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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. or
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.
or
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.
You are granted permission to reproduce and distribute this article provided that all of it (including these notices) is included. Copyright © 2007 David Mudie All Rights Reserved Visit http://www.EffectivelySpeking.com to get your own free newsletter subscription and start overcoming your fear of public speaking. The author and publisher of the website have used their best efforts in preparing this material. The author and publisher make no representation or warranties with respect to the accuracy, applicability, fitness, or completeness of the contents of this website.
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