Tips on creating a successful presentation

Posted Sunday, July 29, 2007 at 12:33pm in PR General  | 

Disclosure: I am by no means a presentation expert. In fact, I would say I’m hit or miss. This blog post is a means to hopefully provide readers with a few tips on presenting and also as a way for me to collect my own thoughts on the topic. You might want to save this page to del.ico.us and read it when/if you need to. It’s quite long at nearly 1600 words.

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It’s a great buzz when you’ve pulled off a good presentation. The adrenalin’s flowing, you’re feeling confident about yourself and, who knows, if the right people are there it could end up leading to a new business lead or job offer. Thing is though, there is a considerable amount of work that goes into carrying off a good presentation both before and during. There are many factors to take into consideration and this blog post doesn’t cover them all but I’ve noted some of the most important ones.

PREPARATION

Like most worthwhile activities, preparation and planning are necessary tasks to ensure your presentation runs smooth and you’re not left panicking at the last minute. In short, the more you prepare the more likely your presentation will be a success. If you are fully prepared then you are probably a lot more confident in delivering a sound presentation and thus increasing your chances of success further. Confidence is half the battle, as they say.

Preparation questions to ask the event organisers:

How many people are attending?

Presenting to 20 people is different than presenting to, say, 200. And, again, presenting to only 2 people is different than presenting to 20.

What time am I up?

Assuming you’re not the only person presenting you need to know what time you’re up. If it’s first thing you then you need to be there before the conference starts to set up. If you’re one of the last ones speaking then it’s a good idea to sit through and take notes of your fellow speakers’ presentations. Well, for one reason, it’s polite and for another, you might be able to take something from those presentations to add to your own.

You don’t have to rearrange your whole presentation or anything but if you can relate a part of your own presentation to one of the other speaker’s it helps the audience and also looks like the presentations are more of a collective.

How long do I have?

For obvious reasons your presentation shouldn’t last only 15 minutes when you’ve been allocated 30. On the flipside, and probably even worse, it shouldn’t last 50 minutes either or you may find the event organisers dragging you off stage.

Your presentation length is important so it’s worth timing it prior to the conference/event day as any presentation that goes well under or over the allocated time looks unprofessional.

What kind of mic will I be using?

A small but important question. Conferences and events generally use either a lapel mic or a static mic. If it’s a static mic then you will usually be speaking behind a lectern and thus won’t be able to walk around on stage. If it’s a lapel mic, however, then you have the freedom to walk around until your hearts content. Although, mimicking circus clowns is not recommended.

If you are using crib notes to help you in your presentation then it’s best to work out how you’ll be using them should you be wearing a lapel mic. You don’t want the likely scenario of standing in front of the audience reading your notes word for word with your head down.

Preparation questions to ask yourself

Who is my audience?

The more you know about your audience the better you can tailor the presentation to them. Put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself these questions: Why are they there? How much do they know abut this subject? What is their attitude likely to be to you and your presentation topic? Are there any decision makers present?

What key messages do I want to say?

You work in PR, right? Then you probably know all about key messaging. Be it in news releases, interviews, white papers etc. Same applies in presentations too.

Before you start creating your presentation work out what key messages you want to get across to the audience and how you want them to react to them. The whole point of a presentation is to get a point across so, with this in mind, devise three key messages and structure your presentation and content around them.

And remember, it doesn’t do any harm to repeat these key messages during the presentation on more than one occasion. Make them subliminal if you’re smart enough.

Preparing the content of your presentation

Create a narrative

People like being told stories. It’s human nature. Presentations can be stories too and, like most stories, they should have a beginning, middle and an end. If you can give your presentation some sort of narrative which grabs the audience then you’re onto a winner. Very few people enjoy being presented with slides and slides of facts and figures so, if this is the case of your own presentation, it’s up to you to tell the story within them.

Use images and diagrams

A picture paints a thousand words but it probably paints two thousand in a presentation deck. Now, I’m not saying you should have multiple pictures flying around or fading in and out of each of your slides. A definite no no. But if you can add one image to signify the point you’re trying to illustrate in one go then your audience will have far less trouble absorbing it than they would if you have, say, eight bullet points of text.

Don’t use too many slides

There’s nothing worse than death by Power Point. We’ve all been there. Reams and reams of slides; endless bullet points and, by the time it’s finished, you’re pretty much ready for a nap. If you haven’t fallen asleep already, that is.

For an example of how many slides to use in your presentation take a read of Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 Rule of Power Point. Must admit, I tend to use more.

THE PRESENTATION

So you’re fully prepared for your presentation. It’s the day of the conference and you’re up next.

Dealing with nerves

Everyone including CEOs and other senior staff are nervous to some degree prior to presenting. It’s only natural to get nervous and the day you don’t feel the butterflies to some extent is the day you shouldn’t bother presenting again.

Nerves are the body’s way to help keep you sharp, on your toes and alert. I’m sure I’ve read somewhere that nerves and adrenalin were the body’s way of stopping us getting eaten by much larger animals with much larger teeth than ourselves back in the Neanderthal days. It’s a natural reaction.

Unfortunately there is no wonder cure to stop nervousness. Well, none that I know of. However, there are ways to help combat them. As an example, I was given some presentation training when I was at Edelman and the trainer told me you can look at doing a presentation two ways.

The first way is thinking of it as a ‘performance’ where your every move is watched and every mistake is criticised. Or, you could look at it as a means of ‘communicating’ where your success is measured by how well the audience understands the message.

So, in effect, you can make a couple of mistakes and the chances are the audience probably won’t notice them. They’re too busy COMMUNICATING with you. Think about it, when you’re watching someone present is it really such a big deal when he or she mixes their words?

Cracking a joke

If you can get your audience to laugh then your confidence during the presentation will rise tenfold. Thing is though, do you want to take the risk? They might not laugh and you may be left in total silence. Worse yet, they might throw a couple of rotten tomatoes at you.

Cracking a joke during a presentation is entirely up to you. If you’re confident enough that the audience will find it funny then by all means. And if they do you’ll feel much more relaxed, confident and, to a certain extent, authoritative. On the other hand you might want to ask yourself if it is really necessary and will it allow you get your key messages across more effectively? Maybe not.

If you’re announcing the loss of 500 jobs internally then your mother in law jokes should be best left at home, thanks.

Body language

What’s the saying? 30% of communication is done orally and the remaining 70% is done through body expressions. You could write a whole book or three on body language and many people have. So, in short.

Do

* Make eye contact with as many of the audience as possible

* Stand with good posture

* Make ‘sincere’ hand gestures

* Smile

* Make facial expressions that are consistent with what you’re saying

Don’t

* Focus your attention on your notes

* Look at the floor or the ceiling

* Have a defensive stance. E.g. crossed arms

* Touch your hair, face or mouth and don’t put your hands in your pockets

And that’s it. What would you add? What works best for you in presentations?

Sidenote: Piaras pointed out this presentation from Guy Kawasaki some time ago. This is a great example of a confident speaker and a very interesting presentation too. I’ve watched it around four times now.

technorati tags: presenting, presentations

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