Archives for October 2009
Don’t hate the PowerPointers
In the twenty-odd years since it’s creation, PowerPoint backdrops have become every speaker’s Charlie McCarthy.
Intended to give life and structure to status updates and sales pitches, the slide deck has, instead, become a wooden accompaniment to listless recitations in meeting rooms and lecture halls. The dreadful examples filling SlideShare are enough to make me yearn for a return to acetates.
Many commentators blame the tool, but it can clearly be tamed. My B-school gave us a half-day’s training with a whiz from McKinsey who taught us to storyboard, use action-titles, and adopt balanced color and graphics. Clif Atkinson makes similar arguments in Beyond Bullet Points tutorials. The result better illustrates a talk instead of simply repeating it.
Alternatively, Saachi & Saachi recommend bold graphics and high-contrast messaging. These grab attention, but I’ve found that they require perfect timing an coordination to be effective. Also, overused, they get tiresome fast.
And they still don’t solve the fundamental problem of the the way that speakers interact with their slides.
Instead, return to Edgar Bergan’s interactions with Charlie. The interaction is a dialog, straight man vs witty rejoinder, lead-in vs. double entendre. The best speakers have a similar relationship to their background material. It doesn’t just support the story, it joins them in the narrative of telling it.
Seth Godin has few words or animations in his slides, but uses them as an ongoing commentary on his ideas. Famously, Steve Jobs uses his slides as tease and tells, foreshadowing then revealing the reality behind his spoken reflections. There’s a real rapport between the men and the medium.
Creative or gifted amateurs can sometimes do almost as well or, failing that, at least provide some entertainment in trying. Pecha Kutcha night, 20 slides, 20 seconds each, returns to Maastricht this Tuesday evening. A dozen presenters will try their luck: it’s a bit of a poetry slam in execution, but makes for a fun evening.
…and you can learn a lot about how to give a presentation watching people tell their stories, accompanied by a tight set of images.
Channeling Seth Godin
If you’re a small, unknown company with a new product, how do you connect with customers? How can they come to know, like, and trust you when they’ve never heard of you; why should they choose you over established competitors?
As I build my own business and counsel my clients, this question looms large.
Seth Godin is a new media marketing evangelist with intriguing answers. as I watch his presentations and listen to his interviews, I’ve taken away three ideas that really resonate.
- Find a niche small enough for you to be the best.
What group of people would think of you as their first, best, and natural solution when they have a problem? Who shares your interests and passions; who forms a natural community of people committed, in the same way that you are, to your vision of change?
The adventuresome and the forgotten are a natural constituency, people who find believe that their problems are not a mainstream concern.
2. Find a way to stand out.
The way to be known is to be demonstrably the best, to be unconventional, to be able to upset the established order of things. I have always preferred to compete on understanding the problem, creating solutions that perform, and being first to the market.
If you can keep a sense of energy, style. and fun, while avoiding taking yourself too seriously, I think it’s a plus (see Richard Branson: quite mad, but quite effective).
3. Form a tribe.
Find a way to gather people together who are dissatisfied with the way things are and who are as committed to change as you are. Be willing to provide a forum, bring them together, and to lead a movement.
Old media was about grabbing and holding people’s attention while hitting them repeatedly with the value proposition. But Godin suggests that providing a forum to connect people is a better approach: they will find you and, if you solve their problem, their word of mouth will draw in others. (This was also the strategy of Marshall Ganz, who created Obama’s affinity strategy for organizing volunteers)
I’m a small company; my best client has four people. There isn’t money or time for either of us to follow a traditional marketing plan. But what each of us needs is a core of committed,well-served customers with focused needs that we can solve better than anyone.
Putting that principal into practice has absorbed a lot of my reflective time and discussion the past few weeks.
Progress comes from doing small experiments to try out promising ideas, then measuring the results and adapting to the opportunities (or cutting the losses). So, I’ve created a couple of well-defined interest groups in social media centers. Interestingly, people have spontaneously come to join.
I’m not sure how you would apply it to, say, running a flower shop, but I do like the way it shapes finding constructive approaches to connecting our solutions to customers. And it actually seems to have some validity in practice.