Korea, and giving them their ‘basic training’. In order to make my presentations more interesting and interactive I often teach the teachers how to introduce themselves in Korean. This is a simple exercise, and usually lasts around three or four minutes.
I have seen this trick used by Garr Reynolds in his superb presentation at the Synergy Conference in Las Vegas and it really is effective.
This technique is a great way to break the ice with your audience and it is a great way to give you a little confidence before you get in to the main part of your presentation.
All you do is read out the language to your audience, get them to repeat it with you and then ask them to introduce themselves to their neighbour. (Of course you can make a joke about them repeating the words “your name”)
This is a great way to build rapport with your audience because if they are your customers, next time they visit you in your country they can introduce themselves in your language, and you can have a laugh and joke with them. It really does help you build a much better relationship.
So why not give it a try the next time you do a pressentation in front of an English audience. Teach them how to introduce themselves in your language. You will have a lot of fun doing it, and your audience will appreciate this new feature of your presentation.
When designing your presentation, why not use your own language in the same slides.
To an native English person, seeing another language, especially if it has a symbolic alphabet rather than a romanic alphabet, is interesting. Above you can see the English for “welcome” as well as “welcome” in Korean. In the above slide I have used the beautiful Korean letters to add to the design of an opening slide.
By using your own language in the slides as part of the design, it can help you to remember your story and will help you if your mind goes blank. It also gives you something else to say as an icebreaker at the beginning of your presentation.
People always find learning new words in a foreign language fascinating, and it can help to make your presentation memorable. And remember, one of the goals of your presentation is to make it memorable
Here’s a reprint of a post I wrote for my personal blog.
One of the most commonly neglected parts of preparing, designing and delivering a presentation is the story. Telling a story in your presentation does not mean delivering a little anecdote here and there. The story is your whole presentation.
When preparing a presentation I see people spending hour upon hour designing a presentation with amazing images, simple words and colourful charts. I also see people writing line upon line of boring text. And whilst the presentation might look good, or look like your have done a lot of work (the “impress you boss presentation”) the actual presentation falls flat when you deliver it.
The most common reason for presentations falling flat is a lack of a story. A story that runs through the whole of your presentation.
When you watch a great movie, or a compelling soap opera / drama it is the story that draws you in. It is what makes the movie or drama so great.
Story telling can also take your presentation from being just another presentation to being a great presentation, one that people will remember and talk about for a long time after the event.
As I featured in my previous post on story telling, both Mike Rowe and Adam Savage know about compelling story telling, it is why their TV shows are so successful. But we humble presenters can also learn from them. We can design our presentations around a single story and to present our presentations like a TV show, with an interesting beginning, a contextual middle and an end that concludes the story.
Garr Reynolds in his fantastic book “Presentation Zen” talks about how story telling was the way we communicated before there was the written word. It was how news and culture was transfered from one generation to the next.
We too should remember this when we start to prepare our next presentation. Stand back and ask yourself “what is the story here?” And turn your presentation into a great presentation.
Just read this on the Decker Communications blog.
I would have to completely agree. Warren Buffet DOES get it. The importance of communicating
One of the many overlooked parts of creating a presentation is the use of fonts. Many people just simply open their Powerpoint application and start typing. The thought of actually looking inside the font drop-down menu never occurs to them, and they end up creating a standard, old looking presentation.
Actually looking for and choosing a font can go a long way to making your presentation stand out and look better.
Nancy Duarte in her wonderful book Slide:ology gives some great advice on choosing the right font for your presentation. The right font can create the tone for your presentation, for example an informal font such as “Courier” can set an informal tone to your presentation, whereas a more formal font such as “Georgia” can give your presentation a more formal feel.
I would advise you to avoid using Times, Times new Roman or Arial as these are usually the default fonts for most presentational software programmes.
If you want to collect some unusual fonts there are many places where you can get free fonts. One of my favourites is 1001 Free Fonts – here you can download for free many wonderful fonts that look fresh and new.
So, before you start writing your next presentation, take a couple of minutes to look through your fonts and select a font that you like and fits the ‘feel’ of your presentation.
Photo courtesy of Flickr House Wallpapers
I am a big fan of House MD, and have managed to see all episodes from season 1 through to season 5.
While watching these episodes I noticed that the show follows a format that we can all learn from when doing a presentation.
The show opens with a scenario that tells you how the illness first became obvious. This could be a scene with the patient doing their everyday thing, then suddenly collapsing and then the opening titles begin. What this does is set the scene. When we do a presentation we need to set the scene early on. Give your audience a sense of what the problem is, why we are talking or what difficulties we experience in our everyday life that your product can solve (but of course at this stage your audience does not know this)
Following the opening titles, we get to see Dr House talking with his junior doctors about the patient’s problem, the initial prognosis is given, and the first treatment is administered. As always, the first treatment does not work and the problem the patient has get gradually worse. When we do a presentation, we need show our audience what the problem is, in detail, set out what we can do to make that problem or difficulty better.
What we need to remember here is that a story is being told, it is unfolding before our eyes, and this is very important when we do our presentation.
During an episode of House we get to see the patient almost die, before the Sherlock Holmes like Dr House comes up with the answer to the illness. In a presentation, we need to build up to the main point. The main message we want our audience to go away with. – Starting with your best point is not going to make your presentation memorable. Revealing the main message towards the end of your presentation will make it much more memorable.
Below, you can see how this transfers into a flow diagram that you can use next time you start planning your presentation.
Finally, you have the happy ending. The happy ending gives your audience that wonderful warm feeling of being part of something special, and that it the most important part of your whole presentation.
When you give a presentation, it is important to tell a story. The story could be about the way your company has grown, the development of your product, what you or your company has done over the last few years. Whatever you talk about in your presentation, you need to tell a story.
The reason for this is to keep your audience interested. It also gives your presentation a flow, a path forward. Without a story, your presentation will feel flat and uninteresting.
Below are a couple of examples of great story telling in a presentation.
In this video Mike Rowe tells his story without the aid of Powerpoint or Keynote. He just stands, up front and centre and tells his story, with amazing power.
(To view this video with your language’s subtitles click here)
In this next video Adam Savage of tells his story using a few slides, but not too many. The impact of this presentation is actually in the story of how he made the Maltese Falcon, and he does this with amazing skill
(To view this video in your language click here)
The point here is that you tell a story. It gives greater impact and interest to your presentation and it makes speaking in English much easier. Telling a story is like having a conversation with your audience, and if you are using English everyday in your work, then you are likely to be telling stories everyday.
So remember, when you are planning your presentation, think about your story, what it is, and how you will tell it. The time you spend doing this, you will reap the rewards later.
Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design, spent a day at the Decker Communications HQ. There she discovered the importance of eye contact when presenting.
Your body language and the amount of eye contact you do during your presentation is so important. Stay standing behind the table and you risk not connecting with your audience, move about too much and you are likely to make your audience motion sick.
One of the most interesting things to come out of this post was that Nancy was recommended to over emphasise her gestures and to spend 5 seconds in eye contact with each member of her audience.
In English, as I am sure it is true in many other languages, many sales people forget a very important part of the sales process. They forget to match a benefit to a feature.
Over the coming months I will write more on understanding your audience and, why it is important to include this understanding when you are planning your presentation, but for now, let us assume that you know your audience and you know what they like and dislike. This post will deal with the importance of matching benefits to features.
In English we talk about a feature like this:
“Our product has a 5 year guarantee”
However, just by saying this we leave ourselves open to the question “so what?”
In order to make our feature more effective we need to match it with a benefit. So you should say something like this:
“Our product has a 5 year guarantee, which means that if anything goes wrong with our product within 5 years we will fix it for you completely free of charge”
The key phrase here is “which means that…” this phrase links the feature to the benefit and gives the feature a winning edge.
Below is a chart with some other examples on how this works
I have sat through an endless number of presentations where I have been subjected to a list of features that have no meaning to me whatsoever. “this car has a sunroof”
“So what?” I want to scream.
When you are preparing your presentation, you need to make a list of the features you want to sell to your audience, then you need to ask yourself “which means that…?” and add the benefit to the feature.
Then when you are doing your presentation you will always have the “…which means that…” phrase ready. Your audience will appreciate the message and you will be giving yourself a huge advantage over your competition.
This is a very simple technique, but one that can give your presentation a better response that just spilling out long list of features that have little or no meaning to your audience.