Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.
Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week. This week’s theme is “Change: Get on Board or Get Run Over.”
#5: Cooks Source Copyright Infringement Becomes an Internet Meme
Speaking of getting run over… This western New England publication became social media road kill for two reasons. First, they were quite obviously and brazenly stealing others’ work. But that alone did not do them in. What really spelled their demise was wanton and arrogant disregard for the power of social media. End result: splat!
Here’s a story about a company who decided to get on the bus a split second before getting run over. It remains to be seen whether or not they’ll be thrown back off but at least they’ve seen the writing on the (Facebook) wall.
The most popular post on this blog is “Create a Compelling Resume Online With WordPress,” which provides a detailed plan for configuring a WordPress blog to act as your personal online homing beacon. I’ve been giving more and more talks about Personal Inbound Marketing lately, and my very strong advice for people is to register their own personal domain and use it for a WordPress blog. Previously, this required two steps using two different companies. Now, you can do it all at WordPress.com. It’s still not the preferred route (I’ll explain why in a future blog post), but it’s great for people who are not very Internet literate.
#2: Old Media Beware: Blogs Rely on Cleverer Tech, Leverage Social Media, Making Bloggers More Money
Blogging isn’t the story here; it’s democratization. The Internet and its Web 2.0 applications are obliterating barriers to entry in lots of markets. Journalism is one of the first, but if you’ve been following Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson, you know that product development and manufacturing are one of the new frontiers.
This isn’t just about SEO. The important message is that asking people what they want is a mistake more often than not. When you’re developing products, this is a huge challenge but when you’re developing web sites it’s a huge opportunity. For example, if you had conducted a massive consumer marketing survey in 2000 that asked Sony Walkman users what features and design elements were missing so that you could build a new, innovative device, the last product you would have come up with is an iPod. As the web site iPod History says, “At first, the reactions were confused and hostile, critics lambasted the $400 price tag, the unconventional scroll wheel and the lack of Windows compatibility. Despite all this, the iPod sold beyond everyone’s expectations, went on to revolutionize the entire music industry, and the rest is history.”
The point is that innovation is pretty risky when you’re talking about product development. It generally takes lots of money to get a new product to market. But with web sites, the risk is much lower and the tail is much longer. Be specific and make sure you offer plenty of flavors.
Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.
Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week. This week’s High Five is a special edition: It lists my top five TED presentations for inbound marketers.
The first rule of inbound marketing is Creating Great Content (PDF). Since you won’t get far without it, and because so few people provide advice on exactly how to create remarkable content (except for this guy), I thought I would share my five favorite talks to help and inspire inbound marketers.
#5: Jacek Utko designs to save newspapers
What happens when an architect is hired to redesign a newspaper? He treats the pages as a canvas for creating posters that tell stories. The inbound marketing lesson is to pay attention to design. And by “design” I mean creating something the world did not know it was missing (Paola Antonelli). This means fully leveraging the form, fit, and function of all of the electronic canvases available to us.
#4: Rory Sutherland: Life lessons from an ad man
Think “45 degrees.” In this talk, Sutherland discusses how to add product value by changing perception – in one case by turning something 45 degrees – and hilarity ensues. It’s worth watching for the entertainment value alone, but the inbound marketing lesson here is that remarkable content can actually add value to your products and/or services by changing their perceptions.
#3: Scott McCloud on comics
Fasten your seatbelt for this one. Scott McCloud whooshes down his road to discovering the answer to the question, “What does a scientific mind do in the arts?” He describes how comics funnel words, pictures and symbols through the single conduit of vision. The inbound marketing lesson in this talk is… well… there isn’t one, there at least a dozen but he covers them so fast you really need to buy his book, “Understanding Comics” to get the full picture (pun intended). I think his lectures and writings are pure marketing and advertising gold for our highly visual Age of Content.
#2: Steve Jobs: How to live before you die
OK, I cheated a bit because, technically speaking, this isn’t a TED talk. But I don’t care because it’s important enough. History will remember Steve Jobs for many things, and his communication skills and persuasiveness will likely be very near the top of the list. In fact, there was a terrific book written on this skill - The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs (highly recommended). His commencement speech at Stanford is well known and has been watched by millions. The inbound marketing takeaway in this talk is simple: it’s simplicity. After a quick, self-deprecating joke about never having graduated college, Jobs gets right to the heart of the matter by saying, “Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.” In all of his presentations and speeches, Jobs is ritualistic about setting expectations up front. He tells you exactly what he’s going to say, continually reminds you where you are in that continuum, and always manages to under-promise and over-deliver. His presentation style is an entire encyclopedia on being remarkable.
#1: Seth Godin on standing out
Who better to teach how to be remarkable than the guy who wrote a book titled “Purple Cow” and marketed it by giving it away in a milk carton? Godin is Remarkable Royalty, the Earl of Extraordinary, the Duke of Different, the King of Compelling, etc… The inbound marketing lesson from this talk is that success “is not always about what the patent is like or what the factory is like. It’s about can you get your idea to spread.” At the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about.
It was just after Christmas and I had some gift cards and a book to return to Barnes & Noble. In the hustle and bustle I left the house without the “wish list” I had printed out, which contained my reading list. Since I would rather spend my time treasure hunting on book shelves than slaloming through post-holiday traffic, I decided to troll. One of the books on my list was to pick up a styles manual, as humdrum as that is. Luckily, however, I saw “The Elements of Story: Field Notes on Nonfiction Writing” by Francis Flaherty and decided to go ahead and purchase it. The good news is that reading this book was a transformative experience. The bad news is that I am now burdened with reviewing a book penned by a New York Times editor.
The Skinny
Why It Rocks:
Flaherty groups fifty rules into seven parts, presenting them with vivid examples and none of the pretentiousness you might expect from a New York Times Editor.
Why It Doesn’t:
At the risk of sounding spineless, the only complaint I have about the book is that there were not a hundred rules.
Who Will Dig It:
Bloggers, of course, but also anyone who needs to write articles, posts, reports, proposals, and any other non-fiction prose.
The Essence
Previously, I had read a few books about visual design. A consistent theme of design is simplicity, which is captured in Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s famous quote: “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” I immediately recalled this quote after Flaherty closed out Chapter 5 by saying, “To write is to choose, which is to exclude.” That’s when the sea parted for me; writing is design using words. The same rules of simplicity, contrast, color, motion, proximity, etc. apply to writing as well. With this in mind, I began to think of writing in a whole new context.
Flaherty groups his fifty rules into seven groups:
A Human Face
“Every story, even the driest, has a human face. Draw it well and put it on display, for to readers it is a mirror and a magnet.”
The Theme
“The writer must be loyal to his major theme. He must study all its facets, and he must tamp down other topics that threaten to displace or diminish it.”
Motion
“Good stories are a brisk journey, and the reader can always feel the breeze in his hair.”
Artfulness
“The artful writer sees what others see. He just sees it in a drawn-fresh way.”
Truth and Fairness
“Writing is an art, and art bestows a license. But the license is a limited one, and it never sanctions material omission or unfair play.”
Leads and Other Article Parts
“Leads and settings, transitions and kickers: Each part of an article demands its own peculiar art.”
The Big Type
“Titles and subtitles are turbocharged text. They are your work distilled.”
I would not argue strenuously if you said it’s a bit lazy of me to reproduce the Table of Contents here. However, part of the charm and lure of this book is Flaherty’s masterful use of words and particularly the economy with which he employs them. Therefore, I felt it would be most effective for his work to speak for itself at least a little.
The Verdict
I found “The Elements of Story” to be as enjoyable as it was informative. Flaherty’s writing style is easy on the brain and ripe with understated – almost British? – humor. I consider it required reading for bloggers and strongly encourage anyone interested in improving their writing craft to give it a read.
PowerPoint doesn't kill people, bad presentations kill people.
I used to think I was pretty good at creating presentations. I took a business communications class in graduate school and learned the same old rules; limit your fonts, three to seven bullet points, don’t read your slides, blah blah blah. I withstood others’ horrible presentations, invisibly smirking and silently mocking the 250 word novels slides with their horrifying color schemes and monotone, stammering presenter. I congratulated myself on not being “that guy.” But the truth is that I was just as guilty of Really Bad PowerPoint as anyone else.
Then I read Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds and everything changed. My goal in this blog post is nothing short of paying forward that same change, and so I’m using myself as a case study to show what my presentations used to look like, what they look like now, and what I aspire them to be in the future.
But before we go down that road, in case you’re dubious about whether or not really bad PowerPoint is a problem, here is a presentation that Guy Kawasaki put together that was used as the forward to Presentation Zen.
The Presenter As Storytellter
The number one lesson I’ve learned is that “slides do not a presentation make.” Rather, they are simply a prop for the story you’re telling. The following slide show contains a series of before and after shots from the same presentation, which I completely overhauled after reading Presentation Zen. They illustrate the first major change; move the narrative off of the slides and into the oratory.
Once the presentation is transformed from a distraction to a storytelling prop, the burden of communication falls on the story itself. Based on the recommendation in Presentation Zen, I also read “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive And Others Die.” This indispensable book presents six principles that make stories “sticky.” It’s invaluable to crafting messages of all sorts, not just creating presentations. Whether writing an email, composing a blog post, or crafting a memo outlining your thoughts on your organization’s next mission statement this book will help you do it more effectively and memorably. These six principles can be represented by the acronym “SUCCESs”:
Simplicity
Unexpectedness
Concreteness
Credibility
Emotions
Stories
The Presenter As Designer
Duh. That’s the one word that best describes how I felt while reading Presentation Zen. Reynolds eloquently and convincingly makes the case that design is important, poorly understood, and badly implemented (by and large). Those were the “duh” moments, as I realized that those are all true and that I had never realized it or paid much attention previously. But next came salvation, as basic design principles and techniques are presented that make it possible to learn how to improve design. Imagine that – you can actually learn how to design! Looking back, I can’t believe that design wasn’t part of the core curriculum for my engineering degree or any of the computer science tracks I’ve seen. And now that we live in the age of Web 2.0 where we are all content producers, it seems to me that it should be required in all college programs. But I digress.
Reynolds begins by stressing simplicity, balance, noise suppression, and space. These are all related and as I look back on my old presentations it seems as though I was deliberately violating as many of these guidelines as possible on every slide. Take the slide shown below, for example. This is not simple at all; there are too many ideas at once and even the screen shot, while appropriate was still complex and distracting. The layout is completely unbalanced and top-heavy. The slide template is noisy with lines and the “ISA” logo implanted in the corner of every slide. Finally, there is a small amount of empty space on the slide, but it is concentrated in one corner and looks more like something is missing. They eye darts around this slide searching for meaning with no help provided from the design.
My personal design renaissance has begun with what Reynolds calls “The Big Four:” contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity. I’ll now provide examples from my own presentations on how I’ve implemented these principles.
This slide uses contrast in two different ways. The first is the color contrast between the dark gray background and the pure white text. The words jump off the page in way that bullets never can. The second use of contrast is the emphasis of the words “interesting” and “boring” by changing the font size. For some reason we seem to be afraid to make things BIG enough or bold enough.
One of the central themes of this particular presentation was the abundance of free tools available on the Internet in our Web 2.0 world. Therefore, I made use of design repetition by placing the “Free” price tag graphic element on eight consecutive slides in the exact same spot. I also made sure to emphasize this in my delivery by asking the audience to guess how much each solution cost. Of course, the answer was the same and the audio and visual repetition made sure that this point would be driven home. Plus, the audience had fun with it.
Alignment stresses the importance of making objects appear as if they were placed in a particular place deliberately, rather than simply thrown anywhere there was space available. This slide aligns the letters of an acronym quite deliberately to show their relationship. While this is a good example of alignment, I’m not sure it’s a great example of contrast, balance, or noise. I’m sure there is a better way to present this idea, so I will keep tinkering.
This title slide demonstrates the use of proximity. The graphic and title are strongly related and so they are grouped together in close proximity. My name, company, and position are also grouped together and separated from the title in order to distinguish and de-emphasize them. You can also see elements of contrast and alignment in play here as well.
The Presenter As Heretic
Alas, as much as I believe all of this makes sense, it remains heresy to create a PowerPoint presentation that does not utilize the prescribed template or can’t be used as a handout. If you look at most of my presentations now, they are completely useless without the presenter and that’s exactly as it should be. Nonetheless, many conferences are still beholden to the same formula of “Email me your presentation three days in advance so that we can print them out.” Adopting this approach means that you need to create your own handouts that contain the substance of your presentation and not just the props. This all takes more work, but it’s worth it for you and your audience. My recommendation is to write the document in Word, then upload it to Scribd (or Posterous or other similar service) so that you can embed it in web pages and blog posts and also increase your online visibility. Leveraging Social Media & Internet Technology (Handout)
Looking Ahead
While my presentations are a night and day difference from what they used to be, the one thing for certain is that I still have a long way to go. I’m continuing to hone my public speaking skills (which I still think are not very good) and currently enjoying “Confessions of a Public Speaker” by Scott Berkun. I’m simultaneously thumbing through Nacy Duarte’s “Slide:ology,” which is not merely informative; it is incredibly beautiful, mesmerizing, and inspirational. I now look upon each public speaking engagement with excitement and optimism of not merely meeting the challenge, but improving each and every time. I’m looking for an end result that comes close to something like this…
Photo credits:
“death-by-presentation” from HikingArtist.com on Flickr (Creative Commons)
