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Present Like A Rock Star

Presentation | Public Speaking Tips

Monthly Archives: February 2016

Buy Your Own Presentation Remote (“Clicker”)

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A few years ago I was sitting in the audience at a conference when I noticed the luncheon keynote speaker was starting to become a bit perturbed.

He had walked on stage and began talking and realized there was no presentation remote (often referred to as a “clicker”) on the podium. He didn’t skip a beat with his opening but mentioned out loud “I could use a clicker.” He chatted for a minute or two while expecting the A/V person to run up on stage with a clicker.

The keynote speaker now was not a happy camper and asked again in a more demonstrative manner.

I happened to know the speaker and decided to grab my own remote out of my backpack and ran up on stage and began plugging the USB connector into the laptop. The A/V person took over at that point and the speaker was able to continue on with his slides. It turned out that the previous speaker had put the remote in his coat pocket and walked off and headed to the airport. The A/V team only had the one remote, leaving the speaker in a bind.

And just recently at client conference I was getting ready to introduce a speaker and the A/V person, who earlier assured us he would bring us a clicker, still hadn’t done so. I raced to the cloakroom located a few minutes walk away where my backpack was stored and returned with my own clicker. The A/V person eventually showed up with their remote, however several minutes into the client’s presentation.

I share these stories because whether you speak once a week or once a year, this type of situation is bound to happen to you at some point. But it is easily preventable by purchasing your own remote and carrying it with you at all times.

Presentation remotes typically range from under $20 to more than $200, but some of the best and most popular cost between $35-$75. If you think you will speak at least a few times per year, I recommend you buy one.

Besides a clicker not being provided or available, there are two other reasons I recommend purchasing your own presentation remote:

  • Being comfortable with a presentation remote is not a trivial thing. I’ve used clickers at events that seemed to have a delay or you had to click extra hard on the forward button which sometimes leads to advancing two slides, instead of one. Such a minor annoyance has the potential to mess with your concentration and flow.
  • A/V provided remotes don’t always work properly. Clickers have been known to randomly freeze at a certain point in the presentation; not be fully compatible with Macs; or have low battery life and risk dying in the middle of your presentation. Having your own ensures your will have a working remote, but also means you have a back-up clicker if the A/V provided one fails to work or be available.

If you don’t have your own remote yet, here are a couple of quick tips:

  1. Arrive early to your session room and make sure a remote is available and present.
  2. Test it out and make sure you are comfortable with it.
  3. If you have your own clicker see if the A/V people will let you use it.
  4. Regardless of which one, make sure the remote has plenty of range, works smoothly and has enough battery life.
  5. If you are using your own Apple Mac laptop to present from, make extra sure ahead of time that the provided presentation remote is compatible.

If you are ready to buy a clicker, here is a list of 5 of the more popular presentation remotes based on asking several people who speak for a living, my own experience and popularity on Amazon.

Logitech Wireless Presenter R400

Logitech Professional Presenter R800

Kensington Wireless Presenter

Kensington Wireless Expert Presenter with Green Laser Pointer

Interlink Electronics RemotePoint Global Presenter-remote control(VP4360)

You Are the Presentation – Not the Slides

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What ISN’T on your slides is the most important part of your presentation.

As a speaker, you might spend hours and hours working on and fretting over your slides … building a great story and making the slides visually appealing.

But if presenting was just about your slides, then you could simply post them on a site like SlideShare and not bother presenting live on stage.

The audience comes to hear you speak, not sit in silence watching you click through your slides. With most speakers moving to a visual-focused slide design approach – using images that convey a key message, perhaps with a few words – what you say about that slide is EVERYTHING.

Your slides are like a photograph, but it is your job to bring it to life through spoken words (whether a few or 1,000), stories, examples, audience involvement, voice inflection and body language. When building your presentation, focus as much or more time and energy on your talk track – what ISN’T on the slides – as you do the look and content of each slide. Your presentation is a collection of stories – make sure you have great ones for each slide or series of slides.

The slide below, for example, is one I use often to convey a point about usability, customer experience and that your customers don’t know how to navigate your web site, emails, mobile app and other touch points like you do. They likely don’t frequent them often. So it is your job to make it easy and to tell them what to do.Look Right - cross walk street sign

I bring this point alive by talking about that even though I’ve visited London a few dozen times, I still need to be reminded which way to look before crossing the streets. And London city planners understand this human behavior by painting “Look Right” and “Look Left” signs in cross walks.

The slide itself has the image and only 11 words in a text box (which I could probably even remove), but I typically spend a few minutes to bring the image and point alive.

You are the presentation, not the slides. Remember, a great speaker can still rock the stage with mediocre slides, but a mediocre speaker will struggle to turn awesome slides into a killer talk.

16:9 versus 4:3 – The Presentation Format Conundrum

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In the last few years there has been a rather quick, yet subtle, switch in slide format being used by brands, event organizers and professional speakers alike. That transition is to the wide screen 16:9 format and away from the perennial standard of 4:3.

Personally, I much prefer the wide screen format, as do most frequent speakers, as it provides a lusher and more elegant canvas from which to work. It conveys more of a movie screen type feel, rather than boxy and almost square feeling that the 4:3 format exhibits.

While this transition to the 16:9 format is great for speakers and audiences alike, it has also created a few challenges for presenters. These include:

  • Reworking old slides: When creating a new 16:9 presentation from an older 4:3, much of the content on your slides will get stretched. 
  • Back and forth: You might find that you have to create two versions, one in each format, of your go-to presentations. Not a huge issue, but quite annoying.
  • Surprises: in 2015, I delivered nearly 25 presentations at conferences and events and of those only two were still set-up for the 4:3 presentation format. One I knew about in advance as they provided their branded template, the other I found out the night before. I was speaking on the third day of a conference and had noticed on day one that many of the other presentations looked squished and had formatting issues. That’s when I asked the A/V people if they were supporting 16:9 – and the answer was of course “no.” Unlike many of the other speakers I was able to redo my slides.
  • Slide real estate: Not only is reworking your old 4:3 slides a challenge, but when creating new 16:9 format slides you may find that a lot of your visual assets – screenshots, charts, stock photos, etc. don’t fit or work as well on the wider, narrower format. For example, when you expand an almost square or tall image to the wide-screen format, you are going to cut off elements in the image at the top or bottom.

Tips to Successfully Deal With the Transition to 16:9

Here are a few tips to help you address the 16:9 format head on:

1. Re-do your templates: Hopefully your marketing department has already updated all of your company’s presentation templates – but if not, read them the riot act and get them on board ASAP.

2. Update your stock photo inventory: You will need to start buying or creating stock photos that are more landscape than portrait. Those dozens of stock photos and other images that work well in the almost square 4:3 format, won’t cut it in 16:9. Also, for a full-screen effect, many of your images will have to be enlargened so much that key elements of the image may be cut off.

4:3 Presentation Format 16-9 Format

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. Find out conference format in advance: Reach out to the conference organizer early in the process and find out which format they will be supporting. You want to avoid last minute surprises (like mine above), but also give yourself plenty of time to reformat existing slides if leveraging an older 4:3 format presentation.

Good luck with your formats!

 

8 Steps to Nailing Your Presentation Topic and Description

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Perfecting your slides, rehearsing, preparing for the actual presentation and traveling to the event are typical things you will focus on in advance of an upcoming presentation. But before you ever get to those steps in the speaking process, coming up with the title and description of your presentation is the foundation of your eventual success on stage.

If you are a book author, CEO or celebrity your topic is likely pre-ordained and may just need some tweaking for the specific event and audience you will be presenting to. And if you inherit a presentation or topic, you may have little opportunity or flexibility to change things up.

But what if you are invited to speak at an event, want to submit a session proposal for a conference or your events team secures a sponsored session as part of the exhibiting package? What then?

The Topic Drives Your Success

Why is your session topic the single most important driver of your success? Five key reasons your topic title and description are so important:

  1. The title sets expectations for the audience.
  2. It determines your core story line.
  3. Puts bookends around what slides you can leverage from your inventory and other presentations.
  4. Drives how comfortable and relaxed you are with the slides and storyline.
  5. Becomes the outline when you sit down to craft your actual presentation.

Simply put, if you give yourself or someone else a topic and description that you aren’t fully comfortable with or are lacking material, examples and stories – it will show in your presentation. The audience will feel it and you will do your best with the material but aren’t likely have your best showing. (Note: The caveat of course is if you are intentionally creating a brand new presentation – but the importance of the topic title and description remains.)

Try This 8-Step Process

To help you get that topic just right so you can nail your next presentation, follow my 8-step process. Each time you are confronted with coming up with a topic, you might not use all 8 steps or in the same order, but for best success you will likely need to incorporate a majority of them. Let’s get started:

Presentation Title and Topic Development Process

1. Research: Review the event website or materials you’ve received. Look for profiles of the attendees (these might be included in the sponsor package), find the theme for the conference, determine who are the sponsors and exhibitors, past speakers or those already slotted for the upcoming event. Pay special attention to who the keynote speakers are, their topics and also what competitors will be speaking about. Where is the event being held? What is the expected mood of the industry and attendees? What are the buzzwords and hot trends in the industry? Does the event have specific content tracks?

If there is an online submission process, look at the questions being asked. Common these days are questions like: What are 3 takeaways from your presentation? Is your session targeted for Beginner, Intermediate or Advanced audiences? Is your topic best suited for (list of industries or B2B versus B2C, etc.)?

Understanding what’s going to be required in the form fields in advance will help you better craft the actual topic and description. Also, knowing that you are going to select the “B2C” and “Intermediate” audience-type options, for example, gives you additional focus and clarity of your topic title and description.

2. Organizer Input: If you have the opportunity, have a conversation with the event organizer or those who will influence or review the session proposals. Ask them: What types of sessions have been the best received in the past? What did not go over well?

3. Content Audit: Knowing your slides and topic cold is usually the best indicator of success on stage. So while coming up with an entirely new topic sounds great now, do you have the material you will need including case studies, examples, anecdotes, images, research, statistics and other content?

Even better of course is that you already have many or most of the slides you will need for the proposed presentation. Look at your existing content and slides and determine if you can leverage an existing presentation or topic for this event and audience? Or do you need to update an existing presentation, tweak it or rework it?

If none of the above will work, can you build a great topic and presentation by packaging slides from multiple presentations into a new one? The advantage of this last approach is that it can give you a new and fresh topic and presentation, but also doesn’t require you to start from scratch. You just need to figure out the glue that binds the different elements together.

Leveraging a lot of existing slides, even if repackaged, has the huge benefit of your knowing them well, having stories to tell and the ability to ad lib to each slide. The culmination is that you have increased confidence when presenting this new topic, because it is actually the repackaging of a presentation you have probably given at least a few times in the past.

4. Brainstorm: Jot down notes in a tool like Evernote. When you come across articles, TED Talks presentations, blog posts, books or things you observe in everyday life – grab links to the content or capture your ideas in rough note form.

5. Draft: Now it is time to start writing and take a stab at a first draft of your topic title and description. Hopefully you’ve got a decent understanding of the audience and what’s on their minds, the theme of the conference, what content you have to work with and a smattering of ideas that you’ve written down.

Use whatever approach works for you, but I like to think about the description in 3 buckets: title, main description and bullet points. Just start writing whatever comes in to your head based on your work so far, but focus on one of these areas at a time. You might take a stab at a placeholder title and then jump to writing 4-5 bullet points that convey the core elements of your presentation. These bullet points ultimately serve as an outline for your slides and possibly how you presentation is organized into sections. Look at your bullets points. Do you have content to support them or are you confident you can translate them into compelling slides. If not, rework them until you are confident you can get on stage and speak confidently to each point.

With the bullets coming together you might turn to the main part of the description. Think of this as being similar to a description of a book or film. It needs to capture a potential attendee’s interest quickly, provide a reason they should attend and give them confidence that will get what they expect out of the session.

Now see if the title, description and bullet points are in harmony? Are they consistent and do they support each other? Is the title catchy? Does it generate intrigue, but also strongly hint at what will be covered?

6. Step Away: If you aren’t up against an immediate submission deadline, let your topic description draft sit for a day or two. Think about it on the commuter train, in the car or over coffee or a beer. Don’t however, focus on the detail of the draft, rather think about it from your memory and at a very high level.

Stepping away from the written description often gives you new perspective. You may discover upon reflection that you honed in on the tactics and takeaways that attendees crave, but you didn’t really provide the context of why your topic is important and a “must attend.” It is also possible that you will read something, hear something on the radio or have a conversation with a peer or client that will spawn an idea or twist that you hadn’t considered. Add your notes to your draft, but don’t necessarily worry about revising yet.

7. Feedback: Next you may want to share your topic idea – whether the draft description or just your high-level idea – with co-workers, clients or contacts at the event organization. The more interaction you can have with the people responsible for selecting or approving your session, the better chance you have of getting a “yes.”

8. Finalize & Submit: You are almost done. Make your final revisions, check for grammar and spelling and submit online or directly to the event organizer. Good luck!

One final note: Don’t forget to check the event website to make sure your information is both up, in the correct time slot and correct. You will often find an error of some type.

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