- Building a Rapport With Your Audience Using Social Media Research January 2, 2012
- YouTube Insights gets Facelift as Youtube Analytics January 16, 2012
- How Social Media’s Causing The End Of Business As Usual December 31, 2011
Archive for: great presentations
Books Worth Reading
In the coming weeks, I will be posting reviews of business books I’ve read in the past year that can enhance the way you do presentations, improve the way you tell stories, engage with your audience, or market your business through social media or other channels.
I’m kicking off this series with Scott Berkun’s hilarious and highly practical Confessions of a Public Speaker (O’Reilly Media), in which this best-selling author and speaker reveals techniques great communicators use to connect with their audiences.
Many of the practical tips he outlines for presenting are hard learned lessons from falling flat on his face in his own public presentations over the years – hence the title of the book.
Here are some of the many areas of topics he covered and I found particularly fascinating or useful in today’s speaking arena:
1. How to keep an audience engaged in the era of tweeting, texting and mobile phone games.
2. Social Media: How to monitor what people say on Twitter, while you are actually presenting on stage.
3. The importance of speaking not just to a live audience, but also to the camera (since your presentation will likely end up on Youtube)
4. How to deal with hostile audiences
Read the rest of: Books Worth Reading »
Steve Jobs’ Presentation Secrets
November 3, 2009
Whenever you hear someone describe Apple CEO Steve Jobs, they often use words like “charismatic,” “showmanship” “electrifying presenter.” His presentations look so effortlessly that people often believe it’s innate.
But that’s hardly the case. Steve Jobs is no doubt one of the world’s best presenters, but that’s because he is relentless at rehearsing and refining his presentation until every aspect shines.
BusinessWeek columnist Carmine Gallo examines many aspects of Jobs’ presentation techniques as well as his tireless preparation in his new book, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience.
Gallo analyzed dozens, if not hundreds, of Steve Jobs’ keynotes and other presentations, which resulted in Gallo crafting a playbook, per se, on how you can learn similar techniques to electrify an audience.
Most speeches fall into four categories: informative, inspirational, persuasive or to entertain. Gallo notes that Jobs aims to cover at least three in every speech.
“Steve Jobs presentation is very much like a dramatic play – a finely crafted, well-rehearsed performance that informs, entertains and inspires,” Gallo writes.
Aside from delivery and preparation techniques, Gallo also covers how Jobs uses storytelling to grip his audiences as well as prepare outstanding visual slides to complement each story. No bullet points.
Related Article:
7 Tips to Sell Ideas The Steve Jobs Way
Read the rest of: Steve Jobs’ Presentation Secrets »
How to Help Your Audience Visualize Your Speech
August 14 2008
Speechwriters and those who give presentations strive, or at least should strive, to help their audiences visualize a story or concept. If you’ve seen bad PowerPoint presentations, the speaker did not have that in mind when s/he flashed up slide after slide of mind-numbingly boring text. As I’ve written several times before, if slides are used in a speech, they should aim to only compliment the speech by providing visuals and only minimal text.
This concept is well illustrated in Dan Roam’s new book, The Back of the Napkin. In it, he argues that a simple drawing can be more powerful than any excel spreadsheet or PowerPoint presentation.
Below is a video that outlines the concept further.
Read the rest of: How to Help Your Audience Visualize Your Speech »
Giving the Speech of Your Life
February 26, 2008
Some of the world’s most fascinating thinkers and greatest visionaries will be descending on Monterey, Calif., tomorrow to give the “speech of their lives” on social challenges facing the world at the annual Ted Conference.
TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) started out in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader, with the mission “to spread ideas that change attitudes, lives, and ultimately the world.”
Its speakers over the years have been the Who’s Who on the planet: From Bill Gates to Al Gore to Sergey Brin. But the real star speakers have been the unexpected, like Li Lu – the key organizer of the Tiananmen Square protest 1989. Or Patrick Awuah, a native of the African country of Ghana, who left his homeland as a teenager to attend college in the U.S., work at Microsoft for a decade, then return home to co-found a liberal arts college aimed at educating Africa’s next generation of leaders.
If you haven’t heard of the conference, it’s not surprising, because it’s always been by invitation-only and cost $4k. But last year, it relaunched its Web site – posting the best Ted Talks over the years.
It’s run by the Sapling Foundation, run by Chris Anderson, the founder and former publisher of Business 2.0 magazine. The foundation acquired the conference from its retiring founder Richard Saul Wurman. He gave an emotional talk at the 2002 TED conference regarding what inspired him to do so.
Read the rest of: Giving the Speech of Your Life »
