Innovative Presentations For Dummies
Overview
Be the speaker they follow with breakthrough innovative presentations
Innovative Presentations For Dummies is a practical guide to engaging your audience with superior, creative, and ultra-compelling presentations. Using clear language and a concise style, this book goes way beyond PowerPoint to enable you to reimagine, reinvent, and remake your presentations. Learn how to stimulate, capture, and hold your audience in the palm of your hand with sound, sight, and touch, and get up to speed on the latest presentation design methods that make you a speaker who gets audiences committed and acting upon your requests. This resource delves into desktop publishing skills, online presentations, analyzing your audience, and delivers fresh, new tips, tricks, and techniques that help you present with confidence and raw power.
Focused and innovative presentations are an essential part of doing business, and most importantly, getting business. Competition, technology, and the ever-tightening economy have made out-presenting your competitors more important than ever. Globally, an estimated 350 PowerPoint
presentations are given every second. When it's your turn, you need to go high above and far beyond to stand out from the pack, and Innovative Presentations For Dummies provides a winning game plan. The book includes extensive advice on the visual aspect of presentations and, more importantly, it teaches you how to analyze your audience and speak directly to them. A personalized approach combined with stunning visuals and full sensory engagement makes for a winning presentation.
- Learn how to be an innovative, not just "effective" presenter in any situation
- Understand how to read and cater to specific audiences
- Create captivating visual materials using technology and props
- Creative customize presentations to best communicate with audiences
More and more employees are being called upon to make presentations, with or without prior training. With step-by-step instruction, vivid examples and ideas and a 360-degree approach to presentations, Innovative Presentations For Dummies will help to drastically improve your presentation outcomes as never before.
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About The Author
Ray Anthony has helped Fortune 500 clients close multi-million dollar deals by designing and developing extraordinarily innovative, solution-selling presentations with superior value propositions for his clients. Barbara Boyd has worked as a marketing and technology consultant for more than 10 years and is the author of several books.
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innovative presentations for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
Sooner or later in your professional life, you’ll have to give a really important presentation. By focusing on several distinct and unique aspects of creating a presentation (topic selection, audience analysis, visual design, and delivery technology and techniques), you can develop the skills to give innovative, stimulating presentations with consistently positive results.
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When putting together a presentation, there are a bazillion apps that can help you create cool content. The ten apps we list here let you sketch, make graphs, edit photos and video, and add special effects. For the most part, you create the content and then either save it as a PDF or import it directly into your presentation app (PowerPoint, Keynote, or whatever you use).
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Always set aside enough time to fully plan your presentations. Here is a list of valuable questions for you (and especially your presentation team) to consider that will greatly assist you in developing ideas, tactics, and approaches in your innovative presentation:
What niche image (besides a competent and professional image) do I want to project to this audience to build my credibility?
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You may be wondering in my innovative presentation, “What do I do with my hands?” Rest assured, with some imagination, there are practically unlimited gestures you can use in a significant way.
Size, shape, or dimension of gestures in innovative presentations
Visualize how using gestures could add to the message in the following two statements:
“Our new quantum computer is the most powerful of its kind in the world, yet small.
Video can enhance your presentation and grab the audience’s attention with a new element. Edit your video in a video editing app such as iMovie or Adobe After Effects before adding it to your presentation. For best results, save your file in HD 720p or full HD 1080p as a .m4a or .mp4 file, and if you’re using audio, embed AAC audio files.
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Do you trust someone who talks to you but doesn’t look you in the eye? Think about how your audience for your innovative presentation feels. Does a lack of eye contact make them feel uncomfortable?
If you don’t engage them with eye contact, it not only takes away the personal touch and hurts rapport, but people in your audience will form a negative impression of you — that you’re nervous, feel uncomfortable with your topic, are hiding something, or are afraid of the reaction to your talk.
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Innovative presentation boards are best used with smaller groups of fewer than 25 people to ensure good visibility of the information. Here is a simply designed, basic board with minimal information on it.
When the presenter wants to repeat and reinforce certain points such as “Return On Investment,” he transitions from his electronic presentation, which shows visuals about his product’s benefits, and walks to the side of the room where the board is positioned close to the group, stressing that “no other competitive product can deliver such a high financial return,” as he points to it.
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Rehearsing differs from practicing your innovative presentation, which is improving your general speaking techniques through a simple form of repetitive behavior with the goal of becoming articulate and polished with a custom-designed presentation or speech, especially one that you give for the first time.
Rehearsing is standing up, using your presentation visuals, and delivering your material word-for-word out loud — without missing any detail — as if you were doing it for real.
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Here is an example to demonstrate the innovative presentation's law of emphasis and intensity. Suppose you're driving at night, and from far away you see the high-intensity lights of a police car. The brilliantly vivid, flashing, colored lights immediately capture your sight, even with all the traffic around you.
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There’s nothing linear about Prezi, in fact, it takes a little while to get used to making a Prezi innovative presentation. Prezi can be used on Mac, Windows XP, Vista, 7, or 8 Classic, as well as the iPad. It ranges from free to $159/ year depending on the services you choose.
If traditional presentations are like putting a train on the track, one car hooked up and pulling another along, Prezi presentations are like making a painting — a cloud here, a tree over there, a river flowing through the woods — and you step back to see the whole complete picture.
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Although more of a technique to enhance content instead of a type of content; such as the innovative presentation, rhetorical questions create anticipation, curiosity, and suspense for what follows. A rhetorical question poses a query without expecting an answer. It creates curiosity, anticipation, or even suspense and gets your audience thinking about the question you just asked.
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iPresent for iPads takes sales innovative presentation software to a new level. It combines output from traditional presentation media such as PowerPoint slides, PDF files, and video, and lets you create gesture-driven menus on an iPad to navigate seamlessly between them.
This way, you get the best of both worlds — professionally designed interfaces that make it really easy to tell a story, combined with a custom look achieved in just a few minutes.
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These optimistic personalities love an imaginative innovative presentation because they adore novelty and innovations of all sorts. Energizers are fun-loving, highly sociable, and sometimes flamboyant personalities who can be the life of the party. Journalist and bubbly television personality Katie Couric and the supremely entrepreneurial and charismatic benefactor Oprah Winfrey are typical Energizers, throwing off positive energy in all directions.
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How you begin your innovative presentation makes a difference. Think about your first romantic kiss, your first car, your first job, or the first time you achieved something you were so proud of. Now, think about a negative first occurrence, a painful or embarrassing memory. Positive or negative, you remember meaningful firsts of any kind quite vividly, often for a lifetime.
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Often you give an innovative presentation at an event, such as a conference or tradeshow, conveying information the audience will use to make a decision or take another action. At a meeting, instead of a mostly one-way presentation, everyone there discusses a topic with the objective of planning something or coming up with a solution to a problem with a client, partner, or your staff.
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Video helps you become a skilled innovative presenter. It’s like watching your golf swing — seeing everything you do right … and do wrong. You are probably thinking: “I HATE seeing myself on video.”
Well, experts can tell you that they never had a person in our presentation training or coaching sessions who looked at themselves on video and said, “Wow.
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The best innovative presenters in the world agree on the extraordinary power of storytelling in business or even technical presentations because you can include all kinds of content (facts, statistics, examples, explanations) within the format. Stories have a bottom-line moral along with key messages and learning(s) that reveal purpose.
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Rate of speech is how fast you talk in words per minute (wpm) and is an important component of innovative presentations. Rate of speech is also called speed, pace, tempo, and rhythm. The typical or average speech rate is about 125 wpm, and most people recommend that you speak between 110 to 180 wpm, although not consistently.
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To appeal to a crowd with an innovative presentation set the stage by warming up the group with some conversation and ever so briefly hitting the likely hot buttons of the group. Now you’re primed to rock-and-roll.
During your presentation, you:
Start with a compelling, crisply communicated three-minute executive summary of the most important points of your product’s value proposition, including results, technical highlights, operational benefits, and financial returns on investment.
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When you present an innovative presentation for an audience your posture speaks volumes. You want to make sure that what your posture is saying is positive. Here are four types of posture to avoid.
How to avoid the timid posture in innovative presentations
This posture is characterized by a stooped, slouched, or otherwise listless demeanor that suggests a lack of confidence, energy, or drive.
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As the presenter, you guide the audience through your innovative presentation. You begin with a set of assumptions about what they know and then move forward, essentially teaching them, giving them the information they need to move to the next step or idea.
Use your visuals to support the building blocks of your presentation.
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Taste is subjective, color trends change, and new production techniques can make a visual you are considering using for your innovative presentation from five years ago seem old today.
Using visuals to support your presentation increases audience retention six-fold: Research shows that three days after an oral presentation, the audience retains 10 percent of what you said, whereas after an oral and visual presentation, the audience remembers more than 60 percent of what they heard.
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A successful innovative presentation combines these three elements: message, messenger, and medium, seamlessly to create a coherent argument. Your innovative presentation has three main components:
Message: What is said.
Messenger: Who says it.
Medium: How it’s said.
How to create the message for your innovative presentation
Your message — what’s often referred to as content — can be simple or complex or somewhere in-between, but it should always be relevant to your audience’s needs and be structured to satisfy the Five C’s (clear, concise, compelling, captivating, convincing).
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Contrasts show striking differences between two things. An innovative presentation presenter at a software design conference speaks about advances in 3-D gaming animation where the facial hair, skin, and other physical features of animated characters are almost indistinguishable from photographs of actual people.
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The closing effect — the Law of Recency —carries more weight for your innovative presentation’s message than the primacy (beginning) effect, because the last thing a person sees, hears, tastes, touches, feels, or experiences is actually the first thing they remember.
The acronym LIFO, used by computer scientists, stands for Last In, First Out and applies to list processing and data structures.
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In order to use your tablet or smartphone as a remote control, you must install an app that works with the innovative presentation app you use. Here are several that many people have found although others are available in the App Store or through the iTunes or App Store app for iOS devices, Google Play for Android devices, or the Apps+Games Store for Windows Phone apps.
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Gesture recognition lets you control your innovative presentation without touching a remote control or even the screen of your smartphone or tablet! Without getting too technical, your hand or body motion is detected by a camera and an action occurs. For example, wave-o-rama is an iOS photo album app that moves from one photo to the next when you wave your hand in front of the iPad screen.
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Finding more than one way to make the same vital point in your innovative presentation repeatedly effectively accomplishes your objectives of branding, name recognition, and message recognition. Attendees at your presentation respond more positively to the same argument stated several interesting and impacting ways rather than hearing the same message over and over.
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Innovative presentations should focus on a crisp overview, key points, main messages, and critical information, which means they aren’t always the most effective format for communicating dense information or large quantities of data.
Handouts, or leave behinds, allow you to provide detailed information that you can’t effectively put on a slide, such as complicated flowcharts, diagrams, tables, or illustrations that would otherwise show poorly on a monitor or projection screen.
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A business proposal is a written document or a multimedia file (such as in Apple’s iBook app) you give with an innovative presentation to a prospective customer to obtain a sale for your products and/or services. It can be as simple as a one-page summary that briefly outlines what you will do, how much you will charge, and when you will complete the job.
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If you create your innovative presentations in PowerPoint on your computer but then want to show the presentation directly on your iPad or projected from it, or if you share your presentations with a staff of people, SlideShark is a good choice.
The free version offers 50 MB (megabytes) of storage, which increases each time a friend you recommend signs up, or you can purchase a gigabyte of storage for $8 per month.
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When you present to one person, you have the opportunity to be conversational and dedicate your innovative presentation to the specific needs and requests of your one-person audience. Nonetheless, your visuals should be easy to see. When presenting in your office, project your visuals on a large monitor in a small meeting room if possible.
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An objection is a statement, request, comment, or question from someone in your innovative presentation’s audience that indicates some form and degree of resistance — ranging from mild to extreme — regarding an aspect of your presentation.
Salespeople frequently deal with objections to buying their product or service.
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Windbags have an opinion about everything, and they think everyone wants to hear them endlessly pontificate in your innovative presentation. They want to hog the floor and interject their comments throughout your presentation.
Windbags don’t care if others mind. They never heard of a sound bite — that ultra-concise way of using an economy of words to make a clear point quickly.
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For handouts, keep these nine simple points in mind when planning and creating your innovative presentation handouts for your audience and use the tips appropriately:
Determine the number of handouts (including DVDs, props, gifts, prototypes and others) you need and always bring an extra ten percent for unexpected attendees or those who want to take extras back to others in their organization.
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For your innovative elevator pitch presentation, you can begin with your name and describe the benefit your product, service, or company brings to its customers — this is called the value proposition. Think creatively.
For example, if you’re a baker, rather than say “I make cakes for people,” say “I sweeten people’s lives.
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When you present to one person, you have the opportunity to be conversational and dedicate your innovative presentation to the specific needs and requests of your one-person audience. Nonetheless, your visuals should be easy to see. When presenting in your office, project your visuals on a large monitor in a small meeting room if possible.
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Unless you’re involved in medical, scientific, or other types of research, you haven’t heard of poster sessions, let alone how to have an innovative presentation here. Also called a poster presentation, a poster session is a systematic way to present research information at a professional or academic conference.
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Even seasoned speaking professionals often have a bit of stage fright or anxiety, especially when giving a new innovative presentation or speech. In new or nerve-wracking circumstances, some mannerisms you don’t even know you have come out of hiding. That’s why videotaping yourself can be a real (surprising or perhaps shocking) revelation.
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There are several ways to encourage audience interactions in your innovative presentation. Trainers use learning exercises, case studies, role playing, and questioning to get people to use the information they have acquired in real-world simulation in the classroom — to just do it.
For example, Ray Anthony who sold computers for an international company, would ask potential buyers to bring their real accounting data with them to a demonstration of his company’s minicomputers (at the time, actually accounting machines the size of a desk).
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Moderate repetition becomes persuasive repetition when you build the main innovative presnetation’s message over time. Using the Law of Repetition during the length of a presentation or speech creates a greater familiarity with the message and leads to gradual, yet firm, agreement as the intensity of repetition gradually builds.
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Like any other presentation, with your innovative presentation you want to talk about the current situation (or problem) and the results and benefits that your product or service can bring. During your presentation, you interweave these two positions — present and future — with the other components of an opportunities, results, and benefits (OR&B) presentation, which looks something like this:
Executive summary: Speak to the high-level concerns of your audience, addressing both the present situation and where your product or service will take them.
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People in the room of your innovative presentation may be holding conversations with the person(s) next to them and sometimes talking loud enough for you and others to hear are a distraction to everyone in the room.
People making occasional comments may actually be talking about something you discussed. But if you see a specific person or group repeatedly talking, smiling, laughing, and basically not focusing on your presentation, you have to cut them short — and fairly quickly.
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Whether you call them hostile, inflammatory, or emotionally-charged questions, some of innovative presentation questions are biased and designed to instigate trouble, discredit your points or recommendations, put you on the spot, make you defensive, or even attack your credibility and competence.
Always expect the unexpected attack.
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The world has changed. Besides showing up late for meetings or innovative presentations, many people put their phones on the table in front of them, read and send text messages, surf the web, and check their Facebook page throughout your presentation.
Ray Anthony worked with a special, highly elite U. S. military group (he can’t say which one).
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A powerful way to draw attention in your innovative presentation to an intended part of your text, illustrations, diagrams, photos, or videos is to use other visual attention-getters to precisely emphasize and contrast what you wish. Your imaginative ideas can create almost unlimited ways to do that. Here are just a few examples:
With text, use a different color, font, size, bold, heavy underline, or italic to make it stand out.
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Your innovative presentation's conclusion can be soft-spoken or electric, depending on both your personality and your audience, but every type of conclusion should follow certain guidelines to be effective.
How to conclude, don't include your innovative presentation
If you forgot minor, unimportant pieces of information, don't add them to your conclusion as afterthoughts.
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Use the Law of Effect to activate or change people’s behavior in your innovative presentations. Politicians, sales and marketing professionals, and others who strive to influence and persuade people to act in certain ways use this law.
Edward Thorndike, the psychologist known for his work on animal behavior and learning, developed this law.
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If you are looking for a checklist to incorporate innovative competencies into presentations, look no farther. Here is a list of specific, actionable competencies and performance indicators to guide you and enable you to critique yourself as you head toward speaking excellence.
Don't be intimidated by this checklist!
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Your first step in understanding the potential client for your innovative presentation’s situation is to visit her website. The design and tone of the website gives you insight as to whether you’re dealing with a formal, traditional company, a hip startup, or somewhere in-between.
Read between the lines as if you were an undercover detective.
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An innovative presentation, like a conversation, has at least two people — one who speaks and one who listens. However, both situations need balance. If two people have a conversation and one person dominates it, talking solely about her interests without regard for the other person who passively (supposedly) listens, the listener probably isn’t interested in what the talker has to say, especially after an extended period tolerating a long-winded monologue.
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In training or innovative presentation coaching programs, people often ask instructors, “How can we really do effective eye contact with an audience of 500 to 2,000 or even more?”
The closer you are to someone, for example to your immediate front or close left and right sides, the more that person can detect if you are looking directly at him.
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When you have an upcoming meeting or conference, you have time to prepare your innovative presentation’s message and the accompanying visuals and rehearse what you plan to say. Nonetheless, last-minute and chance meetings happen.
Your boss may call or send you an e-mail at 4 p.m. Monday asking you to present the latest product development schematics to a potential investor at 10 a.
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As intelligent and prepared as executives are for your innovative presentation — or perhaps because of it — they don’t tend to make assumptions or jump to conclusions, so don’t expect them to connect the dots with your information.
The more simple, obvious, clear, and direct you make your presentation, the better your chances of having them appreciate it.
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A senior account manager gives an innovative sales presentation using video, animation, and a live demonstration about his company's latest computer-activated plasma- and laser-cutting tools for steel plate to a defense contractor who builds naval combat ships.
His crisp summary highlights the extra speed, reliability, and precision of his company's heavy-steel cutting machines that results in reduced waste, increased productivity and quality, and the ability to better meet stringent deadlines and budgets — critical components of getting renewed contracts in the defense industry.
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Facial expressions, in relation to innovative presentations, include movements of your eyes, mouth, eyebrows, forehead, chin, and other parts in any combination that can add meaning to the spoken word. Facial expressions are usually an accurate barometer of how a person is feeling.
Smiles, grins, smirks, frowns, grimaces, winks, and raised eyebrows are just a few of the more than one hundred subtle facial expressions that project the attitude and emotional state of a person.
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A category of displays to consider using for those speeches or innovative presentations that warrant them are items that you can buy or build or hire someone else to build.
Here is an example of a display that adds flavor to a presentation. You can place something like this near you or somewhere in the room. Or you can have it as an attractive sign at an entrance beckoning people into a meeting room.
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Entrepreneurial companies love having innovative presentations that are interesting, lively, and creative rather than sleep-inducing and boring. Advertising and marketing companies embrace as much relevant and focused creativity in their presentations to clients as possible.
After all, it’s expected of them! Architects can use subtle innovative touches to highlight and differentiate their firm’s special characteristics and successes.
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Make grand gestures in your innovative presentations by extending your arms far from your body, which enlarges you as a presenter. Use these gestures in front of large audiences to increase your stage presence and charisma. If you want to add dynamics to your body language, expand your gestures outward and animate them as needed.
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You may be impressed with Doceri’s fun, creative user interface. It is probably as a great resource in a classroom setting — either educational or corporate.
You can build an interactive presentation ahead of time or, because Doceri is so simple to use, your iPad or Mac computer becomes an electronic blackboard (or white- or greenboard if you prefer) and you write on the board as you talk, illustrating your point or writing questions and comments from the audience, while facing them.
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Regardless of whether you choose a mild or slightly wild start to your innovative presentation, your introduction should highlight your credibility, professionalism, and expertise and get your group’s ears, eyes, and minds focused on your topic. First impressions can be fragile and that’s why getting it right from the get-go is critical.
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To establish utmost credibility in an innovative presentation, know your information completely and be able to give in-depth facts, statistics, and other data without referring to your slides or notes. Being articulate and organized in your communication without employing slides as a crutch testifies to your knowledge of the situation, the problem, and the proposed solution.
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When you are doing an innovative presentation for the director personality there are some things to keep in mind. Quintessential strong, steel-willed leaders exemplify Directors, who tend to be left-brain dominant people. Some think of these successful people as Type A personalities.
Read the typical characteristics, traits, attitudes, and behaviors that define this take-charge personality and think about who you know who fits the Director quadrant — it may be you:
Focuses on goals, results, action, and achievement
Highly competitive — loves tough challenges to overcome
Forceful, authoritative, commanding (large and in charge)
Wants it all yesterday
Demanding and impatient
Decisive and direct — blunt and opinionated in communication
Exerts control — of self and others
Seeks power, status, prestige
Big (often fragile) ego requiring feeding
Independent and self-sustaining — takes quick initiative
Does not allow himself to show vulnerable emotions or any sign of weakness
Opportunist — a smart risk-taker and methodical innovator
Directors make decisions more quickly than any other personality type — if you present the right type of information to them.
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Thinker types, who may make up your innovative presentation audience, frequent the fields of finance, law, engineering, science, and technology. After Directors, competent and successful Thinkers often occupy the C-suite, running major businesses and organizations.
The extreme left-brain human computer, Mr. Spock from Star Trek, is the epitome of the hyper-cerebral, but detached and impersonal archetype Thinker.
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If you’re giving an innovative presentation to a large group at an association meeting, convention, or trade show, your presentation can be sequential and tightly structured. However, if you give a presentation where you expect a lot of questions or requests for more specific information, such as in a sales situation, your content and visuals need a flexible organization so you can quickly and smoothly respond to changing conditions.
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Important team innovative presentations have something in common with lawyers. Most lawyers fervently believe that a case is won or lost before they ever enter a courtroom because it is the research, analysis, preparation, and strategies that firmly set the wheels in motion for a decisive win.
The more critical the presentation and consequences of it are, the more extensive the time and effort you dedicate to getting ready.
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When you have an innovative presentation, you want it to be successful. The following six steps detail the overall planning process for a successful innovative presentation.
Identify your desired goal.
This is a goal(s) you want to achieve, but don’t yet know whether it’s reasonably possible. First, you must find out more about your audience and the situation you face regarding the topic and other aspects of your presentation.
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Before your innovative presentation, nothing helps more than preparing to answer any and all types of questions. Forewarned is forearmed. When you carefully think through what people might ask, not only will you be able to better answer questions, but you’ll do so with a sense of relaxed and self-assured confidence.
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Perhaps the hardest thing about doing an innovative presentation remotely — whether with active participants in a videoconference or webinar or in a recorded presentation — is not seeing your audience directly. (Studies show that not seeing you, the presenter, in person makes attending remote presentations difficult, too.
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Ever meet someone who is always volunteering for some worthwhile cause and always doing something for others? Then, you’ve met the Affable personality type who you may do innovative presentations for. These sociable, nurturing, and agreeable personalities value interpersonal relationships more than the other three major personality types.
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Given the sales numbers for handheld devices such as smartphones and tablets, it’s highly likely that attendees at a training session with an innovative presentation will have, and bring, such a device. You can use this to your advantage by incorporating surveys, interactive activities, and quizzes into your training presentations.
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After you invest in setting up a small projection system in a conference room, you find many opportunities to use it. Having your own innovative presentations projection system provides a fabulous location for rehearsing presentations that you eventually give on- or off-site. Aside from client and project staff meetings, you can plan team-building and social events such as PlayStation competitions or movie lunch hour.
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An important rule of innovative presentations is to project your voice instead of shouting. Speaking loud by shouting comes across as strained, empty, and unnatural. It may also appear overbearing, harsh, or irritating.
Did you ever wonder how orators in antiquity could be heard by thousands of people without the benefit of amplifying speakers?
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When you begin developing your innovative presentation, think about the main point you want to make and keep reworking it, asking yourself why or how, until it’s solid. Change subjective adjectives into descriptive adjectives. For example, you have an appointment to present your services to a potential client and developing your main point may go something like this:
The company offer great travel services.
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You establish credibility when you communicate directly from your innovative presentation audience’s perspective, priorities, and positions regarding your topic. These analysis factors enable you to customize and tailor your presentation in ways that increase your chances of success. After you answer the following questions about your audience, you can begin to build a profile of the people your presentation caters to:
Group size: Find out how many people will be in attendance.
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You created a list of all expected possible questions based upon your innovative presentation. Still you're likely to get a legitimate question or two that you never considered and that leaves you wondering, "Where did that question come from — out of left field. How did I miss that one?"
Unless you're psychic, you can't anticipate everything, and unless you're omniscient, you can't know everything, although some in your audience may think they do.
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Let’s face it; it’s relatively easy presenting innovative presentations to just one type of personality because you can develop a straightforward strategy to effectively customize your communication. But what if you have to give a business or technical presentation to an audience comprised of all four personality types?
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“Seeing is believing,” as the saying goes. Demonstrations, when performed properly during an innovative presentation, lend proof to your claims, especially with skeptics or cynics.
If you work in sales, marketing, or in a technical capacity, product demonstrations back up and verify your claims about your product being the fastest, most durable, most flexible, easiest to use, lightest, most quiet, or whatever the outstanding capacity places your product or service above the competition.
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Aside from being effective visual tools, a key reason to consider using presentation boards alongside your tricked-out technology-based innovative presentation is variety, change, and redirected attention. Think of your favorite food, one that you love.
As tasty as it is, could you eat it three times a day for days or even weeks on end?
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There are essentially three fundamental strategies you need to know about to effectively deal with objections to your innovative presentations: prevention, analysis, and convincing your audience.
Preventing: Doing a meticulous audience analysis that identifies your audience’s key needs, wants, concerns, risk tolerances, priorities, and preferences goes a long way toward meeting your goals with little or no resistance.
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Like choosing a color palette, choosing a typeface for your innovative presentation can be an exciting, creative task or a daunting one. Typeface styles communicate the tone and intent of your company and presentation. Just by changing the typeface, the style of your presentation can go from juvenile to professional.
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Most audiences of innovative presentations ask mild, inquiring yet nonthreatening, questions. Boardroom presentations tend to generate a lot of questions during the presentation rather than afterwards. Nonetheless, questions are an integral part of any presentation, and you need to devote adequate time and effort to do well in this area.
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With increased travel costs and clashing schedules, you may have trouble reaching the innovative presentation site or find that a key player in the decision-making process can’t attend. Alternatively, you may want to distribute a recording of your presentation and reach a nationwide or international audience in different time zones.
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Something to consider using in your innovative presentations is analogies. French novelist and poet Victor Hugo, who wrote Les Misérables, waxed metaphorical with, “Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.” Deep, isn’t it? Aristotle said “… it (a metaphor) is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblance.
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A low-tech visual for innovative presentations that still has a place in today’s digital world is the flip chart. Flip charts continue to be excellent presentation media, if used effectively in groups of 25 people or fewer. A flip chart is simple, does not require electricity, and is reliable, low-cost, and easy to use.
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Purposely — and purposefully — using the same phrase or term numerous times throughout your innovative presentation emphasizes your talk’s point.In political, social, or other types of speeches designed to arouse, provoke, or galvanize an audience, repetition of key emotionally charged phrases can be deeply effective.
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Why do people intently listen to or watch an innovative presentation with rapt attention or enthusiastically engage in an activity? Obviously because they want to. They’re interested and enjoy doing it. Simple as that.
When people lose interest, they lose attention, concentration, and focus and become bored or distracted.
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Augmented reality (AR) apps enhance what you see and show you more. They can be a great addition to innovative presentations. AR apps insert virtual images in a real environment or give you more information about something you see, such as a video from the tourism board when you point your smartphone or tablet at an ad on the train into town.
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Testimonials in innovative presentations help close business deals with new customers and get approval for internal projects, programs, or strategic changes. It’s one thing when you say that your training business can get stellar results, it’s another when four sincerely satisfied clients brag about what you delivered and describe your team’s stellar performance in very specific ways.
Business Communication
How do you go about reimagining, reinventing, and remaking your presentation to ensure you have an innovative presentation? There are four basic steps to do it. These steps outline the innovation process and are followed by several examples.
Credit: Illustration courtesy of Ray Anthony and Barbara Boyd
Set innovative objectives.
Business Communication
Although you must speak loudly enough for everyone to hear you, you should vary your volume to match your intention. Variety of volume as well as speech rate, tone, and pitch, is key to making your presentation easy and enjoyable to listen to.
Even if you possess a room-filling, bone-rattling baritone voice, without variation, it becomes monotonous and monotone.
Business Communication
Sooner or later in your professional life, you’ll have to give a really important presentation. By focusing on several distinct and unique aspects of creating a presentation (topic selection, audience analysis, visual design, and delivery technology and techniques), you can develop the skills to give innovative, stimulating presentations with consistently positive results.
Business Communication
At some point, everyone has had to sit through boring, pedestrian presentations. You can't expect to have a meaningful impact on your audience if you subject them to a run-of-the-mill presentation. So how do you go about reimagining, reinventing, and remaking your presentations? The following figure outlines the four basic steps.
Business Communication
People automatically reject change of any type — it’s a part of the human psyche and that doesn’t change because of a great innovative presentation. Something new or different, whether it’s starting a novel training program, buying a product or service from a new vendor, restructuring an organization, purchasing a new company, or implementing a different strategy, policy, or procedure creates fear, anxiety, or some kind of mental or emotional discomfort.
Business Communication
In today's polyglot world, a time may come when you're asked to give a presentation to an audience for whom English is not their first language or to give a presentation in a language that isn't your first, but that you know. Either situation can be cause for anxiety, so keep the following in mind when preparing yourself and your presentation for these types of events:
Be aware of gestures that may be acceptable in North America but unacceptable elsewhere.
Business Communication
Here are some tips for team innovative presentations from people who've been on both sides of the podium, so to speak (pardon the pun). Here are some common mistakes that are made in team presentations. In keeping with a positive spirit, the positive thing-to-do counter action is presented along with the common mistake to avoid.
Business Communication
Sometimes two colors — one light, one dark — lend a stark importance to your innovative presentation data. This has become Apple’s signature presentation style. It’s up to you to decide if it fits with your presentation style, because there’s nothing wrong with using color.
In fact, studies of the psychology of color report that colors affect mood, and everyone from package designers to prison architects consider the correct color to use to garner the desired results.
Business Communication
It may not seem like it, but pauses can be just as important to your innovative presentations as the words you are saying. The English poet, writer, and novelist Rudyard Kipling aptly said, “By your silence, ye shall speak.” And as classical pianist Artur Schnabel profoundly noted, “I don’t think I handle the notes much differently from other pianists.
Business Communication
For more than a decade, researchers in the academic field of communications studies have looked at how people learn and tried to identify the best way to relate complex information, especially of a scientific or engineering nature. Dr. Michael Alley, a professor at Pennsylvania State Univerisity and author of The Craft of Scientific Presentations, developed a presentation style called the Assertion-Evidence Structure or AES.
Business Communication
A successful innovative team presentation has a strong, action-oriented leader. Within the company, the leader may have the title of project manager, sales account manager, owner, or executive responsible for a strategic change or innovation. Although the presentation team leader may choose to delegate some of the execution of specific tasks, he takes responsibility for many or all of the following jobs:
Selecting well-suited team members: Typically team members are subject-matter experts who present effectively, or who can at least be coached or trained to present well.
Business Communication
When it comes to answering questions from your innovative presentations, there are good and bad answers. There are some faulty — albeit common — ways that presenters answer questions that you should try your best to avoid:
Switcharoo: Politicians are notorious for ignoring the true nature of someone’s question and instead giving a predetermined answer that does not fit the question.
Business Communication
Varying your volume, rate, pitch, and tone in your innovative presentation makes you sound more natural and more interesting. Here are some tips to help you use the appropriate rate of speech.
When to slow down in innovative presentations
A slower pace can help in these situations:
At the beginning of your presentation.
Practically all presenters and audiences benefit from some degree of innovation in presentations because the speakers achieve superior results and the audiences better understand and buy into what the presenter is advocating.
And, who wouldn’t appreciate attending interesting, relevant, enjoyable, and entertaining talks at work?
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