Pointed & Impassioned Blog » Preparation

You’re only as good as your last presentation

george — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:13:37 +0000

If you search out “Bobby Jindal” on YouTube, you may be surprised to find that Louisiana’s governor is a pretty good speaker. You’ll discover that his very poorly delivered response to President Obama back on February 24th was an anomaly. Sadly, when you’re that much in the spotlight and your delivery is that bad, the rest of it doesn’t matter in the eyes of the average person. All they know is: Bobby Jindal sounded like Kenneth, the page on 30 Rock.

The lesson for all of us is that it’s important to get things right the first time. Correcting a bad impression with a client or your bosses, while not quite as monumental as the task facing Jindal, is still not easy to do.

Get a quick overview of your word usage

george — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:14:13 +0000

Want a visual way of analyzing word usage in your presentations? Then you’ll love Wordle.net. It creates a word cloud of your most commonly-used words, and gives you a lot of control over what it looks like.

I entered the text of Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention last night, and you’ll see how the word PROMISE jumps out. Handy way of checking to make sure you’re emphasizing the words you want to emphasize.

Online collaboration tool makes great proving ground

george — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 19:37:38 +0000

What if you don’t have the time, the venue, or the people to run through some practice presentations in person? I’ve been trying out a free online tool that might help. It’s called Elluminate, an e-learning system used by a lot of academics to do virtual collaboration and teaching. Here’s a screenshot:

Now of course you could load up your presentation materials on a place like SlideShare and get feedback, but what I like about Elluminate is that it’s live, with audio and video, so you can get immediate feedback and even try changing things in real time. Then there’s the application sharing, the desktop display functions, and lots more.

Best of all, there’s a simple version of the system which is free, allowing up to three people to join you for a mini-roundtable.