by Pierre Morsa —
Many speakers tend to rush the start of their presentation. During conferences and events, they start to speak even before they put a foot on the stage, talking as they walk towards the center, or as soon as the master of ceremonies stops to speak. It makes them look as if they think they are suffering from the “imposter” syndrome, insecure and unsure that they should be speaking on stage.
by Pierre Morsa —
Do animations in a presentation make you feel seasick? Animations in PowerPoint are great, until they aren’t. A small dose of animation is fine, but presentations with too many animations can be cumbersome to watch in presenter mode. Luckily, PowerPoint offers a simple functionality to disable all animations in one go. In the ribbon, go to the “Slide Show” tab, then click on “Set up Slide Show”. Then simply tick the box “show without animation”.
by Michael Rickwood —
As many of us are learning, it’s easy to arrange a virtual meeting, but not so easy to run one successfully. There is quite a steep learning curve. One vital area to work on is speaking in virtual meetings. People often complain of video issues, microphone issues, poor vocal expression, monotonous speakers, and poor interactivity. Step 5 of our Virtual Meeting Revolution process is called Connection for a good reason: when speaking in an online meeting, you need to connect with the other participants, and you can’t connect if they are so bored they are not paying attention, or if they gave up trying to understand what you are saying.
by Pierre Morsa —
We worked with a lot of TEDx events over the years, and some of the talks have accumulated hundreds of thousands views, some even getting above the 1 million mark. Here are the top 5 talks of events we participated to, in number of views. In fifth place we have Jean-Gabriel Causse, speaking at TEDx Dunkerque, with nearly 600,000 views. Color me shocked, but his is talk about the power of colors is full of interesting details.
by Pierre Morsa —
A few months ago I recorded an episode for our video channel “The Business Presentation Revolution.” Initially, my content was too long to fit in the 3 to 4 minutes running time that we had planned. Looking at my script, I realized that many sentences could be simplified, some details omitted, and the structure streamlined. After several dry runs and rewrites, we finally managed to get the video down to 3 minutes.
by Phil Waknell —
Is there a perfect recipe for a successful presentation? No. Partly it depends on the audience and the context: a boardroom presentation shouldn’t look like a TED talk, even if the subject is the same. And different presentations at the same event – a conference, a demo day, an Executive Committee meeting – should also look different from each other, because otherwise none of them will stand out. So if there is no magic formula, are there at least some key ingredients we should always include?
by Joe Ross —
You know that mental image you have of what you think you should be like on stage? Yes, that one based upon a mash-up of some of your favorite TED speakers whom you are certain you’ll never be as good as. Well, forget it! Welcome to the Post-TED style of authenticity centered presentation. In my last article, Wash that TED right out of your head: New Post-TED presentation, we explored some of the foundational reasons which many are experiencing, and what I call, “TED-like style Fatigue”.
by Pierre Morsa —
The lectern is a staple of traditional speeches. We see politicians use them all the time, as well as… who else? Who, apart from politicians, still uses a lectern? If I had to create a 0 to 10 presentation scale where 0 is totally informal and 10 is fully formal, I would say that running naked on stage is 0 and speaking from behind a lectern is 11. Yes, the lectern is really that formal, and in 99% of the cases, that’s not a good thing.