More Interesting Reading for Monday

Here are a few more interesting things that I've been thinking about this Monday morning. The first is courtesy of a link I came across on the PandoDaily site today. The link is actually to Lifehacker -- it's an interview with Ira Glass from This American Life. Here's the link. It's a really interesting breakdown of some of the editing and audio processing that they use. Cool stuff.

Another interesting one is something that I came across in the Pando Ticker last week. This is an interesting blog post about gender from a female presenter talking about how people seemed to think it was okay to provide unsolicited criticism of her presentation. Meanwhile, none of the male presenters experienced any presentation criticism. It's a good read; however, depending upon your gender and your experiences, you may find it unsurprising. Here's Lara Swanson's blog post.

Mary Meeker Gives Internet Trends Presentation for 2013

At All Things D's D11 Conference yesterday, Mary Meeker took the stage to present her 2013 Internet Trends presentation. All in all, it's a great overview of the state of technology and a look at trends -- totally worth your time to go through. Here's a link to story and presentation on All Things D:
Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report is Back, at D11 (Slides)

Another Political Post - What's In Your Presentation?

I know, I know. I really try to avoid political posts, but this story struck me as so amusing that I simply had to post something about it. First, I need to start by saying that I didn't watch John McCain's speech tonight, but I thought I would run through the news blogs before I went to bed tonight when I came across this bit of news, Mystery Revealed, from Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo (if you haven't read Josh Marshall's blog, this is one of THE best investigative journalism sites for politics -- one of his subdomains is Talking Points Muckraker, and their team truly fit the muckraker definition).

So, according to the story on TPM, during John McCain's speech tonight, there was a segment of the presentation that featured John McCain standing in front of this large building. It turns out that that building is the Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood, CA. The post includes pics of the building from the school's web site. So why is John McCain standing in front of this middle school -- well, we can only speculate, but the most likely reason is that the person who put together the presentation background was looking for graphics of Walter Reed (not to be confused with the medical center where so many of our veterans are staying) and they found this beautiful picture.

Think about that for a moment. You're preparing a presentation, one that you only get one opportunity to present, and that opportunity comes once every four years -- call it once in a lifetime.

How much do you know about the images that you are using? That might be worth considering when you're preparing a presentation for funding of your next start-up... or even yet another iteration of that product line that you've been working on for three years.

Not Just For Start-Ups: 10 Tips for How To Demo Your Startup

If you aren't either subscribed to TechCrunch or checking it daily, you're missing some incredible content. It's not just start-up or technology content either -- here is a great post from a couple of days ago with 10 Tips for How To Demo Your Startup.

While these are great tips of your presenting your startup, they're great tips for marketers, product demonstrations and general presentation strategy. I'll let you read the post, but here are a couple of those tips:

2. The best products take less than five minutes to demo
4. Talk about what you've done, not what you are going to do.
7. Powerpoint bullet slides are death

Also, be sure to read through the comments -- the dialog there can sometimes be more interesting than the post itself.

What Makes An Interesting Presentation?

If you don't read it regularly, you've really got to check out Techcrunch -- it is truly one of the best sources for what's happening at the leading edge of technology and in the start-up world. But you can find a lot more than just tech on Techcrunch.

Just the other day I came across this post about a start-up that was focused on 'Identity' solutions for Web 2.0. The post was focused on Dick Hardt, the CEO of the company, but it talked about his dynamic presentation style and included the video that I've also included here.

Even if you don't watch the entire video, you can get a flavor of the presentation by watching just a couple of minutes. One thing that is also interesting -- as noted by Dick's responses to some of the comments on Techcrunch, he is still presenting a variation of this presentation and his slide deck is now up to 1000 slides.

If you haven't already jumped ahead and watched the video, then the first thing that is probably going through your mind is "1000 slides?" Once you see the video, you'll get more of a sense of how the whole thing works. For me, this presentation got me thinking a lot about about presentations, presentation structure and style. In recent years, I find myself more and more in environments that seem to demand a very classic, rigid presentations including the mandatory 'Agenda' slide followed by a bunch of slides with lots of bullets and lots of text. I've also heard complaints from people if they "don't know where the presentation is supposed to be going." These comments are echoed in the comments on Dick's presentation. I think we can blame the widespread use of Powerpoint for part of this.

With Dick's presentation, what I'm reminded of is the very old days of slide presentations, when 'slides' were actual 35mm slides. In that way, it's sort of a Retro-style presentation. For those of you who don't go back that far, in the days before LCD projectors, we used to render Powerpoint files out as 35mm slides, and your deck was an actual cassette full of slides -- no animation, no movement (maybe some synchronized music), but each slide really only captured an idea. What's more, the overhead projector -- and overheads -- almost implied more of a collaborative, text-heavy meeting or discussion. Even in the world of overhead projectors, I remember one woman giving a presentation using overheads that she had written in crayon -- it was actually quite artistic.

So, what makes a good presentation -- is it one that follows a set structure like a college essay or does it keep you guessing from one slide to the next? Is it packed with text or is it a sparse, one concept per slide approach? Can it be presented by anyone, or does it only work for you?

For me, I think that the content, the performance and the audience are intertwined. While it's difficult to say for certain based on the video, from the soundtrack you get the sense that Dick's audience laughs at the funny parts and is engaged in the presentation that he is giving. He is connecting as a performer and his presentation informs. From that standpoint, I really do think that it's a good presentation -- a slide presentation. But, in the same way that this keynote video would be painful to watch if he used a text-heavy, overhead-style engineering meeting approach, I don't know that this presentation style would resonate with his engineers in a detailed feature iteration meeting.

What does your audience expect? How can you excite them and, at the same time, keep them in touch with their existing frame of reference without boring them with the same old stuff?



Oh, and don't forget that agenda slide!