Shelly Kramer On Better Presentations
Shelly Kramer of V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency talks about making your PowerPoint perfect and your Keynote kool (yeah, terrible punning, I know). She even mentions the Keynote presentation of a certain PR firm, brought back from the dead by the talents of Al Bonner. Read on….click the link at the end to read the entire piece (with the before and after presentation slides) on her blog. Thanks Shelly!
I’ll be the first to admit that developing PowerPoint presentations (or any other kind) isn’t my strong suit. But as a Comms major in college, standing up in front of a roomful of people has never been an issue – big surprise, I know.
For me, words are infinitely more important than slides – so treating them as accoutrement to the topic – not as the star of the show, is important. Less is usually more (and better) and clean, simple and direct is rarely a bad strategy.
Al Bonner, a friend and frequent collaborator, however, is a presentation pro. I’ve really learned a lot from him in the past year, as I’ve watched him build his company, Presentation Transformations from an idea into a successful business.
After sitting through more presentations than I can count, I know this to be true – most of them suck. And most lack an element that really wows the audience. Presenters often cram too much information onto a slide, making them boring, overwhelming and sometimes even impossible to read. Do you find yourself zoning out in the middle of the majority of the presentations you’re sitting through? I know that I do – and sometimes they’re presentations being made by people who know better – they just don’t know how to create a compelling visual presentation.
There’s no better way to illustrate the difference between an okay presentation and a killer one than to show you, so here it is. Below you’ll see two presentations. The first is the original developed by my other friend and frequent collaborator, Alex Greenwood of AlexanderG PR. Alex is a terrific communicator and sought-after PR pro but, like most of us, his forte is not in developing slide presentations.
