Business presentations

Feb 6 2009   8:38AM GMT

Know the Audience, No Other Rules on My Presentation

Posted by: William Peterson
Business presentations, presentation, presentation skill, Tips, practice, audience

As the golden rule for preparing a presentation, “practice, practice, and practice” is an essential skill to everybody. And I agree that the more I practice, the better I get, because it’s never an easy job to demonstrate and explain something in front of different audience. Making a presentation involves public speaking, which can be seriously scary. Famously, speaking in public has been voted scarier than dying (which says something about its lack of popularity). So if we make enough practices before, the confidence and courage is fearless.

Since we know the importance of practice, we should know more about our audience. I usually ask myself some questions in hehearsing, such as what’s the instant reaction from audience to my words. It’s easy to do a piece of research of those potential audience. Once I know some information about them, like genders, ages, or interests, I may add the considerations into my practice.

Practice is an essential, not a rule on presentation skills. Knowing a little about audience is the tip of such a game in which audience and me are players. Then no scary anymore. Like what’s quoted in the book The Art of War on 6 century BC: “If you know others and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles“.

William Peterson

Feb 4 2009   11:01AM GMT

Let’s Talk about Presentation Skills from Our President Obama

Posted by: William Peterson
Business presentations, presentation, skills, Tips, Review, Obama, speech, inauguration, negotiation, change

President Obama’s “HOT” is the result of our economy’s “COLD”. For me, his charisma is more than those inspired stimulus plan. I watched Obama’s first presidential show on CNN days ago, and considered the inaugural speech an excellent public presentation model for everyone, who wants to be another president or not.

Dr. Rich Kirschner mentioned about Obama’s presentation skill was kind of “Powerful Use of Persuasive Speech for Positive Change“, and I agreed with that.

All in all, Obama uses persuasive speech to take a potentially damaging set of revelations, and turn it to his advantage. Such talk actually has the potential to play an important role in bringing about positive change in this fundamental area of our civic discourse.

Such skills could be useful in most business negotiations, although many techies don’t like this way as I know. Actually not everyone can create its own presentation style like Steve Jobs, and sometimes it’s better to do business with old technologies.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Dec 27 2008   9:49AM GMT

On the Meeting: Teleconferencing, Videoconferencing and Web conferencing

Posted by: William Peterson
Web, CIO, IT professional, Review, Business, Corporate, Web Presentation, Business presentations, Businss Training, Web conferencing

Sure, once mostly a face-to-face practice, now executives are increasingly offering their wisdom via teleconference. It’s really more efficient than old ways to facilitate with modern technologies. Certainly teleconferencing is just the live exchange of voice on the meeting, and the videoconferencing has been used widely in last decade. Then now, conducting a live meetings or presentations via the Internet could be easier for anyone. Web conference, or Webniar can be seen everywhere over the Internet.

Right, I’m a techie fan, and here I’d like to review these current technologies for teleconferencing, videoconferencing and Web conferencing.

1. Internet Teleconference, such as Skype
Internet telephony involves conducting a teleconference over the Internet or a Wide Area Network. One key technology in this area is Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP). A lot of commercial VoIP networks available over the world, and Skype is the most popular one for personal and SME uses. Actually Skype offers a series of solution for business to start off such tele-conferencing soon.

One thing left, video conferencing is supported on Skype. And it’s usually my first place alternative for international calls.

2. Videoconference Impact on Education, Medicine and Business
No doubt videoconferencing could be sort of essentials on distance education, and also helps most doctors diagnose any complicated illness. And especially on business, it enables individuals in faraway places to have meetings on short notice. Time and money that used to be spent in traveling can be used to have short meetings. The technology is also used for telecommuting, in which employees work from home.

I ever tried such video conferencing on e-learning, and it works well. And it’s also widely used for any international conference on UN, or most multi-national enterprises.

3. The Boom of Web Conferencing Services
Web conferencing is not just the Internet version of teleconferencing or video conferencing, there’re some other typical advanced features here: slide show presentations, live or streaming video, VoIP, Web tours, meeting recording, whiteboard, text chat, polls and surveys, and screen sharing/desktop sharing/application sharing.

A lot of IT vendors provide Web conferencing service, including Adobe, IBM and Microsoft. But I still prefer another two services: Cisco’s WebEx (http://www.webex.com/) and Citrix’s GoToMeeting (http://www.gotomeeting.com/).

We really have more and more meetings to go, and technologies just make them cost-efficient with our brilliant ideas.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Dec 25 2008   2:12PM GMT

Project Presentation Essential: Create Project Report Effortlessly in Office 2003

Posted by: William Peterson
Office, PowerPoint, Project, Microsoft, Business, Office 2003, Report, Business presentations, Businss Training

“As a Project Team Leader, how much time have you lost trying to take information from Microsoft Project and drop into to PowerPoint presentation? If you are like me, you’ve probably done a few ‘Print Screen’ and Pastes…”

I’m not a skilled Microsoft Project user, but I suddenly found this old add-in for Project 2003 terribly useful here. Basically, the installation drops a new toolbar within Project with a button labeled “Create Report Presentation…” and it allows you to select which milestones to show as well as which fields to include. Magically, now you get an auto-generated PowerPoint presentation with a slide dedicated to the project tasks. Maybe it’s a little out to use Office 2003, but I can’t find such good add-in with Office 2007. Whatever, it’s not bad trying this for just project leaders.

The Project Report Presentation Add-in for Microsoft Office Project 2003 helps a user to quickly and easily create a Microsoft Office PowerPoint presentation containing user-selected task information from Microsoft Office Project.

Download Office 2003 Add-in: Project Report Presentation Here > >

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Dec 23 2008   5:44AM GMT

We Must Read More for Making Good Design

Posted by: William Peterson
Technology, Learning, Design, Book, Tips, Business presentations, presentation, Instructional Design

I realize that sort of information browsing online is not enough to learn any subjects throughoutly. So I move to reading more professional books like returning the college. Everyone likes better design in its presentation, so we must learn some elementary skills from books at first. And I was recommended to read Timothy Samara’s guidance to enhance my abilities of instructional design.

Here’re two recent books about tips and rules for design starter to make good to better design. Keep these ideas in mind when designing your next presentation or website, poster, and you’ll get excellent design achievement soon.

Timothy Samara is a graphic designer and educator based in New York City, where he divides his time between consulting, writing, and teaching at the School of Visual Arts, Parsons School of Design, NYU, and Purchase College. He is the author of several books for Rockport Publishers, including Making and Breaking the Grid, Typography Workbook, Publication Design Workbook, Type Style Finder and Design Elements.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Dec 20 2008   3:15AM GMT

Online Holiday Boom with Stand-Out Sales Presentation

Posted by: William Peterson
Training, IT professional, Enterprise, Sales, Technology, PowerPoint, Business, Corporate, Business presentations, Holiday, presentation, Businss Training

Because of the weak economy, consumers seem to prefer more online shopping with discounts or free shipping on this holiday season. At least, this is good news for most long-waiting online retailers. Based upon sorta great prospect, Abhay Parekh, founder & CEO of an interactive multimedia platform company, is presenting a wiselike guidance for business communicators, on Sales & Marketing Management Magazine:

Five Tips for Creating a Stand-Out Sales Presentation

Looking to create that perfect eye-catching sales presentation to lock in some last-minute Q4 sales? The you had better rethink your strategy and take your presentation to the virtual scale.

1. Show, rather than tell.
2. Ditch your static slide presentations.
3. Go virtual.
4. Survey says?
5. Know when to stop.

Read full article at:
http://www.presentations.com/msg/content_display/presentations/e3i54e0d1d9416e8c7fbf73d212d777bd11

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Dec 18 2008   7:26AM GMT

No Death by PowerPoint: We Know Its Midlife Crisis

Posted by: William Peterson
Web, IT professional, PowerPoint, Review, Web Presentation, Business presentations, presentation

Recently Ms Laura Bergells showed us an interesting research on PowerPoint Death with data analysis. Clearly, more and more people is concerned about the health statistic of our PowerPoint, because we’re still using it well now and gonna use it more in the future.

I agree that PowerPoint is the best ever presentation tool for desktop authoring. And I guess everyone is considering the inevitable threats from so many Web apps for presentation. PowerPoint is experiencing a midlife crisis as everyone does, but we still like it, don’t we?

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Nov 22 2008   11:22AM GMT

IBM White Paper: The Value of Training and the High Cost of Doing Nothing

Posted by: William Peterson
IBM, Training, CIO, IT professional, Enterprise, Learning, Review, Business, community, Solutions, Business presentations, White Paper, Businss Training

Never doubt that IBM’s training is the best business training I’ve ever seen. Recently, IBM published an interesting white paper called “The Value of Training” by consultant David Leaser. It notes that, a company will lose 10 to 30% of its capabilities per year. By year three, an organization has retained only 41% of it original capabilities, dwindling to 24% by year six. Right, that’s the point: it costs more than a better training, if we still do nothing.

When most companies are facing the terrible financial crisis, they cut the budget. Less business trip, less internal expenses, but significantly the staff training should not be ignored.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Nov 22 2008   11:00AM GMT

Office’s Running Hour: Sketching Out Your PowerPoint Presentations in Ten Minutes

Posted by: William Peterson
IT professional, Office, Technology, PowerPoint, Keynote, Business, PowerPoint 2007, Tips, Solutions, Tutorials, Business presentations, presentation

Well, every Friday I’ll attend some weekly meetings in the company. I think most office people get the same as me. Have you ever found yourself decompressing in true leisure one minute and scrambling to meet any deadline the next? So I teach people to survive with making conference presentations effortlessly.

VideoJug’s “How to Write A PowerPoint Presentation In 5 Minutes” is a great tutorial for most staffs. However, there’s kinda funny elements in it. And I think an real enough briefing-like PowerPoint presentation could be made perfectly in 10 minutes. Besides these tips in that video, I have something else to recommend:

1. To make excellent presentation with professional-looking slides, you need some good PowerPoint template resources on your pocket. See one of my previous post about this here.

2. Getting used to these intuitive features in PowerPoint 2007 will make your creation better and faster. Just learn something like SmartArt, shortcuts, etc. Quick Tips for PowerPoint 2007 on my previous post | PowerPoint 2007 - Get up to speed from Microsoft

3. Attach more. When you’re too busy to summary something in the slides, why not just attach and show the original files within your presentation? Check out some previous posts from me about “attaching documents or objects“, “recording narrations“, “Adding YouTube video clips“, or “embedding real-time Web pages“.

Assuming you’ve got the 10-minute-presentation talent, you got enough breathing space in office, aren’t you?

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Sep 14 2008   11:26AM GMT

Look upon the Never Rivalry: Pushing Silverlight to Flash Presentation

Posted by: William Peterson
Web, YouTube, IT professional, RIA, Rich Media, Enterprise, Web 2.0, Technology, Learning, Adobe, Silverlight, Microsoft, Flash, Review, Business, community, Corporate, Online Apps, Flash Video, Webcam, Web Presentation, Business presentations

The NBC’s Olympic Games in Silverlight boomed Microsoft’s rich media technologies a lot, but it still stands outside the stage where Adobe Flash dances. Microsoft is not the god, neither is Adobe. Actually Silverlight did well in many specifications as newly developed kit for the Web, while Flash seemed old and out of some emerging developments. To fight the mainstream, let’s look around what Silverlight.

In the developer Niraj Swaminarayan’s Silverligh vs. Flash - An Analysis Report, we can see that some parts are not that crucial for most Web developers. So I take my hands to the opinion that, the so-called rivalry is really not that important like lots of observers said. YouTube can be a Silverlight based video sharing community as well as Flash offers.

I’m concerning about the impact on my favorite Webcasting industry where the Silverlight platform could not step in currently. If Silverlight lives better and better as expected, what’s the critical issues we’ll face when replacing with Silverlight? The IT infrastractures for a business do not require the value of emerging technologies. That’s why Windows Vista could not become the mainstream with its 2 years’ experiences. Certainly it’s not a bad idea to take Silverlight presentation in the future.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran