Ready? Here you go:
Don’t. Read. Your. Dumb. Slides.
Long version:
I’m at a pitchfest of an event, and people have come up one after another doing this basic performance over and over again:
“Hello, my name is _____. I’m the CEO and founder of ShinyNewSite.tv. At ShinyNewSite.tv, we believe in maximizing your efficiency through enhancing your brand and building your… Our mission is…”
What? Hello? Where am I? Oh wait. I think I read a slide that was essentially 300 words on your mission statement, using something like all 300 to try and tell me what you and your marketing team made up.
Communication is about CONNECTION
If you learn NOTHING else from me about communication, presentation, or whatever in hacking your own life, building your own value to the world, please learn this: connect. Connect with the people you’re trying to communicate with. Build something between us, no matter how short your time is.
How?
- Think about who I am. And then build your presentation (conversation, blog, whatever) with me in mind.
- Acknowledge that you want MY attention. Try hard to keep it by cutting out the fat.
- Wake me up by saying something in a different way, or say it in a way that sounds like I wrote your slide for you (meaning we’re on the same wavelength).
- Don’t skip the foreplay, but don’t bore me.
Am I Being Too Demanding?
Hell no. ATTENTION is my most scarce resource. If I’m going to be sharing space, or reading, or learning, or taking some time out of my life to pay attention to your presentation (email, blog post, podcast), you owe me. You owe me your best attempt at saying something that connects with me.
Smallest presentation hack ever?
Dont. Read. Your. Dumb. Slides.
Chris Brogan isn’t always this cranky. He keeps a blog at [chrisbrogan.com]
I had a similar experience at a conference I was at last week. After enduring the first presentation of the day, I pulled open Keynote and deleted every word on 19/20 slides, and replaced them with appropriate Flickr Creative Commons licensed photos. The presentation was far more powerful for it.
and skip the powerpoint presentation, not much bugs me more than someone reading off of a powerpoint display..
Truthteller site
http://www.reddeerblog.com
And for heaven’s sake, look me in the eye(s).
Edward Tufte should be required reading for anyone within ten feet of an LCD projector.
-L.
[...] Chris Brogan’s tip for PowerPoint presentations caught my [...]
Indeed, it’s pain to listen somebody reading slowly same text that you could read ten times more faster yourself.
Reminds me of the great article “Let There Be Stoning”:
http://www.geol.wwu.edu/rjmitch/stoning.pdf
This is SPECTACULAR advice. At my place of work it’s like people shoot up PowerPoint in the toilets!
What’s more – nearly every presentation is the same – ‘Here are my slides, let me read them to you’. Grrr!
I will be forwarding your link to everybody I encounter who is guilty of this crime against society.
[...] read me the presentation! The team over at lifehack.org have identified a small, and yet incredibly powerful presentation hack. Central to this post is the axiom that [...]
Seth Godin should also be required reading. He recently republished his Really Bad Powerpoint post.
I’ll be going through Powerpoint hell again today when we have our monthly company update – they should never have been given the projector.
Chris,
Great advice. Here’s another piece of that:
Tell. A. Story.
We’ve been telling stories since the those first tribal campfires, yet today too many people stand up and blather on without engaging the audience at all.
Like you said, *attention* is a scarce resource. Figure out how to hold that and make it worth your listener’s time. So what if you talking about some really esoteric widget. Tell a story about someone using that widget to make their life (or world) better. (And if you can’t tell such a story, perhaps that points to larger problems with your widget!)
Here’s an example of telling a story that I did recently on something as niche as “VoIP security” that turned out very well: http://www.blueboxpodcast.com/2007/03/blue_box_se_15_.html
The challenge is, of course, that putting a story together like that is *hard* to do. It’s a whole lot easier to just throw a bunch of text fragments onto a slide as bullets and be done with it. Turning that into more of a cohesive “story” takes time, something else we don’t have a lot of these days. But it can be worth it!
Tell. A. Story.
Here’s a tip– don’t put words on your slides– they’re slides– as in slide show– as in pictures.
Last PPT I had to make on my own, I had single words on each slide to accompany a graphic– I was talking dammit the pictures were backing me up.
Seemed to work well.
Hear, hear! You should’ve heard the gasp that when through the room when I told the COC people not to use PowerPoint and in particular, not to use bullet-pointed slides.
“But how will we ever communicate??” seemed to be the murmur.
Um… how did we communicate before PP? We told stories. We told jokes. We had conversations. We laughed; we cried; it was better than Cats.
Oh, wait. Anyway, we managed to communicate before bullet points, and we’ll do it even better once we ditch them.
Heidi– before PPT we used overheads (groan)
[...] right way (or perhaps the least-wrong way) to use PowerPoint, if you must. She also pointed me to a lifehacker.org posting by Chris Brogan that, if followed, would make me feel 80% [...]
Can we read the smart slides?
nice thought on this, chris. by the way, something needs to be done about the adsense on this site.
What, not ONE Power Point apologist?…
I now feel validated in my own personal seminar approach, which is called “Winging It.” (I’m considering a patent.)
To late Justin, I just patented it right after I read your message.
Thats what you get for saying your patent out loud – nothing.
Patent’ing “Winging It” ? Patent my balls. On yur chin.
PowerPoint slows down communications: shed it. More data to a co-worker can be transmitted in a single photo than a single word. Stick to visuals using visuals – like pictures. You have a visual tube, to put words on. … again nice one Justin.
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[...] found a forthright advice about presentation: “Don’t. read. your. dumb. slides”, writes Chris Brogan at Lifehack.org. Oh, that was easy to be understood. For elaborated advice, read another article titled ‘My [...]
i am giving a ppt on the topic of email hacking ,
can u send me some pdf or power point slides or any other type of data material
thanks
[...] Don’t.Read.Your.Dumb.SlidesThe smallest piece of advice on powerpoint explained [...]