Seth Godin is an influential figure, and his opinions on PowerPoint have a lot of clouts. He once authored a well-known post about how to do outstanding presentations. We shall explore the style recommended by the master of marketing, Seth. Look through this to get the trick to mesmerise your audience with the given tips.
Initially, in his write-up, he focused upon the flaws that make the presentation really bad. Now we shall know what the mistakes we commit during preparing PowerPoint presentation slides are.
Know why your presentation looks terrible?
What are PPT and the purpose of its creation?
Engineers created PowerPoint as a tool to assist them in communicating with marketing—and vice versa. Instead of developing slides the old-fashioned way, the coders behind PowerPoint saw it as a clever hack—a method to save time and money. PowerPoint, on the other hand, took on a life of its own once it was released.
It’s a fantastic tool because it allows for a lot of spoken communication. You can send a report, but no one reads them these days. We need a mechanism to exchange ideas from one group to another as our companies become faster and faster.
The general perception of familiar Microsoft PPT users is that it is a great application to make our presentation slides. But Seth has an entirely different view of this. The current usage of the PPTs doesn’t really communicate the message. The presenters are using slides as a teleprompter. Simply reading the slides is not what the audience expect from a presenter. There is a tradition of writing a formal report and giving it to the audience during the presentation. Due to the overstuffing of the PowerPoint presentation slides, it is becoming a part of the past. This style of expression doesn’t make the audience remember the content and context.
You can download the free templates here: Free Slides
Communication meaning in terms of Seth
Presentation is not just compiling the data and facts and submitting it in the format of a slide. But that becomes a report, not a presentation. You cannot take the ideas into the minds of the audience unless you are a pro writer. The best communicators can express the thought openly and make the audience feel the idea.
The content clubbed with emotion can grab the attention of the listener. The slides which are stuffed with bullet points can hamper the impression. The human brain comes to an opinion seeing the emotions, body language, and how you speak. Not alone logic can make your presentation successful.
You can really communicate to the audience reach their right brain with the impressive slides and talk to them and put logic into their left brain. It is the technique employed by one of the greatest Hollywood directors Stephen Spielberg.
What makes an excellent presentation?
Prepare cue cards to ensure that you never miss what you want to say during your presentation. While all the audience sees the presentation slides on the screen, you must see the cue cards. Unfortunately, this feature was not developed by Microsoft.
Make your slides that sync with your talk and give an emotional outlining of the accurate information you state in the slides. Make the PowerPoint presentation slides as true. The statistics you put in the slide cannot convey the data effectively, but instead, you put the images which show effect due to those numbers you have mentioned.
Put all the presentation details in the footnotes of the slides and tell that to the audience. They can focus totally on the presentation without writing all the slides. Get the feedback form and pass it to the onlookers in the meeting room.
What are Seth’s exceptional fives points to prepare PowerPoint slides?
- Not more than six words. EVER on each slide.
- There will be no corny visuals. Instead, use professional photos from corbis.com. Each one costs $3, or a little more if they’re for ‘professional use.’
- There are no dissolves, spins, or other types of transitions.
- Sometimes, you can use sound effects during a presentation, but never (ever) use the program’s built-in sound effects. Instead, rip sounds and music from CDs to take advantage of the Proustian effect.
- Do not distribute printed copies of your slides. They’re emotional, and without you, they won’t work. Tell them that the slides will go if they want to show “the boss” your slides.
Isn’t that the whole point?
What’s even more impressive is how you’ll begin giving presentations in the future.
Instead of generating slides that follow your bullet points, you’ll emotionally organize the presentation, allowing the slides to guide the process.
Remember that each slide does not have to be self-contained. One slide can be used to establish a point, and the following slide can be used to bring it home.
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