Ditch Boring PowerPoints; Embrace the Big Picture
Robert Swanwick
Attendees today expect more collaborative/interactive sessions at conferences (
buzz sessions,
high-impact storytelling,
fishbowl,
café).
Yet the bulk of planners stick to traditional modality → PowerPoint lectures with five minutes of questions at the end. If your event has a significant number of these type of lectures, do everything you can to avoid murdering your attendees. (See
Laura Bergells’ story linked to the image below, or watch this
YouTube.com video from comedian
Don McMillan.)
PowerPoint is simply a series of rectangles put in sequence to tell a story. And because the deck is linear, in the wrong hands it lends itself to a slow march to snoozeville. Because presenters are so familiar with developing in linear sequence, they often forget that the goal is to explain/demonstrate a concept and along the way show how the various elements relate.
Luckily, presentation tools are evolving, and there are now much better methods than PowerPoint to communicate complex topics. These new tools replace the sequence of rectangles with one giant canvas. You place text/images/video wherever you like and pre-program rectangle-sized zoom in and zoom out to show your audience parts of the whole picture. Each slide is then shown within a larger visual context.
Creating slideshows in this manner is significantly harder than creating a traditional PowerPoint because you are forced to think about the relationships of everything you show and figure out a way to visually represent those relationships. While that may be harder for presenters until they get used to it, think about how much easier it is for audiences to digest the relationships that are shown to them (so they don’t have to infer connections from linear progressions).
There are two main providers of this new technology, and they both have free versions. Their interfaces take a little bit of time to get comfortable with, but are reasonably intuitive.
Prezi →
Website Review Twitter
Ahead →
Website Review Twitter
Presentations can be downloaded or embedded into a Web page or blog. Encourage your speakers to use these tools. It is certainly better to wow your audiences than put them to sleep. If you believe in the hyperbole “death by PowerPoint,” then don’t let your event “sleep with the fishes.”
Here are links to several articles on post-PowerPoint presentations:
18 Tips for Killer Presentations Garr Reynolds Presentation Tips 33 Highly Useful Presentation Tools Michael Hyatt’s Presentation Tools
ROBERT SWANWICK is the CEO of Speaker Interactive, and his past clients include Aflac, British Telecom, ExxonMobil, Marriott, Metlife, Renault and Westinghouse. Contact him via Twitter @SpkrInteractive or via e-mail at rswanwick@speakerinteractive.com.