I posting something on Twitter recently which seems to have started a bit of a flurry. I said: “As they say in SEO: Content is King. All presentations need do is get your content over. Less than that wastes content, more wastes effort.”<\/p>\n
Obviously, given Twitter’s character limit of 140 there’s always an element of cutting to the bone, so I thought I’d take a moment to unpack the idea I was getting at in those 140 key-strokes….<\/p>\n
Content is king – for me this is axiomatic for presentations. If you’ve got nothing to say, say nothing. Too many presentations waste my time (and the speaker’s) by being about nothing – or perhaps more accurately about nothing important. Note to all… I don’t consider the speaker’s ego to be anything important.<\/p>\n
Once you’ve established your content, it’s all about getting it to your audience.<\/p>\n
Obviously, it’s great to make a presentation that takes people’s breath away, with each slide, each moment, a work of art – or genius even – but in the real world that’s not always going to happen. To get your information over to your audience you need to put in enough effort, structure and design etc to help both penetration and retention. (Penetration is defined as getting the info into your audience’s heads and Retention is defined as making sure it stays there.) If you don’t do that, then you’re wasting their time and yours. If you do 45 minutes preparation for a five minute presentation but it needed 60 minutes for what you say to stick in your audiences’ head, you’ve effectively wasted the 45 minutes work you did.<\/p>\n
If it needs 60 minutes work, do 60 minutes work.<\/p>\n
So what about doing 75 minutes work then? Surely that extra quarter of an hour will make it stick more? Well if it does, fine and good – do it… but there comes a point where you can’t justify that extra time. It might make it stick a fraction of one percent more if you put an extra 15 minutes work in, but what else could you do in that time?<\/p>\n
I don’t know about you, but in 15 minutes I could write an article that gets more information to more people. I could have a cup of tea and a biscuit. I could play with my kids. I could read a couple of articles by other people. I could proof-read the workbooks for a course…. you get the idea. While ever you’re spending time on your presentation, there’s an “opportunity cost” to be paid – the cost of not<\/strong> doing something else.<\/p>\n Obviously, the most common risk with presentations is actually<\/strong> under-preparation but don’t be fooled into thinking that you need to do so so so so so so muuuchchhhhh preparation. Sometimes all you need to do is ‘enough’. Once you’ve spent time getting your presentation to the standard it needs to be, there’s an issue of something called “diminishing marginal returns”: the first five 20 minutes work you do achieves X amount of output but the second 20 minutes achieves a total of slightly less than two times X and so on….<\/p>\n How much is ‘enough’? That’s up to you and your professional judgement of the material, you, your audience and what else you could be doing in the meantime.<\/p>\n Simon<\/p>\n ps: Yes, yes, I know, I’m over-stating the case but what the heck! :)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I posting something on Twitter recently which seems to have started a bit of a flurry. I said: “As they say in SEO: Content is King. All presentations need do is get your content over. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-key-posts","category-presentation-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}