Business Presentation Primer

Most people use Microsoft PowerPoint because of various reasons the main one being its ubiquity. There are alternatives: on Mac OS X; Keynote and PowerPoint (again) and in Windows;  Harvard Graphics (still around) and cross platforms; OpenOffice's Impress. No matter what software you pick, contrary to Marshall McLuhan's famous saying, here the medium should NOT be the message.

The presentation software should not constrain your talks and conferences, it should not force you to use uncalled for features just because they are available. The presentation should not dictate the use of special equipment for its delivery. It should not be so complex that it freezes the computer or generates the blue screen of death.  Avoid using different types of transitions, unless the script calls for it. The right to left sweep is one of the most universal transition. Avoid using clip-art at all costs.

Scripting

To be effective, all business presentations should be scripted. Yeah, just like in the movies. To be efficient as a presenter, you should always be prepared. I understand that in a business environment, some of the tasks discussed below might be farmed out. The important thing though is that as a presenter, you familiarize yourself with the material and that you make sure it is correctly adapted to its target audience. You can be a natural but all great actors have had bad scripts and played in bad movies. Don't let someone else's judgment interfere with your personal assessment of the audience and the relevance of the message to be delivered.

The first step in developing a presentation is knowledge. Knowledge of your audience, knowledge of the surroundings and knowledge of the topic, product or context. How would I profile my audience? Are they knowledgeable on the topic? What is the context of the presentation? Are they homogeneous or diversified in backgrounds? Is there a political or strategic agenda? Can the organizers tell me more on the audience to expect? Is it a luncheon engagement? Do I speak in the morning? How much time do I have? Who is speaking before and after me? The more you succeed in adapting your message to your target audience, the more it will impact on the receptive crowd. This knowledge will guide you throughout the research and writing, help you pick support material and finally, assist you in conveying your message with the most pertinence. 

The second step is outlining. What would I want the audience to remember the most about my presentation? Build a plot. Adapt the story for the desired ending. You can spend time on secondary intrigues but your audience will likely remember only one main plot and its denouement. Focus on drama. Use clear images and comparisons. Build up. Captivate and watch your rhythm. Pace your presentation in terms of building up to a climax. Repeat how you got there and conclude. Again all good presentation software have an outline or draft mode, rarely used. If they don't, use Microsoft Word. You have an existing speech? Break it down into an outline. It will help you research support material and trim ineffective passages or emphasize strong points.

The third step encompasses research and writing. We now expand on the keywords and snippets outlined previously. Again, pacing is of the essence. Imagine yourself delivering the speech and the presentation. Put yourself in the audience's seat and look and listen. Get an outside opinion.

Sources

You should always keep a trace of sources and references of "outside" information used in your presentation. If you do a lot of Web research, consider Zotero for easy collection of research sources. If you would like to improve on your Google skills, make sure you read this. Ideally, data sources should be checked and confirmed by at least two or more credible sources, especially if taken from the Web. For example, you will obtain different results from Compete, Alexa, Comscore and Quantcast on Unique Visitors as they all use a unique methodology for extrapolating numbers. Going through target sites' press releases will yield yet another set of claims. The truth is relative, as long as you use a coherent and similar footing of comparison between all sites, you should be close to reality.

Consider Dogpile for a compiled results list of Ask, Google, Yahoo! and Live Search. Consider the alternative altavista too to compare results or to use Babel Fish translation. There is nothing more damaging than false statistics or out of context usage of quotes or statements. Misguidance and typos will never go unnoticed in front of a large audience.

You should not list your sources on the screen--- not in a detailed manner that is. It clutters the screen and drives attention away form the point you are attempting to make. Keep the documented sources for the hand outs or inquiries. On screen quotes should always be associated to a name, title, organization and date. Whenever possible, data should not be more than 18 month old. See sources of data research below.

Specifics vary from country to country but in general, acknowledgement of the author or source will guard you from lawsuits. Some images cannot be used because they are protected by contract. A Web image may very well illustrate the point you are trying to make but it could have been ordered from a professional photographer who has granted a 6 month embargo on its use to an online magazine. The fact that searched images appear in Google Images does not guarantee that they can be copied and placed in a presentation that has potential to circulate in front of a public audience, in printed form or stored on a Web site. Make sure you know what rights are tied to the images you are using in your presentation. Fair use is not a blank cheque. All presentations, even education or in-house ones should be built with careful research on the terms and conditions of their embedded images. Image banks have specifics conditions and licenses for their stock pictures. 

You might even want to copyright your own presentation if it contains sensitive data, proposes a novel approach or is filled with your ideas and research. Look up Creative Commons if this is the case.

Production of the presentation

The final step consists of putting all this together in the software of your choice. Hopefully, at this point, you have pictures, charts and a text that support your arguments and ideas. As a rule, keep the pages or screens or slides properly balanced. The majority of presentations should not be made up of loaded pages. Five to eight words per sentence, four to five sentences at most per slide. Remember, the screen is accompanying a speech. It is an accessory. Show visuals. Simplify the charts so that we grasp the trend. It is a support to emphasize or illustrate arguments, points, facts, quotes or figures. Keep it simple. Detailed charts are for a secondary printed version of the same presentation. In the context of a financial pitch, try to follow Guy Kawasaki's 10-20-30 set of rules.

Try delivering the presentation with and without the slides. If you can't do without the slides, you don't know your material and it will show. The slides are not prompters, they are at best cue cards. I often think of them as images in a comic strips. They are the best illustrations to support a story at any given time. Of course this is an ideal, reality often dictates a dilution of the sublime. Verify figures. Spellcheck.

As much as possible, try for the presentation material to occupy the first two thirds from the top of the screen. Most room set ups are levelled (not angled like a theater), people at the back will not see what is at the bottom of the screen. Again, this is a rule of thumb.

You are now ready to rehearse. Practice makes perfect. Disable the screen saver and power down options on the laptop if using your own computer. Depending on the complexity, you either time and cue yourself or let someone else do it. No matter what, expect at minimum, three full rehearsals and some editing. As a rule of thumb, a nicely paced presentation will average 1.5 slide a speech minute. That's for the conventional business presentations of course. A fast paced presentation will easily reach 4 slides per minute. The multi screen presentation has even more density. Adjust to your style and to your audience and its context. Have someone write down (while you rehearse) what aspects could be improved. Pace yourself.

Some people us their slides as cues. Make sure you will be able to see your slides from the podium. Ask for a preview monitor if you can. Reading a script is also accepted but it conveys a sense of formalism and might not be the right tone to adopt for a given audience. If you print your speech, use Orator 14 points as the font. Insert the slides in position for accurate pacing and cues. Make sure you will be able to place the sheets in front of you at the conference (some organizers wire the playback laptop right on the podium so there's no room left to lay out your script). If you read your discourse, do not staple the sheets and lay 2 pages in front of you sliding the right one over the left one as you move along. This way you will always have a wider view of your speech and your audience will appreciate the absence of tossing page noise.

Now let's look at the contexts or occasions of public speaking. There are two main categories of business presentation delivery--- formal and informal. In the formal category presentations can be organized in sub categories: speeches, lectures, investor meeting, subject matter expertise, sales, motivation, annual meetings, guest speaking, conventions, congress, court, financial assembly, client pitch, etc. 

In the informal category we find internal audits, reporting, training, marketing, product development, supplier meeting, internal meetings, small audience meeting, retreat presentations, etc. Depending on the size of the organization, its corporate culture or what is at stake, some of these "informal" meetings can be quite formal. These are just markers that influence a choice of attire, a degree of polish and the overall formalism in the tone of delivery. Even if the presentation is informal, it has to be accurate and spell checked.

The other important factor to consider is the "literacy" of the presentation. How deep do we have to delve in details? How much charts are required and how complex and accurate should they be? Financial, training, technical and reporting style presentations have to go into intricacy. Einstein once said that everything should be made simple but no simpler. These often break the 1.5 slide per minute rule of thumb either way.

At the other end of the spectrum, you find a style that is more and more used by technology evangelists--- simplicity. Pure, one keyword or one image per page presentations do not fit all types of presenters and occasions, but they have incredible impact. You decide what is best for you and your audience. Advertising agencies, sales and marketing people tend to favor this approach.

Now let's look at general style considerations. As always there will be exceptions. What we are aiming at is readability at a distance. Contrasts work best in all cases. Then it becomes a matter of personal taste as to what colors are picked. Experiment with contrasts.

Colors on digital screens are based on the RGB color model. Pixels, the smallest elements on a screen have values of three light beams (Red, Green, Blue). The absence of intensity (0%) yields black. Full intensity (100%) generates white. For a while presentations were produced on black backgrounds to maximize contrast for all colors. Today, a lot of presenters resort to white backgrounds to mimmick paper and brighten the room. There is something to be said for grey as well. Again, do according to concept, final destination, corporate policy, audience conventions and general acceptance.  What you should really avoid is red or orange for type. It has a tendency to "break" and be hard to read on most projection equipment. You will find a rich color guideline explanation here.

What you should also know is that there is a CMYK color model for print (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black). It works almost in an opposite manner. Colors from the screen emanate, they are projected by beams in the RGB color model. For printed material, we rely on outside light to shine on the surface to allow for the interpretation of colors. Black in this case, absorbs all of the ambient light. In the RGB case, it radiates at 100%. Just bare in mind that you will never succeed in reproducing a printed color exactly for the screen. Corporate guidelines for color schemes were traditionnally based on print and a lot of companies had to compromise to preserve brand, logo or corporate image on the Web (ultimately a RGB environment) and, in business presentations. Talk about a paradigm shift--- color in to color out, analog to digital.

The after presentation

Try to have your delivery and the impact of your presentation evaluated. To improve yourself, find out what the audience thought if this is at all possible. Find out what you might improve for the next one. Introspection and colleague comments work best. Do not isolate yourself from criticism. You will improve over time and you should improve no matter how good you think you are, provided you expose your talks to positive criticism.

At the end of your intervention, indicate clearly where the presentation will be made available and under what conditions. It is best to generate an Adobe PDF file out of your originals to preserve authenticity. If you can, put a watermark or copyright notice on every page. Unless you are releasing your talk under a public license.

Sometimes, speeches are released ahead of the presentation with the mention "Check against delivery". This is to allow a certain lattitude of delivery. Decide what version should be made available, the one you delivered and ad libbed on or the one that was written by the speech writer. The Web being a public place, be careful for statements that might be taken out of context or exploited by opponents or competitors. The perfect, ideal, politically correct speech has yet to be written.

If you decide for the talk to be made available in video and for the script, the orator's speech and the slides to be stored on a publicly accessible web server, work with your PR firm or Department for concise documentation policies. Public talks are an opportuniy for both your carreer and company. You are an ambassador of corporate culture, brand, products and know-how. Building credentials is done with the intent of improving processes that lead to audience recognition and public awareness.

Alternatives, web conferencing and sharing presentations online

There's a new platform for sharing presentations, whiteboard and desktop online called DimDim. Also check out GoToMeeting, Yugma and Webex. There are also many sites that allow you to share your presentations with others online. I just want to mention a few. SlideShare, DocStoc, Zoho, Google Docs, Sliderocket, 280slides and Scribd .

To be added (work in progress, there is a lot to cover!)

Tone, nervousness, script for speaker (orator), water, podium, question period, microphone types, height, water, light, sound check, prompter, podcasts, vidcasts, seating arrangements, journalists, on the road survival kit, technical resource, image banks, image rights, presentation sharing sites, youtube.com.

Next we will talk about some technical knowledge that is often useful and required. Pixels, screen resolution, video formats and encoding, storage. Support equipment. Again this is software independent and we will skim the concepts for an overall understanding from a business presenter's perspective.