Cliff Atkinson‘s keynote empowered us to be evangelists for better presentations: better results, a better story, better graphics (in that order). He gave suggestions for presentation professionals who need to convince presenters to improve their presentations:

• Improve the core template
• Provide before and after examples
• Educate
• See the story beneath the bullet points
• Envision the presentation from both the speaker’s eyes and the audience’s point of view

Apply the rule of 80/20: quick tips that give you 80% of your results with 20% effort:

• Use the B key
• Add Twitter credentials and the event hashtag to the title slide
• Ask the audience a question
• Know the last slide # (in case you need to cut your talk and get to the last slide quickly-enter the slide number and press Enter)
• Use F4 to repeat formatting and other actions
• Reduce file size

Geetesh Bajaj spoke on creating and sharing presentations on the Web. Some services let you create presentations from scratch online; others let you upload in PPT or PPTX format. You can then store and share presentations online. Some leet you download in PowerPoint or other formats. Here are some of the tools we discussed:

• Brainshark and MyBrainshark (the free version): Lets you create, narrate and share presentations. You can add narration by telephone or MP3 file
• Slideboom: for sharing. Geetesh says this site has the best support for animation. However, this site doesn’t have the reach or quality of presentations that you’ll find at other sharing sites.
• Slideshare: for sharing. The largest share of the market
• Authorstream: for sharing. Good support for sound and animation.
• Powershow: for sharing
• Sliderocket: both authoring and sharing, with free and paid versions
• Google Docs: Basic tools for authoring, good for collaboration, can export to PowerPoint format
• Microsoft Office Live Workspace: Can upload PowerPoint files, edit on your computer, the re-upload. Share using the Public folder or keep private.
• Zoho Show: Create and collaborate
• Prezi: Create and share
• 280slides: Create and collaborate. Integrates with slideshare.net.
• Slidesix: For collaborating and sharing. Can include video and audio

Cliff Atkinson‘s session on The BackChannel was mostly new for me. He’s coming out with a book by that name. He talked about audiences tweeting (mostly on phones) during a presentation and how presenters could best deal with it. Cliff mentioned some recent disasters and some ways presenters successfully handled challenging situations. Overall, he recommended embracing this trend. He suggested including tweetable remarks (pithy, short sayings), putting the presenter’s Twitter address and the event’s hashtag on the first slide, including Twitter breaks, and getting help from a moderator to track the trend of the back channel comments. He introduced us to BackNoise, a chat tool that incorporates Twitter but also allows anonymous comments.

Julie Terberg’s Five Faves (best practices) were:

1. Consistency: Keep text away from the edge of the slide, work with guides on the slide, keep placement of objects in the same locations so the audience can quickly know where to look
2. Palette: Create a graphic palette slide. I sometimes call this a sampler slide.
3. Variety: Build variety with custom slide layouts (a feature of 2007)
4. Choose and use images for maximum effect: Use an accent color in photo as an accent line, don’t put lots of text in front of a photo (even a faded one), select images that work well together
5. Think outside the slide: Push transitions and other tricks that seem to extend the slide

And the conference was lots of fun, too! I reconnected with many old friends.

Rick Altman is a great host and organizer; he makes the conference both a learning and a fun experience. Everyone is informal and friendly so the feeling is comfortable, even for new attendees.

Keynotes

Cliff Atkinson (www.beyondbulletpoints.com), author of Beyond Bullet Points, opened the conference with a keynote called, “The Presentation Evangelist: How to change the world, one deck at a time.” He challenged the audience, many of whom consult or provide internal presentation advice within their companies, to become superheroes in the quest for better presentations. For example, presentation specialists can pull a meaningful story from a bunch of bullet points and help presenters understand design elements and the audience’s point of view. He said that the value of a presentation specialist is in getting results and urged the audience not to think in terms of x dollars per hour. By the way, Cliff is coming out with a new book, The Back Channel, about Twitter, chat room and other comments that go on while a presenter is talking. He told us about some of the events where the back channel became an event in itself. One example, from the SXSW conference is discussed here.

The second day, Carmen Taran (www.reximedia.com), author of Better Beginnings, spoke on the topic  “The Naked You: Presenters have nowhere to hide—can you turn that into a blessing?” Carmen talked about finding the real you and letting that show when you present. In other words, she talked all about authenticity. Carmen uses striking images on her slides that are hard to forget—she advocates using what she calls “edgy” and top-quality graphics.

Dave Paradi (www.thinkoutsidetheslide.com), author of The Visual Slide Revolution, spoke on how to “Recession-Proof Your Career.” He explained how to measure the value of what you do, especially in terms of results, and make sure that others know about it. For example, Dave talked about using internal newsletters, industry publications, and corporate blogs (including Twitter) to mention successes. As a group, we developed a list of thought leaders in the areas of speaking and presenting, which I’ll share in another post.

Sessions

Most of the sessions are 3 at a time, so you can’t attend them all. Here are the ones I chose:

Peggy Duncan & Geetesh Bajaj near the Help Desk

• Glen Millar (www.pptworkbench.com) showing off his over-the-top animations that you can’t believe he did in PowerPoint. I wrote a tip about one of his techniques, “The magic of false backgrounds,” a while back. I’ll share another with you in a future post.
• Julie Terberg (www.terbergdesign.com), a Microsoft Valuable Professional (MVP), explaining good design principles. Many of her ideas are in my tip, Create a better PowerPoint template.
• Geetesh Bajaj (www.indezine.com) talking about “Slides in the Clouds,” meaning ways to create and share presentations online.
• Glenna Shaw (www.pptmagic.com) explaining how to create demos using animation
  

  Rikk Flohr on the photo shoot

• Rikk Flohr (www.fleetingglimpse.com) doing his annual photo tour and follow-up Photoshop editing session
• Peggy Duncan (www.peggyduncan.com) talking about how to get found online with “shameless self-promotion and do-it-yourself PR”

I’ll continue the story in a future post.