Slideshare.net's "World's Best Presentation" competition, sponsored by Microsoft: Keynote slideshows to be submitted only in PDF. So who are they trying to kid? Some lessons you won't learn about presenting from this dufus competition

Home > Presentation Skills/Keynote > Slideshare.net's "World's Best Presentation" competition, sponsored by Microsoft: Keynote slideshows to be submitted only in PDF. So who are they trying to kid? Some lessons you won't learn about presenting from this dufus competition

Date Created: 25 Mar, 2007, 02:22 AM

I gave a Keynote presentation last Thursday week which was in fact a keynote, one at the Annual General Meeting of psychologists who also happen to be Careers and School Counsellors in some of Melbourne top private schools.

I was there to present for an hour on "Web 2.0" and other technological shifts impacting on their students, whom I called Generation M, where the M stands not just for Mobile, but for Media. The psychologists perceived there to be a real gulf between themselves and their digitally native clientbase, and they wanted some assistance to understand how to close that gulf.

Now I could have stood there for an hour and shown and demonstrated all the latest connectivity brands and ideas and startups, from early Web 2.0 efforts like Amazon.com and Flickr, through to the more recent such as Twitter and MySpace.

Seen below is one of the slides I used towards the end of my talk showing the logos of some of these new startups, from the web2logo.com website.

In fact, I showed four consecutive slides filled with such logos, slowly transitioning vertically (using Keynote's Push transition) to give the effect of a long credit sequence as you may see at the end of a movie. I talked over the slides without necessarily naming them. The intended effect was to see the growth of such startups.

I had started the Keynote, after the usual thankyous, with a discussion of the place of technology in human history. This is my way of contextualising my presentation, and deliver one of my main "take home" messages: That while technology may appear to be changing so rapidly as to make our heads spin, in fact we humans change quite slowly. What the psychologists had learnt about adolescent behaviour was not out of date by any means, but needed to be understood and applied in newly developing contexts.

This was my way of allaying some of their fears of change which can intrude in their coming to grips with the changing technologies themselves.

To reinforce that story (I only ever tell stories in my presentations, and NEVER work from a script - what my friend Garr Reynolds would call a naked presentation, and I refer to as Walking the Presentation tightrope without a net), I asked the audience to consider where I might choose to start to describe the story of technology.

I used one of my slides from a presentation I give on Clinical Applications of Virtual Reality (below) to suggest that this cave drawing, perhaps one of the oldest permanent drawings still in existence and discovered at the end of the 19th century, was one very early form of human technology.

I then skipped many thousands of years to about the time when these cave drawings were found, and showed a picture of the famous American March composer, John Philip Sousa.

His music is much better known to American audiences since it is so often used in military and school settings, so I played a snippet of "Stars and Stripes Forever" using an m4a file embedded in the Keynote slide. I obtained the original file from Wikipedia, and it was from an original Edison recording of 1906.

This then allowed me to introduce a picture of Edison, his phonograph of 1878, and I asked the audience to contemplate what it must have been like for 19th century inhabitants to hear themselves for the first time, or hear the sounds of others recorded away in time and distance. Something we take for granted, and more so by Generation M.

The connection is more than the use of Edison's phonograph to record the Sousa band in 1906, a hundred years ago. In 1909, Sousa went to the US Congress and complained about the phonograph, wanting the nascent recording "industry" put out of business.

To which I asked the assembled audience to contemplate why he would do such a thing.

After a few moment's thought when it was clear that by my not rushing to give them an answer (that's Naked Presenting - allowing silence to fill a hall) I expected a response from them, one person sparked up by stating it would be putting musicians out of business.

"Yes, well done" was my reply and thus began a brief discussion on the recording industry whose products continue to occupy so much of Generation M's attention. Again, this reinforces that while technology may change how we do things, the "why" changes very slowly.

But I went a little further.

Look at one of the slides I used (below) offering another picture of Sousa (obtained from Wikipedia with its Creative Commons licensing for media), and some of the words Sousa is said to have used in his appearance before Congress in 1909.

What you see is part of a quote dissing Edison's 1878 Phonograph, but like so many adults who wish to influence the politicians of the day, citing negative consequences on the youth of the day is usually a good bet.

By the way, this is the only time I will read a slide aloud: when it's a short direct quote.

My very next slide (below) took us straight into 2007, a hundred years later, and this picture from the New York Times of February 2007, where New York politicians were wanting to ban iPods from Manhattan intersections.

Interestingly, I didn't have to explain what the white earbuds respresented. All in the audience had seen them before, in response to my asking if they knew what they were... look how iconic has the iPod become in 5 years.

From here I began to talk about the promise of technology to change our lives, whether that promise had been achieved, and what might be the consequence of an "always on, always available", economy of abundance Generation M was growing up with, in contrast to previous generations.

Eventually, I introduced the group to the concept of the Long Tail, as described by Wired Editor, Chris Anderson.

The Long Tail phenomenon is quite familiar to psychologists, but in an utterly different context. One learns about "tails" of distributions in Psychology 101, when exposed to statistical concepts. Of supreme importance is the concept of a Normal or Gaussian, distribution, because this forms the foundations of psychological testing for IQ, personality, brain injury and psychopathology.

The long tail, as discussed by Anderson, is really just a form of positive skewness.

Here, the bulk of that being measured is pushed to the left of the graph, called the head, while the long tail moves to the right. A good example would be the frequency of earthquakes (X-Axis) charted against their power (Y-Axis). There are few very powerful earthquakes, but many of small to negligent power.

From here I spoke of Anderson's descriptions of how Hollywood and mainstream media have for decades made their money from creating a "demand" for hits ("The Hit Parade"), and how modern digital technologies are dismantling this model. It is doing so, according to Anderson's Long Tail ideas, because storage of media is no longer a question of real estate (how many vinyl records can a record store keep on the shelf at any one time), but that of availability of "whatever you want, whenever and however you want it" (the Economy of Abundance) which Generation M has always known (in contrast to their parents).

It is this point that I suggested that this phenomenon was something new, as for millenia our models of economics had worked on an Economics of Scarcity: things have value not because they are intrinsically useful, but because of how rare they are.

So while industrial diamonds have great practical utility, those diamonds that fetch more per carat serve no useful purpose other than decoration, affording its wearer status. De Beer's and others closely control the price of diamonds by how many they release to market.

The same used to go for the recording industry, but as Anderson tells us, the huge hits are becoming fewer and fewer, whether that be for music or films or TV. It was here I was able to discuss iTunes, the AppleTV, and User Generated Content. It's also where I had planned to show the cover of last year's Christmas edition of Time Magazine, featuring its Person of the Year - You.

But, I didn't get around to it... With all that and some chitchat during the presentation, my hour was up, and we spent some question time in general discussion. It looks like the group will ask me back for a more workshop-style "what do we do next" following this rather more "heads-up" presentation.

What was most important for the group to come away with was the sense of feeling empowered that they knew much of what they needed to know to do their jobs, and not to let the technology and new terminologies get in the way.

The second important aspect - important to me - was two-fold. First was the delivery of technology-based information to a group of peers who know a little, but just enough to know what they don't know. It was a good test of my ability to take information and bend it, shape it, and portray it in ways to make it both understandable and interesting for an audience eager to become more comfortable with it.

The second one was the confirmation of two important qualities in presenting to diverse audiences. These are passion (or enthusiasm if that word is too strong) and story-telling.

I bust my brain each time I present to find a new innovative way to begin a presentation. This is especially so if I'm invited back to present to the same crowd within a year. Because audiences remember. No, not the exact content but they remember your passion and story-telling if not your stories.

But they don't remember the text on your slides. And this is what I teach in my Presentation Skills Workshops. I learnt this a long term ago when I first started doing interviews as a psychologist in radio and television. Friends and colleagues would approach me months after and say they'd remembered me on TV. At the time I was doing interviews quite often, so would usually ask which piece to air they saw.

Almost to a person, they could not recall the content of the interview, but clearly remembered how I'd carried myself: "You sounded professional" or "You looked the part" or "You seemed to know what you were talking about."

So when I present to audiences on Presentation Skills, I offer them the dilemma of presenting:

Do you want your talk to be remembered in such a way that if you present annually at conferences, intending audience members say to each other,

"Hey, Bill is presenting again!"
"Really, is it an interesting subject?"
"Doesn't really matter... he does great presentations even if you don't really know the subject."

Or:

"Hey, Bill is presenting again!"
"Really, did you get much out of it last year?"
"Yes, it was really dense with information, and he's dry as a bone as a presenter. But if you look past that and read his notes after, you'll find some real gems of useful data."

I'm thinking good presenters might be happy to live with one or the other.

But great presenters want both to happen: their presentation is memorable and their content sticks.

Maybe it's my work as a therapist that also informs my presentation skills workshops (as much as my formal training in Knowledge Management), but I am constantly weaving into my training the desire for workshop-goers to be able to take what they have learnt today and apply it tonight, and then tomorrow.

I have two pieces of feedback that tell me when I'm on the ball: In one (and this actually happened) an attendee comes up at the end of the workshop and swears at me, saying, "You rotten bastard! I've got this presentation to do at a World Congress in a few weeks, and now I have to go back and change all my slides."

Now if this came from an inexperienced presenter, I would implore them to make any changes gently. But in the example I have, this was said to me by a very experienced presenter who simply bought my pitch. Coming from an evidence-based scientific field, she could not deny the evidence I had put before her in our three hours together. That evidence was interactive, such that she participated in her own learning of new ideas, which had nowhere to go but be assimilated into her existing knowledge base.

The second piece of feedback came when a few months after an initial presentation workshop a member came back for a second turn, and presented her own slides. What a change! Not perfect, but she clearly had thought much more deeply about how she wanted her slides to affect her audience. She didn't just want them to learn facts, she wanted to get at their emotions and she succeeded by applying some of the principles displayed in my first workshop.

Her slides were visual and impactful, with large text kept simple and appropriate. There was no movement or animation, but it wasn't necessary.

So you want to hold a "World's best presentation contest"?

Thinking about last week's presentation and how to best convey ideas and concepts using slideware (eg., Powerpoint, Keynote, etc.) brings me to share some thoughts about Slideshare.net's World's best presentation contest.

My friend Shawn Callahan has entered a deck, utilising a slide I gave him, and my mate Garr Reynolds is one of the judges.

You might recall some time back that Apple also held a presentation contest for Keynote (when it was still in V1.0). That it held a competition gave weight to the idea that Apple was not orphaning Keynote as there was a long gap between V1.0 and V2.0.

Apple was very clear that the slide show was a stand alone presentation, and not necessarily accompanying a talk, nor was it a "left behind" set of notes. It really was a contest to showcase Keynote's capabilities, given its feature set was signficantly less than the Powerpoint of the day. This forced competitors to focus on the creativity-eliciting qualities of Keynote, and so transitions and movement were very much to the fore plus Keynote's clean design principles.

Apple called its competition "Present your Passion". Keep that thought in mind, and you can read my blog entry about its winner, Meg Spoto, here (November, 2004 - all Apple.com links out of date).

Slideshare.net which allows slide show creators to place their slides on the web in the style of YouTube, allowing for slide annotations and viewer comments, has divided its contest into two categories:

1. Slides which accompany a talk.

2. Slides which can stand alone, and function as handouts or downloads

Here is how Slideshare advises entrants preparing to upload their slideshows:

"While uploading the presentation file, you should tell us something about it in the description section. This will give the voters and judges some context as to your presentation. Specifically, tell us which of the below options describes how your presentation was or is meant to be used. "PowerPoint Deck as Leave Behind" OR "In Person Presentation Support" OR "Both" OR "Other".

Now I can understand that for many business and educational presentations, what may be uppermost in presenters' minds will be the supply of slides for attendees to later refer to, either downloadable in their original form, or on paper as both Powerpoint and Keynote allow.

In which case, if you give them out at the beginning of your presentation, you can be sure you will minimise interactivity with your audience, who will either be writing on your handout, or scanning ahead to see what's coming next.

You'll never see me offering such handouts.

I'd rather they have a briefing sheet or a summary sheet or even an activity sheet which I'll utilise in a workshop. I've even been known to handout CDs of PDFs and movies (where copyright allows) for later reference by the audience. That's because I heavily rely on evidence-based research to support what I have to offer in my presentations, and I want my audiences to see what I have to say and show, expressed in the original research.

So that takes care of one of the slide stacks requested for this competition.

It's the other that perplexes me, the one that supports the presenter to deliver his or her presentation.

If it's the support but not main act - that's you, the presenter - how are we to judge its success? All we get to see at the competition site are the slides. We might get a summary of what you said, given both Keynote and Powerpoint allow each slide to have notes attached to it (with Keynote going a step further and allowing a stickie to be shown in presentation mode (below).

But surely the art and science of presenting complex data or ideas using slide technologies consists of the integration of presenter and slides, and the two can't be separated without a loss of knowledge sharing.

So while I can see some purpose in having a competition for the best handouts (but on what basis are the criteria decided, and how do the judges really know what works?) I really don't get the purpose of comparing slideshows which are meant to support the speaker.

Surely a slide with one picture or one word when presented in just the right context by a superb presenter can be a more memorable one than a competing slide with plenty of fancy effects but one that doesn't hit the mark with the audience. Indeed, even if you have some terrific effects which hit the mark (ahem... I have one where I reveal Sean Connery saying "I know it when I see it" from Goldfinger [1964] when I ask workshop attendees if they can specify what it is about lousy Powerpoint that makes it... lousy) these will be impossible to upload to the contest if you use Keynote because the competition specifically asks for Keynote presentations to be converted to PDF format! Say Bye-bye to the magic of Keynote's persuasive effects... which I personally slave over so that while I work hard to construct the slide, it makes for an easier time for the audience to be held spellbound and to later remember what I demonstrated.

So what's the point?

You see, when you visit websites where you can solicit and hire professional presenters (for your company rev-up, a special workshop, executive training, AGM keynote etc.) you can see videos of the potential speakers in action via online videos. That's hardly surprising since many professional speakers charge $5000 and up. Here is the Prime Time speakers bureau website for you to view some online videos.

Indeed, having looked around the web to see if what I have to say might earn me $5000 per gig, it seems most Speakers Associations demand you send them a professional quality videotape - unedited - of a recent presentation. In fact, some organisations provide an annual service where you can attend meetings, do your shtick and have your demo video recorded for you professionally, as shown here.

Oftentimes, the criteria for the video include a view of the slides, a view of the audience, but most of the time the videocamera should be on you, the presenter.

And to me that's the way to judge "The world's best presentation". Otherwise, all you are doing is judging Powerpoint stacks for either gimmicks, simplicity, or clarity of complex idea presentation presented without passion, gusto, audience interaction and presence.

If you were going to invite someone to keynote your AGM or special event, what would you rather see?

The slides or the person in action?

Yeah, I thought so...