Presentation

Trade shows offer a powerful opportunity for manufacturers and service providers to display their products and services. Organizations and individuals spare no effort to put their best foot forward to get a quality audience – people who can actually buy their product or service. And this promotion comes through beautiful and sleekly designed exhibits.

More often, trade fair exhibits offer tremendous opportunities for businesses. Managed effectively, trade exhibits enable companies to showcase and demonstrate new products and services, reach target audiences, generate membership interest and gauge the acceptance for new business services and products. Usually, trade fairs are not open to the public; they are meant for other company representatives as well as journalists. The increasing revolution in consumer products has made trade exhibits very popular across the world. It is es...

I recently came back from the worst travel trip of my life. Although I have traveled all over the world, this was a simple trip to California yet it quickly moved to the top of the "disaster" list. I won't bore you with the gory details but it gave me food for thought about the relevance of business travel and the lessons one can learn.

Lesson # 1:

It doesn't matter about the difficulty in getting there. They fact is that people expect you to show up unless there is a catastrophe. The largest audience ever was there to hear my presentation and they really didn’t care how difficult my ordeal in getting there was; they just wanted to hear what I had to say.

Lesson #2:

It’s not the clothes or the makeup that people come to see, it’s the speaker or expert. I've made presentations in various arrays of dress in the past but this was the first time I gave a keynote i...

The fundamental nature of PowerPoint makes it an ideal selling tool. You have a group of people, stuck in a room, listening to a speaker for an extended period of time -- anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour or more. This enclosed environment exists only for the presenters to sell something, whether it is a product, a service, or an idea.

However, many presenters, especially those with a corporate interest in mind, fail to capitalize on that environment. Think about it. You have a hundred people in a room. They are all listening to you, but they are also watching the giant screen behind you, staring at the messaging, absorbing the graphics. Make the best of their fixed attention by creating brand reinforcement in every slide.

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Using Your Brand

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"Brand" is admittedly an ambiguous term. It encompasses and summarizes every...

As a PowerPoint user, it is sometimes necessary to accurately translate a company's marketing collateral to slide format. Often, this information arrives in the format of a company brochure, or copied blurbs from the website, or a long Word document bogged down with New Age sales jargon and irrelevant "stuffer" copy.

It is your job to find the needles of information in the haystacks of hype, to reduce lengthy paragraphs to mere phrases, to provide your audience with only the information they need to know. Brevity is your goal, bullet points your craft.

When tackling these projects, which can be nothing short of arduous for lengthy documents spread across multi-page presentations, there are some best practices and tactics to make your life easier and the final product better.

1. Read the content several times. Sometimes it takes a few takes to understand exactly what ...

The Art of Oral Presentations

There are not many people who feel very comfortable speaking in front of large crowds, especially unfamiliar audiences. Many people feel very uncomfortable looking up and meeting eyes with a sea of people. At first they begin to speak and there is a crackling sound in their voice. The power to communicate orally is lacking. Nervousness and anxiety takes over rather than calmness and confidence.

If this sounds like you then not to worry; many of us have the same problem. We become nervous when we have to address a group of friends let alone a large group of strangers. The ultimate solution for this is preparation. This contributes to a feeling of confidence. The following are tips which may help in enhancing your presentations.

1. Organize: A good idea is to structure your presentation using the following outline

a. Plan the present...

In my line of work, I find myself constantly producing PowerPoint presentations. Sometimes these are just individual slides (like a diagram or case study), sometimes they are templates, and sometimes they are whole, individual presentations. Most of my PowerPoint work is completed at my day job where I am an in-house designer, but my freelancing alter ego occasionally comes across a client needing some presentational pick-up. Over the years, I have built and edited hundreds of PowerPoint files.

I know a lot of people think PowerPoint is the devil incarnate, but in the corporate world, it is an ubiquitous evil. To shake some of the negative stereotypes, I apply traditional design principals to make my company and clients look better than the competition.

We go to 120 trade shows a year, and we present at every single one. We also use Macromedia's Breeze for hundreds of onli...

One of the toughest kind of speeches to make is an after-dinner speech since everyone will be feeling sleepy after their meal. And worse, they may not even give you their full attention. There are many things that can go wrong and as an after-dinner keynote speaker, there are a couple of things you have to observe in order to be successful or at the very least, to sit down without feeling embarassed.

1. Find an appropriate topic

As a speaker, you have to find a topic that ALL your audience can relate to. And this applies to all kind of speeches, particulatly after-dinner speeches. There are many things that are against you. At most dinners, tables are rounded. That means to say that a percentage of your audience has their back facing you. Circular tables also facilitate small talks which gives them another reason not to listen to you. Your audience's atten...

After you have prepared your presentation, checked all the equipment you need, set out the venue and finalised the guest list you are now ready to give your presentation. This is your opportunity to gain credibility in your career. You must use this opportunity to build your credibility and be accepted as an expert on your subject. This is not as difficult as it may seem.

If you have studied your brief, become totally familiar with your subject and can show confidence when delivering you will be more than half way to achieving your aims. Buyers are impressed when faced with someone who is obviously knowledgeable about his/her subject, so earning their respect. Let us look at some of the situations where you can achieve this. If you are presenting a new product to potential buyers emphasise the features and benefits of the product but make sure you mention benefits not asso...

Using presentation folders for a more professional look in the business world can do amazing things for a business. Presenting something to a client that looks professional and organized will speak volumns about the buisness before the folder is even opened. Taking advantage of the many options of presentation folders allows almost any business, of any size and budget, to use presetnation folders to take their business to the next level.

The look that presentation folders bring to the table can mean everything to a business and a client. Materials that are presented in a neat, professional manner will grab the attention of the client and give them a sense that the business has their stuff together and really knows what they are doing. It is the first impression made on a client and speaks for the business before anything or anyone else does. What is inside can be truly groun...

What is a great presentation? As you might have already seen on the Internet, or read in books, there are many definitions of great presentations. Nevertheless, they all emphasize one point - a great presentation is one which, ideally speaking, completely holds an audience enthralled. It is not entirely true that only great personalities can give great presentations. To develop great presentation skills, which you will need, especially if you are a Six Sigma professional, you need to understand the anatomy of a great presentation.

Anatomy Of A Great Presentation

Unlike written reports where you have a chance to correct mistakes, presentations are a sort of ‘get it right the first time’ business activity. So, a considerable amount of preparation is necessary to make a presentation great.

1. All Great Presentations Are Well Researched and rehearsed in advance. You must...

It has been a while since I played the role of the audience. Last night was one such opportunity. The presenter was an intern from Shanghai and he flew in with his boss to States. His presentation was titled "Life in China" and the purpose of his presentation was to share with us his experiences.

He did relatively well but he also committed several speech crimes which I thought reduce the effects of his presentation. And these crimes weren't really new. Speech coaches and Public Speaking books/e-books/blogs have warned us against committing these seemingly innocent crimes, at the expense of losing your audience. But you know what, people still do it. Instead of reinterating the points, I shall get you into the head of the audience (since I was one yesterday) and perhaps illustrate why you should avoid them.

Crime #1: Not telling us why we should listen...