I’ve been impressed by an online video editing and archiving tool that lets you create a
“private label YouTube” - check it out.

http://members2.viditalk.com/view/?id=9DGHQ6GWTSYT34RF6B7S1

Posted by Tom Bunzel at 4:45 PM .

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For those who have admired Xcelsius but have been afraid to learn it or unwilling to buy it, now you can download the new FREE light version that comes with lots of tutorials.

Posted by Tom Bunzel at 2:16 PM .

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For those interested in presentation best practices the issue always arises what is the most effective way to avoid stale bullets and sameness in slides.  Inevitably the issue of creativity and resourcefulness leads to the concept of metaphors and analogies - using images or diagrams.  The problem for non-artists or designers like me is where to get the nuts and bolts building blocks of these types of tools.

Recently a colleague, Gene Zelazny, the author of Say It With Charts! put me together with an entrepreneur who has launched an interesting site in this space.  PowerFrameworks is an online gallery of conceptual metaphors in the form of PowerPoint shapes, professionally designed and ready to download into your presentation.  The site also features concrete examples of how the metaphors can be implemented, and even a best practices section mirroring many of Zelazny’s own principles.

Kathy Villela, the site’s founder, actually worked at the consulting firm where Zelazny has worked for decades before beginning this site.  Her concept, and what I like about the site, is that it is more than a gallery of shapes or clip art; it is also well constructed and searchable and mentally stimulating.

Posted by Tom Bunzel at 2:49 PM .

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Serious Magic, creators of Ovation, the popular PowerPoint enhancement software, has been acquired by Adobe. Adobe seems to be primarily interested in their video-related products. In the press release, Ovation isn’t even mentioned until the boilerplate verbiage at the end. They also say they will continue to sell the Serious Magic product line. However, as we’ve all seen in the past with acquisitions of this sort, there’s a big difference between selling and supporting/developing.

Posted by Lee Potts at 8:11 AM .

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My new business book about PowerPoint is now available to read online.  “Solving the PowerPoint Predicament:  Using Digital Media for Effective Communication” is not a book specifically about PowerPoint, but the use of the program with third party tools to convey a message for business, academia or religious content.  You can also buy the book on Amazon.

Posted by Tom Bunzel at 1:00 PM .

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One in an occasional series of posts about presentation pros who are up to something.

I first met and interviewed Eric and Liz Glaser in the mid ‘90s when I was editor of Multimedia Producer magazine and they were pioneering the use of interactive CD-ROMs for sales and marketing applications. In 1998, they created a nifty CD-ROM that allowed the owners of Domino’s Pizza stores to mix and match food products to create menu specials and related profit analysis. I was struck by how easy and functional the program was and recall actually having fun building my own pizza menus. I got to wondering what Eric and Liz have been up to lately. I recently reconnected with them at their company, Compass Creative in Roswell, GA.

Both Eric and Liz come from ad agency backgrounds and, even though they’ve been in the presentation space for more than a decade, their agency roots still show in their approach to creating presentations for marketing and sales departments in large corporations. Their presentation work is artistically sound, to be sure, but the key to their business approach is hardcore sales functionality. In other words, they unambiguously help clients make money.

By 2000, the ubiquity of PowerPoint was eroding the demand for high-end CD-ROM presentations. The writing was on the digital wall, recalls Eric. “We knew we had to move away from just presentation. The days of the $80,000 contract to create a brochure on a CD were gone.” Eric and Liz sat down with their clients and asked them what they needed to improve their sales processes. “We wanted to find out where it hurt? What was the need?” says Eric.

They realized that all of their clients were standardized on Microsoft Office and by this time those companies were building their own reports, presentations, sell sheets, mini-catalogs and other sales products. But Office, bless its monopolistic heart, is not smart enough to know a user’s unique needs or how to automate and customize task-specific processes. Eric and Liz realized that Office is a multipurpose vehicle in a world that demands custom transport.

Monster Garage Meets Presentations

When their customers began clamoring for an easier ride on the sometimes bumpy and slow road between raw sales materials and customer-ready visuals, Eric and Liz stuck their heads under the hood of Office and rigged the PowerPoint engine to generate on-the-fly, customized sales reports, presentations and catalogs. The result is a series of modified, street-legal apps that scream like a nitrous-injected Honda CRX running a strait LS/VTEC block and a Turbonetics T-66 with .81 AR @26psi. Sweet!

Glaser’s new spin-off company, DXT Systems, now specializes in performance-enhancing middleware solutions for companies that want their salespeople and managers to be able to trick out their own sales sheets, screen presentations and print catalogs at dragstrip speeds and without a Class 3 license. Eric calls the system DXT to signify it as a dynamic extension of Office functionality…and to make it sound cool.

Current DXT clients include a DXT.Presentation Builder for Eastman Kodak, a similar system for a worldwide soft drink manufacturer that doesn’t like its name used by its vendors, a do-it-yourself DXT.Catalog/Sell Sheet Builder for MeadWestvaco and a DXT.Sales Report Builder for Solutia, a spinoff of Monsanto.
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Robert L. Lindstrom at 5:29 PM .

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I’m fairly new as a Freelancer and found this website with a huge amount of information, tips, and articles on working at home, designing a home office, choosing projects, time management, etc. A one-stop shop for Freelancers and small business owners.

“Freelance Jobs Directory offers self-employed small business owners links to freelance & work at home jobboards, self-promotion tips, contract employment, lists of self-employment health/medical insurance for freelancers, jobs for freelance graphic designers, web designers, artists, illustrators, and other self-employed home-based small business professionals…”

Posted by Mary Waldera at 12:22 AM .

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This “>thumbnail image provides link to an example of vidoe blog created with the demo version of the new Vlog It! tool from Serious Magic.
I originally created the video in Communicator using the V-screen and teleprompter and then dropped it into Vlog It! Amazingly Vlog It! itself has these same features — the main difference from the Communicator product is that it doesn’t output the same range of professional quality higher res video files.

As a bonus of this product, the FLV file (which normally takes Flash to create and use) along with the thumbnail images from your blog are in My Documents\Vlog It!\My Output.

Perhaps the coolest feature is the way to instantly create a blog thumbnail file and then drag and drop it into your blog’s editor. (Note: there is a slight glitch with the music coming up twice in this version but I think it serves to give you the idea). I see the Video Blog as a great presentation follow up tool to provide professionals with a way to follow up with their clients and audience.

As more and more portable devices play video, the subscription capabilities of text blogs will also be easier to incorporate into video downloads, making this a very cool rich media tool.

Posted by Tom Bunzel at 1:45 PM .

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I was contacted by Mark Rosenthal of One World Presentation Mgt about his product the Presenter that enables large scale conferences to organize and present many different presentations. The Presenter™ is an application to manage large numbers of presentations at medical and association meetings. The program loads, sorts, organizes, and launches PowerPoint presentations from outside PowerPoint. It is database driven allowing for management and reporting for hundreds to thousands of presentation files.

The only thing I can compare it to from a look at the web site is Slide Manager and other similar server driven technologies, but my sense is that this product may be more performance based in real time and integrate well with high end conferences. The list of testimonials is also impressive.

Posted by Tom Bunzel at 2:22 PM .

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This article by Bryan Einsenberg at Clikz.com is worth a look.
It is directed at web marketers, but translates almost word-for-word into advice for presentation pros.

A quick translation guide:

1. Personas = Audience Profiles
2. Scenarios = Persuasion Process
3. People Friendly = Audience Relevancy
4. Web Analytics = Presentation Evaluation
5. It’s the Copy = It’s the Content
6. Best Practices = Best Practices
7. Conversion Rate = Persuasion Rate

Posted by Robert L. Lindstrom at 2:55 PM .

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I just read a fascinating article I think has far-reaching implications for presentation professionals. It’s put out by Educause, a large educational organization. The article name is “Is It Age or IT”.

The article’s intent is to summarize numerous studies about how technology is changing the way we learn and communicate. Findings particularly relevant to presenters…

Technology-savy people:

1) are becoming fluent visual communicators–they expect visuals to be a normal part of their communication and learning experience

2) crave interactivity, both with instructors and with peers–and they become bored easily without it

3) have attention spans that can jump quickly between multiple simultaneous tasks

4) operate seamlessly between physical and virtual reality–a virtual experience can be just as meaningful and influential as an actual physical event

5) prefer discovery over being told–in other words they want to learn by doing rather than listening to a lecture

The implications for presenters are obvious: if we keep designing and delivering linear, bullet-ridden, text-based slide shows, we are completely missing the mark with what a growing number of audience members are experiencing in their daily lives. If we want to persuade and otherwise reach into their minds, we better start making our presentations more meaningfully visual, interactive, and hands-on.

Posted by Robert Lane at 9:37 PM .

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I like to maintain a fifty-fifty balance between writing and consulting/training, but lately I’ve been doing the former and I need to get out more.

Fortunately last week I had a three hour session with about 30 attorneys – a group I have been targeting for some time. (I always hear that attorneys use PowerPoint a lot, but every attorney I ask says they never use it). So finally I found a live audience and there were some very interesting developments.

First I made the mistake of assuming that they actually knew PowerPoint. Many did but in a group of this size I had to go back to some basics, Layout, Task Pane, Animation, etc. Then they played Stump the Professor and had me figuring out how to animate a single data series in a chart with an Emphasis Effect. At the break one attorney set me straight.

“Look,” he said, “everything I do is about telling a judge or jury what I intend to prove, proving it, and telling them that I just proved it. I need tools for that.”

“So you use tables a lot,” I replied, insightful as ever.

“Bingo,” he said, “And I put a checkmark in there when I’ve proved it. But I need to learn how to use pictures and video to make the case.” Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Tom Bunzel at 1:32 PM .

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Ever since I read Vogel’s description of the message learning approach to persuasion, I have been looking for additional sources of information about the subject. The components of message learning are 1) attention; 2) comprehension; 3) yielding or agreement; and 4) retention. All of these are necessary in order for action to result… and action is the proof that persuasion has occurred.

A few weeks ago, I ran across Robert Cialdini’s book “Influence“. In this book, Cialdini describes what he calls the “6 Weapons of Influence”. His weapons are actually 6 categories of triggers that have a tendency to start “fixed-action patterns” in us humans. Cialdini attempts to alert us to the ways in which “compliance professionals” try to trigger automatic responses from their audiences. The six categories these devices fall into are:

Reciprocation - How a free gift makes us vulnerable to undue influence
Commitment and Consistency - Even a small commitment makes us act consistent with that committment
Social Proof - How we look to others when we are uncertain
Liking - The unsettling power of attractiveness
Authority - How we tend to obey perceived authority
Scarcity - Everything seems more valuable when there is less of it available

Part of Cialdini’s purpose is to alert readers to the ways in which unscrupulous people attempt to exploit these triggers for their own purposes.
There are of course also legitimate uses of these principles when attempting to persuade an audience.

This is one of the best researched books I have read in a while, and Cialdini provides complete documentation for all the information he presents. All his claims are backed up with studies… many of them at the same time amazing and disconcerting.

Posted by Robert Befus at 1:08 PM .

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I’m not about to write a review of a book I have yet to read but, if the synopsis and current endorsements are to be believed, this book looks like a promising addition to the library of every visual communications specialist and commercial photographer.
Going Visual, by Alexis Gerard and Bob Goldstein, with a forward by Guy Kawasaki, appears to tap in to the notion that information overload and presentation burn-out can be mediated by judicious use of imagery (primarily digital photographic) to communicate ideas, products and messages. But hey, surely ‘one picture is worth a thousand words‘ has been around for a while now? Well maybe it has, and maybe this book takes it a step further and rewrites the dictum, I’ll have to wait until my copy arrives to find out. If anyone out there has already read this book, please comment.

Posted by Roy Hammans at 4:59 PM .

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