How PowerPoint Presentations are like movies

There is nothing wrong with PowerPoint, except the way people use it. PowerPoint is a visual media but presenters insist using PowerPoint as a text document. It's not.

Think about the best presentation that you have ever seen. It was image rich and text light.

Most PowerPoints fail for three reasons:
1) Presenters fail to deliver a compelling narrative
2) We can read almost twice as fast as a person can talk
3) Presenters don't understand how the brain processes information

Notice that I did not mention too many words on a slide. I think we all know that's a common trait of bad presentations. Just because you have a lot of words on the slide doesn't mean anyone is reading them. A little more on this bit later.

Similarly, I left out a few other obvious remedies to improve PowerPoint presentations, like remember the audience and rehearse the heck out of it, because, well because they are obvious.

Here's a quick, but by no means definitive set of ideas to improve your PowerPoint presentations. It's a mix of science and common sense.

One note, the suggestions that follow are meant to help people delivering live presentations. If you will not be on hand to deliver the audio track for your presentation, this isn't for you.

Set Expectations
Like a movie, you'd what to know if you are going to see romantic comedy or Transformers sequel. Telling the audience what to expect helps them make connections with information they already possess, easing the burden on working memory.

Develop a narrative
If you go into a bookstore, you'll notice the shelves are stocked with novels, biographies, and history. What do they have in common, they tell a narrative story. Human beings love stories. Use that to your advantage. Give your presentation life by creating a story line.

Start writing the presentation in outline form
Remember when you first learned how to write an essay. The teacher insisted that you write an outline first. There was a reason for it. It created structure and helped you tell a better story. For PowerPoint, the outline is slide sorter view. Begin you presentation not by diving into the normal view but lay out the outline of the presentation by writing in the titles in the slide sorter view.

Write titles in headlines form

Studies show that writing titles in headline form increases retention. A well-written headline sets expectations in the reader. Before you start talking about the image or text on the slide, the reader knows the theme for the slide. Your audience will get used to seeing the main thought the headline and be ready for you to explain it. This reduces the strain on working memory.

Use one main thought slide

People don't hate lots of slides in a presentation. They hate slow presentations with lots of slides and there is a big difference. Your slide should communicate one idea, one concept. Use the slide images and words to reinforce that idea.

People can read 400 words per minute
Speakers talk about 200 words a minute. This means the audience has read the entire slide before the speaker has gotten half way through the slide, which really means your audience is bored before you get through slide one.

People process words as little pictures
Text heavy slides impose a double burden on the audience. They have to spend a lot of mental energy process the little pictures and not listening to you. Wouldn't it be better to give them one picture and explain what it means? By the way, marrying a relevant image with a verbal track increases retention.

Human beings get bored every ten minutes
Nobody knows why. But it's true. This means that every ten minutes you need to give them a compelling reason to listen to you. One of the best ways to do this is change your teaching style every ten minutes. If you have been lecturing for ten minutes solid, introduce an anecdote, use a role play, poll the audience. It also helps if you introduce new topics every ten minutes.

Be consistent handling text and graphics
Do not make the viewer work to understand each slide's structure. Most companies have corporate slide templates used for handling graphics and text. Rather than viewing the templates as confining, look at them as liberating. You no longer have worry about where to place the picture and your audience doesn't have to think about why the text is larger on some slides than other.

Read the experts
Like anything, if you want to get better do your homework. In this case, I suggest the following books:

Beyond Bullet Points, Cliff Atkinson
Resonate, Nancy Duarte
Brain Rules, John Medina
Presentation Zen, Gerr Reynolds

Lessons in Media Relations from Tiger Woods and the NFL

Buried deep in Sport Illustrated senior reporter Peter King's most recent edition of Monday Morning Quarterback (a must read for any fan of good journalist), he tells the tale of being a beat writer and spending two hours with Bill Parcells, visiting the notoriously cranky coach's childhood haunts.

King notes that he can't imagine any beat writer having that kind of access to a pro football coach these days. The pressures have changed on both sides of the equation.

Those pressures mean less time less time to develop the relationships that lead to that kind of access. While the shrinking outreach of the media has change some parts of how media relations, it does not mean the industry will follow the way of the Dodo. Good PR can still repair images and grow bottom lines.

For Exhibit A, let me refer you to the media barrage Tiger Woods's PR machine has stoked up ahead the Thanksgiving weekend that lead to his fall from nationwide billboards. Tiger's troubles began when it turned out that his family man image was a sham. Restoring Tiger's image as the face of American marketing starts with recreating his family guy image. In the past week, we have been subject to a round of "Tiger Woods the World's Greatest Dad" stories.

Brilliant as a strategy but ineffective as a quick look on Google finds plenty about affairs and divorces but nothing on the good dad Tiger.

Of course, returning to his ways as the most dominant player in golf would do more to reclaim his corporate image than any series of father knows best articles.

Winning drives decisions in the NFL too. In 2010, season tickets sales fell for the third straight year, and three teams that moved into spiffy new homes for the new 2010 season are on the hook for very high construction costs. Even though the television rights paid to the league have climbed faster than basic cable rates (in 1986, the networks combined to pay the league $420 annually while the current contract calls for a shade over $3 billion annually), winning puts fannies in the seats, especially the expensive comfortable ones with licensing and VIP parking.

This season two head coaches lost their jobs in mid-campaign, an unprecedented event in the NFL. Normally conservative owners prefer to clean house at the end of the year. But we live in unusual times and importance of image management is paramount. Ask Tiger's management team.

Many have discounted the power of PR, but in billion-dollar commercial enterprises PR folks have engaged in media relations programs that because they think it will drive top line success.

Over the weekend, Robert Scoble asked the reoccurring question: why do we need the tech media? If you skip down and read iSocialize's metrics of what works and what doesn't, you understand how the media recognition drives sales. Even Scoble acknowledges that Apple watches the media buzz to see what companies to promote, making PR an effective use of marketing dollars for the successful companies.

The death of media and other non-news

I read another piece on the death of news and thought really? That story has become a cottage industry of its own.

There will always be a place for unvarnished information, if only because people will pay for it. But with a wall of information out there, readers are trying to prioritize their information flow. To do that, they are relying on trusted names, who more than likely share their world view. It's always been that way. Go back to the turn of the century, not this past one but the one before it. Read a respectable news paper. You'd be surprised how strongly the publication's slant shows through. Fox News is only today's version of the Hearst Empire.

Yes, investigative journalism is dying. It's expensive and we no longer think there is a public need. The shame is that without investigative journalism, corporate malfeasance and government corruption will go undocumented as baseless claims fly unchallenged

From a PR perspective, that's not a bad thing. We realize we have the power to communicate directly with our audiences. Media provides third party validation, but the power of media to inform is being sapped by the new methods of delivering content: websites, blogs, Twitter, Facebook. The media may not be happy about it, but the direct link to our users makes public relations, well easier.