

Presentation Mistakes Everyone Makes - d99kris
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/12/avoid_these_five_mistakes_in_y.html

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RyanZAG
Isn't a lot of this based heavily on the audience?

If someone was giving me a presentation on a product using these five 'goals',
I'd personally be very reluctant to consider that product.

Take the cloud issue she brings up, and she is giving a presentation on some
new cloud data storage. She recommends focusing on "help remote colleagues
coordinate disaster relief efforts and save lives". Feels a bit far-fetched
that cloud data storage is going to help with that, and I'd dismiss that line
of reasoning out of hand and be much less likely to purchase than if she just
stuck to the facts.

Same for partnership - 'Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers' ?? I'd spend the rest
of the presentation trying to work out why someone would choose something so
vague when they can use an obvious handshake image.

Same for jargon - if you're selling a cloud data system and you're speaking
without any essential jargon such as 'uptime' or 'automatic failover', I'd
probably dismiss your presentation outright.

I can give you one presentation mistake that she seems to get wrong: "Know
your audience, and pitch your presentation to what they need to hear".

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DannyBee
How about including "drawing people's eyes to the presentation for random
visual reasons, instead of getting them to focus on you" as a mistake, instead
of saying "use better pictures" like #3 does.

It's one thing to include good visuals for graphs/things you want people to
focus on while you explain the slide.

It's another to have visuals for things like "partnerships" or "security".
That would be the part where you are supposed to be talking, and want people
focusing on you.

It's funny that this comes right after the point about asking too much of your
slides.

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jvdh
If you include visuals in your slides, you should do so sparingly. The whole
purpose of a slide is to _support_ your presentation, not to be _the_
presentation. The focus should always be on you, only briefly on the slides
and then almost immediately back to you again.

The only exception to this is if you're describing some deeply technical
process, and even then you should be in front of your slide, explaining
things, et cetera.

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gmac
I disagree, in that I think that use of rich visuals can be really
captivating; but your way can work too.

One thing that can be really effective is to use blank, black slides when you
want the audience back. It's amazing how completely that switches everyone's
attention back to the speaker.

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jvdh
If you really want to improve your presentations, just get "Presenting to
win"[0]. It's a very good book, provides decent advice on how to craft your
presentation, to captivate the audience and to think about what exactly it is
that you want to convey and how best to do that.

[0]: [http://www.amazon.com/Presenting-Win-Telling-Updated-
Expande...](http://www.amazon.com/Presenting-Win-Telling-Updated-Expanded)

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dhimant
Didn't quite find anything noteworthy in that article. I am in fact surprised
that such an article can feature in HBR.

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jacques_chester
Serious question:

Does anyone know of research on this?

Not opinions. Research. Decent research on retention, comprehension etc.

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DannyBee
Don't be silly, there's no need for research, after all "Her team at Duarte,
Inc., has created more than a quarter of a million presentations for its
clients and teaches public and corporate workshops on presenting. "

Honestly though, there is surprisingly little real research i can find on
presentations, but it could be all the general + journal search engines i'm
using are having issues trying to understand the query.

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jacques_chester
I'd also be interested in research on graphs or charts, if you've seen any in
your travels.

It just strikes me that so much of this stuff is straight-up opinion. And we
know from other fields (eg: advertising) that what we _prefer_ may not be the
same as what _works_.

