He is a hard act to follow, but if you even get a tiny part of his magic in your presentation, you will probably be a great presenter.
As you my know a PowerPoint presentation can break out into
A motivational theme
Transmission of facts and information
Or a bit of both.
Generally I assume:
People can already read, so don’t repeat the words on your slide verbatim
Keep the numbers of ideas to a minimum per slide
There is a start, middle and an end in all presentations and generally people forget about the stuff in the middle!
Come in with a BANG and go out with a BANG
People get bored with “ummmmmm, ahhhhhh, OK” So I like to keep it flowing
I have a great deal of work to do here !
People like to be engaged, so look at them as much as possible
And on engagement, ask questions….and do something with the replies
Have takeaways – URL’s to tools and other interesting things they can use later i.e. create a google doc, add all you content there, create a bit.ly link to it – easy!
There are 3 books that form the basis of my presentation outlook
“an informative guide to presentation preparation, design, and delivery. If you’re not already familiar with the popular Presentation Zen blog, this book highlights many of his theories and techniques. If you’ve seen a presentation from famous presenters such as Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, or Steve Jobs, you’ll be familiar with the highly visual, stock-photo-heavy style that Reynolds advocates.”
My Comment: He is all about stripping out every unnecessary part of a slide, bringing it to the core so you can understand whats being presented to you. e is also about shifting the emphasis to teh speaker and not the slides – after all that’s why you’re there – right?
Here is Garr Reynolds explaining Presentation Zen to a group of Googlers. Its a pleasant watch, where he explains how you can use Presentation Zen (1 hour or so)
By leveraging techniques normally reserved for cinema and literature, Resonate reveals how to transform any presentation into an engaging journey. You will discover how to understand your audience, create persuasive content, and elicit a groundswell response.
With Resonate, you’ll learn to:
Connect with your audience empathetically
Craft ideas that get repeated
Rely on story structures inherent in great communication
Create captivating content
Inspire enthusiasm and support for your vision
My Comment: It’s an awesome book with some far reaching ideas that I do my best to employ. The main one is that a presentation moves people when it follows a path. Know the path and you will communicate beautifully.
Here is a webinar Nancy Duarte did for Ted Talks. Its full of detail… useful detail!
Improve our three “built-in” visual problem solving tools.
Apply the four-step visual thinking process (look-see-imagine-show) in any business situation.
Instantly improve our visual imaginations.
Learn how to recognize the type of problem we face and corresponding pictorial solution.
My Comments: It taught me to use pictures to explain how things can fit together. It has amazed me how visualising a problem makes it so much easier for everyone to understand what I’m talking about.
Here is Dan Roam explaining back of a napkin the preceding book to Unfolding the Napkin
Finally – here is me speaking – its not like the Benjamin Zander presentation, but – hey its ok!
I contacted Salesforce.com today via chat to get some informaiton on a tool they have – its a customer services portal. Being in the SEO business, I wanted to have a look at this in action ‘in the wild’ to see how Google indexes this tool.
So I asked if there was a site I could have a look at….
Please wait while we find a sales agent to assist you with your question:
You have been connected to Kara C.
Kara C: Welcome to Sales chat, my name is Kara. In order to serve you best, please provide your full company name.
Nick Garner: ho kara – a quick quesiton – have you any examples from clients hwo use customer portal?
Nick Garner: unibet.com
Kara C: Here is an overview of our customer Portal
Kara C: http://www.salesforce.com/crm/customer-service-support/customer-self-service-portal/
Kara C: I can check with your Account Executive to see if he has any specific customer success stories
Nick Garner: ive been there already – im looking for a live iteration of this software
Nick Garner: on a company site somewhere other than salesforce
Kara C: Your Account Executive has these details
Nick Garner: ive asked you in the hope that i could have a reaonablky quick answer
Nick Garner: this isnt not a quick route to simply have a look at a website
Kara C: Sorry I don’t understand your statement
Kara C: That information is classified which is why you need to request it through your Account executive
Nick Garner: i just want to see this module in action on a client site i.e. support.mysite.com
Nick Garner: so i understand this – there is no public informaiton on who uses salesfarce
Nick Garner: ok – im giving up on this
Nick Garner: thanks for you help
Kara C: Would you like me to have your AE contact you?
Nick Garner: no because if i wanted a salesman to pitch me i woudl have called your sales line
Thank you for using Salesforce.com Sales Chat. You may now close this window.
Your session has ended. You may now close this window.
So apart from being astonishingly unhelpful, they have proven to me (at least) that Salesforce are not a great company to deal with. As it happens I have been using Zoho CRM becuase its about 1/3rd of the cost and from what I can see is far more flexible.
It’s not very SEO related, but Ive often wondered what the 1st registered .com domains were and what you could sell the biggest ones for.
Ahhhh - the money ££££
The List:
Whats interesting is how early on, no one knew how big this interweb thing would be. Year 1, there were only about 12 domains registered (that are still live) and year 2 it climbed to about 55 domains.
The graph gives you an idea of the growth rate
Growth in registration of domains by date registered
If you had gone back in time to 1984, you could have bought and then resold:
1. Insure.com, sold to QuinStreet for $16 million in 2009.
2. Sex.com, sold for $12-$14 million in 2006.
3. Fund.com, sold for $9.99 million in 2008.
4. Porn.com, sold for $9.5 million in 2007.
5. Business.com, sold for $7.5 million in 1999.
6. Diamond.com, sold to Ice.com for $7.5 million in 2006.
7. Beer.com, sold for $7 million in 2004.
8. Israel.com, sold for $5.88 million in 2004.
9. Casino.com, sold for $5.5 million in 2003.
10. Toys.com, sold to Toys ‘R Us for $5.1 million in 2009.
I had done a presentation for Marketing Week a couple of months ago where I talked about SEO (of course!) the presentation went down pretty well, so out of the blue they called me and asked if I be a stand in for a speaker who couldn’t make the engagement.
It was for a financial services conference. Since this is a very broad area, I decided to go for a generic presentation covering some big ideas I always use when I explain SEO, PPC and conversion optimisation.
I find numbers bore people, so there are only a few of them, instead its lots of pictures and concepts that hopefully the audience could take away with them and use as their foundation for understanding the high level forces that shape SEO , PPC and Conversion.
If you don’t know – a Google Dance is where Google change their ranking algo (the software that controls what websites rank where) because for whatever reason Google feel the need to fix one issue or another. The msot recent fix has been to combat a plague of article sites ranking across the Internet that allegedly provide useful content, but in fact are no more than ‘thin content’ with large amounts of advertising.
Ironically much of this ‘content pollution’ has been perpetuated by Google themselves. They have a programme called AdSense. You may have seen the AdSense adverts in body copy in various websites. These AdSense ads contextualise to the content they are embedded in. Users are reasonably ok with the ads since often they are – sort of – relevant. So the ads get clicked, giving the site owner revenue.
The content has the appearance of usefulness and with link building, you can get them to rank nicely. Good rankings on decent traffic terms gives enough visitors to probably generate reasonable revenue through AdSense.
But its all got a little out of hand and there has been a clear out of the rankings recently. This update has been called the Farmer/Panda Update.
Below is a history of the major updates so far that have rocked the SEO world.
(Click on the image for a full size readable view.)
