In this post I’m going to share what I consider five fundamentally important tips for presenting more effectively. They’re all simple, not necessarily easy, but can vastly improve the quality and impact of a presentation if they’re applied.

1. Know why you’re presenting

Before you give any presentation, it’s useful to get clear on the top reason you’re presenting, and what you need to achieve from your presentation. The reason you do this is because it’s difficult to achieve more than one high-level objective per talk. An example is: “To help people feel more confident about public speaking”.

2. Structure your talk

Audiences pay more attention when they have a sense that you’re in control of your topic, and are taking them to a meaningful conclusion. You’ll succeed to the extent that you make THEM feel smart, rather than by impressing them by how smart you are. Here’s a really useful outline that can be applied to improve the structure of almost any talk:

1. Tell them what you’re going to tell them.
2. Tell them.
3. Tell them what you told them.

3. Be Entertaining

If you bore your audience you’ll lose them and your presentation will have been a waste of everybody’s time. Whether your presentation is drama, documentary, comedy or horror, don’t forget that people often feel before they think – there is an emotional component to any powerful message. Some technical ways you can be more entertaining are:

• Don’t simply read your slides (you shouldn’t have so much content on your slides in the first place, otherwise you might as well just give a printed handout)
• Tell stories to make your point. These can be case-studies if you wish. Or analogies.
• Varying your tone of voice to emphasise different points
• Varying your pace to emphasise different points. Don’t underestimate the power of a pause.

4. Be Honest, Be Yourself

The pressure to give a technically perfect presentation is what often leads to stiff, boring presentations where the audience can often actually see how nervous you are. If you’re able to speak naturally in conversation with a friend or a business colleague about your topic, then you should be able to present to a group… just turn the volume up. The key here is to present on stuff that you’re comfortable speaking about, so that you can speak naturally about it. Sincerity wins over flashiness.

5. Use Pictures

If you’re presenting with Powerpoint or Keynote, then try keep it to a maximum of one sentence per slide. This is important for a number of reasons: People can read faster than you can talk – so reading off your slides starts to seem like a hinderance to progress if that’s all you’re doing. Pictures add an entertaining element to your presentation, and often help people envisage what you’re saying.

If you’re not using presentation software, then this principle still applies. There’s a journalistic principle that says: “Show them don’t tell them” – use examples, stories and analogies to make your point, rather than simply stating it bluntly. So, for example, instead of stating that you’re a rockstar geek, rather describe how your last software demo culminated in a mosh-pit.

There are some technical aspects to presenting that I look forward to sharing in subsequent blog posts, but I think these are fundamentals. Anything else you’d suggest? Have you been to one of my talks before? If so, do you have any feedback on how I’ve applied these principles? Please share.

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As luck would have it, Elaine sent me an article about a chap called Nassim Nicholas Taleb who is a philosopher of randomness about the fallibility of human knowledge, and (according to the article) “now the hottest thinker in the world” (he has a $4m advance on his next book, and gives about 30 presentations a year to bankers, economists and traders for $60 000 a pop).

As a trader, Taleb has said he took a skeptical and anti-mathematical approach to risk and uncertainty and had a severe distrust of models and statisticians and a contempt for finance academics, especially economists. He accurately predicted the current market crisis – and made a fortune (estimated at half a billion dollars) from it.

Fooled by Randomness,  the title of one of Taleb’s books, has also become an idiom in English used to describe when someone sees a pattern where there is just random noise.

In his other book “The Black Swan“, he rejects the distinction between non-fiction and fiction.

Here’s  Taleb’s Top 10 life tips, drawn from Appleyard’s article:

1.  Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

2.  Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

3.  It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

4.  Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

5.  Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.

6.  Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.

7.  Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

8.  Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants… or (again) parties.

9.  Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW, but you need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

10.  Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

Extreme events do happen and have a big effect. Examples abound, including September 11th. The Internet with its various effects was scarcely anticipated, and it is a development that has had a significant effect. The effects of extreme events are even higher due to the fact that they are unexpected.

So, in short, I think Taleb’s teachings can be summarized simply as “expect and prepare for the unexpected”. I’ll be sorting out all my insurance posthaste!

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Anyway, this video is for them. And I hope that you enjoy it too:

(Talk by Richard St.John at TED)

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What we want is stuff that offers order in the midst of chaos, stuff that makes our lives simpler. Not more irrelevant features, just a few that help us do what we do better.

I’m inspired by what the guys at 37signals are doing with their software. They have reduced the number of options we have in their programmes, but they’ve made sure that what is there works well. Apple computers are the same.

I’ve had this experience with giving lectures and talks: It seems that the less ideas that I try to cram into one presentation, the more enthusiastic the response I get. The corollary to that was proved to me by the negative response I had last-week when I did a presentation jam-packed with ideas. I thought I was adding more value by fitting 5 big ideas into my 3hour presentation, but in-fact it reduced the effectiveness of the talk. The class were resentful that I made them confused. Not good. Far better to present just one idea, and make them feel smart for learning it.

One of the reasons that Google has done so well as a search engine is because of their bare-basic home-page. Its predecessors like Yahoo used to assault the senses with too many options on their search page, and some people felt confused. Google left no option other than to type in the search box, and so people felt smarter.

When it comes to your business, can you help customers make sense of your offer in the most simple possible terms? They won’t buy what they don’t understand. To quote Seth Godin:

If you can’t state your position in eight words or less, you don’t have a position.”

My parting thought on this subject: If you can make people’s lives simpler, and if you can make people feel smarter by reducing complexity, then you’ve completed one of marketing’s most important tasks.

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There are millions of voices in the global conversation, all talking at the same time. It’s noisy and it’s cluttered, but miraculously the most committed people always get heard. These people are writing regularly and often about a subject they care about to a community of people that is also influential and passionate.

They might screw-up publicly from time-to-time, but nearly every celebrity and politician will tell you that that’s usually good for business:-p

We tend to forget about those companies that don’t contact us regularly and often. I’d like to suggest that you don’t be one of those this year.

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Most marketers I meet are very caught up on this technique or that tactic… but, really what they’re getting excited about is something that worked for someone else, somewhere else, with some other product.

When you focus on the result YOU want to achieve, and don’t worry about how you’re gonna get there (yet), then you open your mind to the most effective solutions to that particular problem.

Be specific though, and state what you’d be prepared to pay for your outcome. For example: “I want 3000 new signups in the next month, and for that I’m prepared to pay R25 000 and personally work 20 hours towards achieving that”.

I can virtually guarantee success with this visualisation. When you’re clear on your outcome, it allows you to be more creative.

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What I find interesting from the Marketing perspective is that all this debate has served to dramatically increase the number of Muslims in America!

One of the reasons is that many people have gone to do investigations to find out for themselves what Islam is all about. Then with the information they discover, some find that they agree with the principles of Islam and they convert.

The Marketing Principle at play here is that no publicity is bad publicity. It’s far worse to be ignored.

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