Take Every Advantage You Can... With Presentation Software

In our last issue I talked about the importance of having an effective title for your speech. As you may remember, I encouraged you to put some effort into composing your title so that it grabbed your audience’s attention. I gave you the example of a speech title I used for one of my first presentations, “A Role Based Security Model” and compared it to a title I might use now, such as, “Boom, We’re Not Guarding Nuclear Weapons Here – But We Want to Be Just as Secure.” Now which title do you think will attract more people?

I also gave you the example of publishers and how they will spend what seems like an inordinate amount of time on selecting a book’s title. Unlike most of us, they know that the first step in the buying process is to get a browser in a book store to pick up their book. 75% (or more) of what influences a browser to pick up that particular book is in the title. They know, if the book does not get picked up, it doesn’t get purchased.

That’s much the same with our speeches. We need our audience to not only attend but to also be excited about our content. One of the best ways to accomplish this is to carefully craft our titles so as to intrigue and captivate the audience.

There’s also another technique that publishers use that we can adapt to speaking. It is the idea of putting important text under an image.

Publishers know that reader’s eyes will be automatically drawn to images – it’s the first thing that will be looked at on a page. The second thing is whatever is directly below the image. A good publisher will use this to their advantage by communicating the most important message directly below the image.

For instance, imagine you are in the bookstore glancing quickly through a book. You of course picked it up because of the title; but now you’re conducting a more in depth review. As you scan the pages to determine if the content will be useful to you, your eyes are automatically drawn to a graph. Now which caption below the graph will intrigue you about the book more?

a) Figure 7 demonstrates that over time profits increase.

b) As can be seen in Figure 7, by using the author’s XYZ method, a staggering 87% increase in profits is realized over a 12 month period.

Most likely caption b) is going to intrigue you and move you closer to buying that book. Now, can we apply the same strategy to our presentations?

Of course we can. One area where we can apply this knowledge is in the use of presentation software such as Microsoft’s PowerPoint. Now I have previously written to you about using PowerPoint effectively. I want to stress again that PowerPoint is a speaker’s prop. This means that it should be used to support a presentation – it is clearly not the presentation. A good test of whether PowerPoint (or any other prop) is being used effectively is whether the speech can stand on it’s own without it – if so, use it to increase the effectiveness of the presentation. If the speech can not stand on its own then I suggest that you might want to recreate the speech and consider it on its own first. Once you have a speech that clearly communicates the message then you can consider adding supports such as props.

But how do we apply the book publishing technique of including important headlines under the image to our speeches with PowerPoint? By realizing that when we show that slide with graph or image (that is relevant to our speech) we will have the highest attention rate of our audience. They are not looking around, reading the notes, typing on their Black Berries, etc. For that one moment in time you have captivated the greatest number of them. Seize that moment by making your most important statement then. You’ve already grabbed their attention – now build on it.

Consider the following two statements.

a) This graph shows that we will be able to detect problems earlier with an OLAP tool.

b) As you can see from the graph, the use of an Online Analytical Processing Tool will enable us to catch such problems early. Clearly the cost of implementing this technology pales in comparison to the savings we will realize when such problems are discovered early.

Keep in mind that your audience is easily distracted. They are going to have a number of things on their minds that you had never considered. Take every advantage that you can in communicating your message to them – that includes communicating the most import segments when the audience is most likely to be paying attention. Using PowerPoint and other props effectively can help you do that.

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