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Presentation Facts is an on-going series of posts exploring what is known for sure about presentations and presentation visuals. The series is moderated by Robert Befus.
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A friend sent me a link to this article today. I think people like this are one of the main reasons rental and staging companies as well as AV techs (especially at hotels) sometimes have a bad reputation.
What do you think??
Posted by Robert Befus at 4:43 PM .
This is a neat little device. AV Technicians who misplace their flashlights can just clip this onto the top of any 9 volt battery (and AV Techs live on 9 volt batteries.)
Posted by Robert Befus at 4:28 PM .
I just got back from a week of business and fun in Prague. I first had the opportunity to visit this incredible city last fall. This time I was able to take my wife Sandy. I had two days of meetings followed by two days of fun and sightseeing. I was very fortunate to be able to speak to a group of students at the Economic University there. The topic chosen for me was “Keys to Business Success”. I had the keys to business success with me and placed them on my key chain along with my car keys and my mini Kroger discount card, but inadvertently misplaced them. Seriously, it was an unfortunate title because I don’t believe there are a few keys to business success, but we had a great time anyway.
Here are some pictures of one the earliest forms of storytelling using a rear screen projection system. These are just a couple of the incredible stain glass windows in St. Vitus Cathedral. This cathedral was started in 1344 and took 600 years to build. I would say it was worth the wait.
Posted by Robert Befus at 3:56 PM .
Okay, so what’s the problem with panel discussions?
In a recent post, Bob said he can’t remember the last time he has attended or (more importantly) participated in an effective panel. It’s would be a good bet that a lot of people feel this way. I have heard Bob present on several occasions and he’s an accomplished communicator. If someone with a high level of skill and experience can’t wring value out of a panel discussion, you have to begin to wonder what makes it so difficult to do them well.
I have to admit that my interest in this subject is more than just academic as I’ve been invited to participate in a panel discussion at the HeSCA’s Annual Conference. I also think an exploration of what it means to take part in a panel discussion might be of interest to Visual Being readers.
So. What goes into making a good PD? What about a bad one?
For starters, they seem to share many aspects with most other types of presentation situations, but at the same time they are obviously very different. For instance, in an ordinary one-person presentation, you need to work to keep the audience’s attention focused on yourself and your message. The same focus control skills are just as important, if not more so, in a PD. However, you also have to know how to gracefully relinquish and then regain that focus when appropriate. That can be a difficult skill to master.
I’ve begun to do a little research online but there doesn’t seem to be much out there dealing with this specific type of presentation. One good resource is Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of Being On a Panel. Apparently, he doesn’t care for PDs either:
Try to recall the last time you enjoyed a conference panel. You won’t come up with more than a handful of instances. By and large, panels are unremarkable and uninformative—and these are the good ones.
The ten tips regarding the art of being a panelist that he goes on to offer in the rest of the article are well worth learning.
The research will continue as much as time allows and I promise to post any additional material that seems worthwhile. Please feel free to share your panel discussion tips, techniques and stories in the comment area.
Posted by Lee Potts at 12:22 PM .
With just a little more than two weeks until the conference opens, we would like to announce the availability the Visual Being Online Bulletin Board for Presentation Professionals at InfoComm.
This bulletin board is meant to enhance your InfoComm experience, both before you leave and once you are on site, by helping you:
One of the things that makes InfoComm valuable and important is the sheer scale of opportunities, activities and learning experiences it offers. Even conference veterans can find themselves feeling overwhelmed there. We sincerely hope that the bulletin board makes it all more manageable by helping you to connect with and feel part of a vibrant, active presentation professionals community.
Posted by Lee Potts at 8:23 AM .
Am just wrapping up 3 days in Philadelphia at the OnDemand conference in Philly. Has been an interesting show overall, although the quality of the educational sessions I attended were slightly below average in most cases. I hate panel discussions. I know some will disagree, but I cannot remember the last time I attended a panel discussion I thought was truly effective (and that includes many that I have been a panel member on). For some reason, most of these sessions were PDs.
This conference which is focused on commercial printers and enterprise content management users does have somethings of interest to Pres Pros - especially the Graphic Designers among us (although there are better places to get this information and I would not recommend this conference for most of our Council members or VB readers).
I had a chance to get up to speed on Adobe’s Creative Suite 2 and the upcoming release of Quark 7. Both have some support for enhanced work flow management in general, and the relatively new JDF (Job Description Format) standards specifically. Although I can’t go into JDF at length here - it is an interesting development that Graphic Designers should become familiar with. There are of course many other upgrades and enhancements to these softwares as well. I thought the new digital asset management tool called Adobe Bridge that is included in CS2 was pretty interesting, especially for small operations that don’t have access to larger enterprise solutions.
Many of us who have been in the presentation business for a long time have fond memories of the days when Kodak was our primary vendor. Although they have struggled to make the jump to digital they do appear to be making some progress. I was very impressed with their digital color production press called the NexPress. It competes with the Xerox iGEN(3) and the Indigo digital press. All of them are great high volume digital printing solutions if you have half a million or so dollars lying around that you don’t know what to do with.
Posted by Robert Befus at 11:35 AM .
Cutting-edge and in the forefront as ever, this week the BBC introduced the New Zealand-designed Weatherscape XT system to their TV weather forecasting in the UK .
Now we Brits would copyright weather if we could; without it what on earth would we talk about? Messing with our national weather forecasting system by introducing yet more ‘fancy presentation graphics’ doesn’t go down well - and it certainly doesn’t improve the quality of weather we get.
Joking aside for a minute, the NZ-designed graphical display is actually very good, but it does beg the question as to whether it improves our ability to absorb information which, at best, is still only tentative. In the days when they used a large map board and stuck a fridge-magnet in the shape of a raincloud over London, you knew that the degree of accuracy with which it was placed reflected the degree of accuracy in the forecast of rain for that area. Every time the BBC has changed their presentation system there has been a flurry of complaints. In the end we get used to it and it becomes the norm. The new motion graphics show detailed, moving areas of rain, snow or sunshine over a representation of the country on a spherical surface. This has already introduced a series of complaints in the national press along the lines of:
This has prompted a wonderful statement on the BBC’s web site :
“Today’s media industry is like a shark. Either you keep moving forward or you are dead in the water. The new graphics are clearer and engaging. We have created clearer, more involving images of weather conditions without sacrificing the science behind those forecasts.”
The Disability Rights Commission said that accessibility was a prime objective and complaints about difficulties experienced watching the new-look forecast would be investigated.
Isn’t it great when the general mass of population take so much interest in presentation graphics?
Posted by Roy Hammans at 8:49 AM .
Will try to post a few notes from the On Demand Conference in Philadelphia this week. On demand caters to the digital printing industry. It took me 50 minutes to fly up from Raleigh this morning… then 90 minutes to creep the 9 miles to my hotel through bumper-to-bumper traffic. I am suffering from a particular traveling frustration known as “road lag”.
Am waiting to begin a session entitled “Sales & Marketing Strategies for Growing Digital Services Revenue”. There are only about 5 people in the room, which I guess means that most people have all the Digital Services Revenue they can handle and don’t need more. Actually, as a person who has the opportunity to speak from time to time, I can sympathize with speakers who prepare to deliver 3 hours of material to a group and then find that only 10 people show up.
Which reminds me, InfoComm is only a few weeks away.
Posted by Robert Befus at 12:25 PM .
For a first post this is slightly historical, but I wanted to share this clip of how our recent UK election results from May 5 were broadcast by the BBC. I was entertained and impressed by both the technology and the presentation.
For a little bit of background: Peter Snow, the presenter in the BBC video clip linked below, has been forecasting and broadcasting election results for as long as I can remember. He has always been known for his innovative presentation style, adopting visual aids that have since entered into the national consciousness. He will always be associated with the ‘Swingometer’, a device co-invented by David Butler and the Canadian broadcaster Professor Robert McKenzie and first used in the BBC television broadcast of the 1955 General Election in the UK. Then it was a piece of cardboard propped up on a desk against a semicircular scale and was manually adjusted to indicate the changing fortunes of each political party as results came in.
It was ideally suited to indicate trends in a two-party battle but was not so good once other political parties began to increase their share of the votes. Now the Swingometer has entered the virtual, multi-dimensional age. Spare a few moments to watch the video of the results linked below.
Unfortunately I can’t give a direct link due to the way that the BBC embeds their news player into their web site. Visit this BBC page, and select the button top right ‘Election News in Video’. In the window that pops up, select ‘Results explained: Peter Snow analyses the election outcome’ in the Special Coverage section, bottom left corner. Stay with it, as it gets more theatrical as it progresses and do view it full screen - but make haste, it may not be posted in this way for long.
Does all this visual technology make the results any easier to interpret? Well, the entertainment value is high and it compresses a lot of data into a short visual experience - ideally suited to those of us that sat up all night watching through a caffeine-supported stupor. In the past the Swingometer was wildly inaccurate in its predictions. In 2005 however it proved to be a pretty accurate measure of the final outcome.
There is also a Flash on-line version of the Swingometer (illustrated), complete with an introduction by the inimitable Peter Snow.
Posted by Roy Hammans at 8:21 AM .
A lot has been made of the Gates comments published today regarding the future of the iPod. Everybody has their own thoughts on the matter and most that I have read today are largely critical of Gates and skeptical of his claim. I love my iPod and we use them quite a bit in the company for playing music at live events (walk-in, breaks etc), but it is hard to deny that convergence is occurring practically everywhere you look in our digital culture today. Ultimately, people gravitate towards compression and simplicity. This is the principle of least effort. We seek out the method requiring the least effort to accomplish a result. In linguistics, this is expressed in Zipf’s Law which demonstrates an intrinsic relationship between the length of a word and the frequency of its use…with shorter words used more frequently. In the world of portable digital devices, it simply means why carry 2 or 3 devices when 1 can do it all as well or better?
If you have heard or read any of my recent thinking, you know that I believe the mobile phone is likely to win out as the portable digital device of choice in coming years, with more and more content of all kinds being ported to it… so I tend to think Gates might be right. What do you think?
Posted by Robert Befus at 2:35 PM .
Picture yourself delivering a presentation to an audience. Things are going just fine until suddenly, your mind goes blank. You have been flowing pretty well without your notes and you don’t want to have to scan through them now to find your next point. What do you do? Well according to some research from the University of Alberta, you might consider gesturing. Or better yet, incorporate gestures all along because in addition to there communicative power, there is some evidence demonstrating that gestures may actually help you remember.
Can’t find the right word? You might want to start moving your hands. New research at the University of Alberta suggests that gesturing while you talk may improve your access to language.
Posted by Robert Befus at 9:34 AM .
Often the job of a Presentation Professional is to design presentation media that helps a speaker convey the need for behavioral change. Studies show that the odds of success are 9 to 1 against you… unless you successfully appeal to more than just facts. This FastCompany article is long but very informative.
Kotter has hit on a crucial insight. “Behavior change happens mostly by speaking to people’s feelings,” he says. “This is true even in organizations that are very focused on analysis and quantitative measurement, even among people who think of themselves as smart in an MBA sense. In highly successful change efforts, people find ways to help others see the problems or solutions in ways that influence emotions, not just thought.”
Posted by Robert Befus at 9:19 AM .
I might be late to the party with this one but my boss introduced me to The Wainhouse Research Bulletin the other day and it seemed worth sharing.
The goal of The Wainhouse Research Bulletin (WRB) is to help vendors, reseller channel partners, service providers, investors, and end-users alike follow the fast moving action in the world of rich media communications. Wainhouse Research analysts cover presence, instant messaging, audio conferencing, web conferencing, videoconferencing, distance education, streaming media, and unified communications products and services. Via the WRB, we both report and give our unique perspectives on product announcements, financial results, and corporate developments as well as technology and market trends. The WRB is published approximately weekly via email.
There’s also an RSS syndication feed available.
Posted by Lee Potts at 9:13 PM .
A comment by Bob Befus at the conclusion of the recent Webinar got me into Podcasts (he mentioned the term and I was unfamiliar with them).
When I first researched the topic I figured “big deal” (which is common for me) — anyone can convert an audio file to an MP3 and call it a podcast. But no, that’s not quite right.
It turns out that just like newsreaders proliferated a while back, podcast readers are widespread and allow users to subscribe to feeds from true RSS podcasts, thereby bypasssing email (spam filters) and reaching listeners who opt in to their content.
I thought about this from a presenter’s perspective and figured that if I were to do a conference I would use MediaSite or a similar tool to archive the full conference as Bob has often suggested and done with the Webinars.
But then I would try to entice my participants (or those who could not attend) to point their podcast readers to a feed from my broadcast to be able to transfer the audio portion (in MP3 or WMA format) to their portable devices to be able to listen to it at their leisure - while driving, exercising or goofing off.
I looked into podcast readers for Windows and found BlogMatrix on CNET and downloaded the client. Within an hour I had subscribed to podcasts and recorded my own.
Then I thought, how would I get my content out of PowerPoint? I intend to write this up for my InformIT column in time for InfoComm but briefly if you enable narration under Slide Show, you can link your narration files to a local folder and they are saved in WAV format.
Subsequently you can import them into a tool like BlogMatrix Sparks 2.0 which will convert them to MP3 (and even allow you to mix and edit them) and post them on an RSS feed site (BlogMatrix currently offers this service for free for a month so check it out - I own no stock in the co… yet).
The other scenario I tried for longer presentations was to use Camtasia Studio 2.0 to capture the entire powerpoint slide show as an AVI file. In the Camtasia Editor, it’s easy to save just the audio (WAV) file, and again use the BlogMatrix tool to podcast it.
I think this is an interesting scenario for those who might want to podcast their powerpoint and thereby offer their clients the most cutting edge media output options.
I would be glad to share this process with you and what else has come out from it at InfoComm.
Posted by Tom Bunzel at 2:59 PM .