Some Quick Tips on How to Give a Successful Powerpoint/Keynote Presentation

Whether you are looking to do a presentation in a class, at work, or to a potential client, there are some serious do's and dont's of giving presentations - especially if you are going to supplement your presentation with a Powerpoint/Keynote slideshow. There are two different pieces to the presentation that are important. First is the actual presenting, i.e. how you speak, make eye contact etc. The second is whether you use, and how you use an electronic slideshow of some sort.

Regardless of whether you are using any material to supplement your presentation, there are a few simple but critical things that need to happen:

1. Eye Contact: Not only does it show confidence and engagement with your subject, it helps people feel connected to you personally. Additionally, by making constant eye contact with actual audience members (don't forget about the people to your far left and right) this gives you a chance to read the reactions of your audience. You can tell if people seem to be perplexed, excited or bored and you can adjust what you're saying on the fly to make the talk more interesting
2. No Reading: Reading off of a speech or any written material averts your eyes from the audience and doesn't show an engagement with the material. Reading a speech word for word sounds exactly like that, which is not what people are interested in hearing from you. If you need to use a speech, practice it ahead of time so that when you give your presentation, although you may have the speech with you, you know it so well you will rarely need your notes. Don't try and recite the speech from memory, but instead become so familiar with what you want to say, speaking about the topic becomes (and sounds) natural.
3. Use Bullet Points: The best way to transition into making better speeches, or to help you through a talk that has statistics or other hard to remember bits of information, is by using bullet points. Instead of writing up a speech, make sure you are familiar with the topic, and then use a few bullet points to help keep you on track. 
4. Project: Not just voice, but confidence, intelligence and engagement. Speak directly to the people who are the farthest away from you (for example sitting in the back row) to make sure you reach all of your audience. Often people focus on the front row or whoever they know in the audience or is the closest. Projecting to the farther audience member will guarantee you are speaking to everyone closer than them and show you are confident in the subject

The next piece, making sure your presentation or slideshow is up to par, is often overlooked. In these situations, less is more, and a crowded or poorly done slideshow will ruin an otherwise interesting talk. A few quick pointers:

1. Less is more, don't crowd slides with lots of notes or images
   
2. Use the slides as a supplement not as the focus of the talk
3. Don't let the slides or anything else distract people away from you
4. Keep slides simple and without fancy designs, those powerpoint templates are bad news
5. Make sure you are familiar enough with your  material so that you don't need to read off of your own slides.
   

Good slide:







Bad Slide:

The best comparison regarding the difference between good and bad slideshows can be seen in this short article comparing Microsoft's Bill Gates using Powerpoing and Apple's Steve Jobs using Keynote: http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2007/09/steve-bill-redu.html

Quick Reference Guide for Statistics

This is actually pretty useful:

Why don't people vote and what can we do about it?

In my column last week we briefly looked at how social perceptions are the primary driving force behind motivating people to get out and vote come election day. However, most people, by a substantial majority, do not actually vote. What are the forces at work that keep people home on election day? And if social perceptions influence how people vote, could affecting a change of the social and cultural perceptions around voting could lead to an increased voter turnout over time?

Working on election day November 3rd provided a very interesting experience about all of these issues. I learned a great deal about peoples’ feelings and thoughts towards voting from the conversations that I became engaged in throughout the day.

By and large, the people who weren’t planning on voting, weren’t registered, and perhaps never have voted, expressed a certain skepticism about the process itself and about how important their role in the process of choosing representatives was. Interestingly, to this group of people, the idea that their one vote was no more or less than anyone else’s created a feeling of unimportance. Oddly, this is the opposite of many other people’s reactions, who feel empowered to be able to freely cast their ballot for the representative of their choice.

Additionally, there are people, for example a couple, who agree to disagree on the candidate of their choice, and by perhaps both even going to the polls together, effectively cancel each other’s vote, yet still feel necessity of going to the polls.

However, all these different ideas and perspectives are just many ways to look at the same situation. For example, some people feel empowered that by going to the polls, they can ‘cancel out’ the vote of an opposing voter. Others, however, feel powerless as they feel their vote will be ‘canceled out’ by someone less informed by them. Each situation is exactly the same, it is just two people casting opposing votes, yet one glass half-full perspective sounds positive while the glass half-empty perspective sounds completely futile.

What this really comes down to is that voting is more about social perceptions than anything else. People who feel that their vote is futile will fulfill their own destiny by not voting and making their opinion futile, which will only create more frustration down the road as the person becomes increasingly outside of the process happening around them. And people who feel that their vote is powerful will get out there and feel engaged to whatever is happening - even if they disagree with it.

That engagement is they key piece to the puzzle. Not everyone will always agree. The only way we could have true total 100% representation is if we all were representatives in a pure democracy, yet even then I would think that we wouldn’t understand and agree with even ourselves as much as we’d like to think.

So what can we do about people who feel powerless and disengaged? By making people feel invested in their community and their world, we can work to avoid the tragedy of the commons scenario that our voting numbers are emblematic of.

Getting involved or volunteering for something in the direct community is a sure way to start to feel connected and a working and productive part of this crazy and chaotic world.

If we can help focus more education efforts at really fostering a feeling of community ownership, we can begin to reverse the unfortunate trends over the past few decades of decreased community and civic involvement.

For a person who has never voted before, casting a ballot on a national level may seem of too little impact. Opening up government to really connect, work with and seek the feedback of residents on all ranges of projects is a prime way to help people feel they are part of something that is both larger than themselves and larger than the sum of its parts. Feeling part of something productive like that is an inspiring experience. Embracing the use of technology for open government and community engagement to reach new audiences and make new connections are sure ways for us to get there.

You have more control than you think

Losing one’s inhibitions and judgments has been ingrained into our culture as natural and inevitable effects from consuming alcohol. We teach our young people these things, and coincidentally, they end up displaying them as they grow older and begin experimenting with alcohol.

The idea that alcohol takes control over people and forces them act certain ways has not always been the prevailing idea. In fact, before the temperance movement picked up steam in the mid 1800s, alcohol was seen as a healthy, necessary and nutritious part of a rugged frontiersman lifestyle. However, strong and radical religious groups began to campaign against alcohol itself as the migration into cities that occurred around the industrial revolution broke down the social controls around behavior and the importance of being sober when using new machinery took hold in the workplace. Before then alcohol was seen as pretty much entirely beneficial.

Now, due to modern temperance political organizations, alcohol still has the same intense stigma that was attached to it leading up to prohibition. The idea that (a) once someone drinks they will most likely not be able to stop themselves from becoming alcohol-dependent and (b) once someone drinks they are no longer in control of their actions or emotions are puritan-based ideologies that in fact have no roots in medical science.

Just this week, more research from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism’s National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions shows that people may in fact be much more in control of their drinking habits than originally believed. In fact, about 70% of those who experienced serious alcohol-related dependence problems entirely recovered on their own and, more importantly, cut back to responsible consumption patterns, and did not give up alcohol entirely. Dr. Mark Willenbring, director of treatment and recovery research at NIAAA, said in the LA Times that "It can be a chronic, relapsing disease. But it isn't usually that.”

The controversy around alcoholism wages on as the medical and scientific community is not in agreement as to how alcohol-dependence can manifest itself into a physically addictive condition. This research however, which is the largest alcohol-related study ever done in the US, suggests that we are moving forward to a better understanding of alcohol and behavior.

The idea that all people loose control with alcohol is a commonly accepted, though incorrect, assumption. It has, however, become totally ingrained in our society. Throughout the country, it is actually the bartender’s personal responsibility (and legal liability) to not serve anyone who is visibly intoxicated (a rule rarely, if ever, followed). The idea being that once someone begins drinking, they can no longer control whether they continue drinking. The excuse “Well I was drunk, what did you expect?” is a frustrating phrase heard all to often where people, rather than taking responsibility for their actions, blame the alcohol, much as was done during temperance.

Just this week, a trending topic on Twitter was “patrondidit,” expanded to Patron (a brand of Tequila) did it, i.e. alcohol being blamed for whatever the person might’ve done. Tequila itself actually takes the position of the most often quoted alcohol to relieve one of responsibility, even though its effects, and actually this goes for all types of alcohol of comparable alcohol content, are exactly the same, and the difference in behavior between different types of alcohol are entirely influenced by social expectations. Throughout history, there have even been nations that grant legal immunity to people who are drunk, while there are cultures, some that still exist, that do not accept intoxication as a social excuse for any social misbehavior.

The landmark study by acclaimed Brown University Anthropologist Dwight B. Heath in 1958 on the Camba of Eastern noted that “None of the stereotypes that are often applied to heavy drinkers was salient for the simple reason that behaviour while drinking was so little different from the normal behaviour during the long intervals between drinking.” The information from the recent NIAAA study reinforces the idea that the effects of alcohol on behavior (note: alcohol has serious effects on motor coordination and in some cases memory) are far more influenced by social expectations around acceptable behavior than anything biological or inherent in consuming alcohol.

I have mentioned the word responsibility multiple times, and it is a very important theme regarding how we educate, propagate cultural norms and set our state and national policies.

Instead of creating legislation that seeks to forward a moral stance, and is ignorant to the massive unintended consequences that are a degrading culture around responsibility, rising alcohol problems among our youth and rising incidents of drunk driving, we need to focus on creating policy that accurately sets standards of responsibility in our culture. By changing our current culture of repressive irresponsibility around alcohol into a socially-accepted and controlled culture of responsibility we can have positive lasting impacts on the safety and health of our young people.

Note: I do not support lowering the drinking age, but rather comprehensive enhanced alcohol policies that are based off of the fundamentals our successful graduated drivers license programs. Yes that means a graduated drinking age. Read more here.

Follow up Links

From Pyschology Blog: Why do people bother voting: http://www.spring.org.uk/2009/10/why-do-people-bother-voting.php

More information about the prisoner's dilemma: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/prisoner-dilemma/

Further Reading on Who owns the internet

Financial Times - Net neutrality required to spur innovation - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/bf87c126-c571-11de-8193-00144feab49a.html

Wall Street Journal - Facebook and Twitter Founders Join Net-Neutrality Wars http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/10/18/facebook-and-twitter-founders-join-net-neutrality-wars/

PC World - FCC Votes for Net Neutrality, McCain Wants to Stop Them http://www.pcworld.com/article/174211/fcc_votes_for_net_neutrality_mccain_wants_to_stop_them.html


The Great Debate: What is Net Neutrality (C-SPAN) http://fora.tv/2006/07/17/Great_Debate_What_is_Net_Neutrality

Why Net Neutrality is Important: http://kensingtonvictoria.com/?p=323

VOTE TODAY!

Make sure to get out and vote today. Click here to find your polling location: http://bit.ly/njvotinginfo