I was invited by Mike Bovenkamp to present at the ISA District 13 Leadership Council. Despite reduced funding from ISA for DLCs this year, Mike and the Sections in his district are to be commended for putting on a successful event with great topics. I enjoyed meeting everyone there and have great respect for these automation professionals.
My presentation and a transcript can be viewed and downloaded from Slideshare and here:
February 26, Manchester, NH – Inbound Marketing University awards the Inbound Marketing Certification to Jon DiPietro as part of its comprehensive Internet marketing training program (http://inboundmarketing.com).
This certification acknowledges DiPietro’s proficiency in inbound marketing principles and best practices. These principles include: blogging, search engine optimization, social media, lead conversion, lead nurturing and closed-loop analysis.
DiPietro is the owner of Domesticating IT, a technology and marketing consulting company and blog, and author of the upcoming book, “Social Media for Engineers and Scientists: A left-brainer’s manual for an increasingly right-brained world.” He is also the owner and co-founder of Bridge-Soft, a provider of environmental data management software to water and wastewater utilities. DiPietro serves in several positions in the International Society of Automation, including President of the Boston Section, Director-elect of the Water/Wastewater Industries Division as well as participating in the Image & Membership and Strategic Planning departments. He also volunteers for the New England Water Works Association, founding and currently chairing the Social Networking Committee.
DiPietro joins an elite group of Inbound Marketing Certified Professionals. In total, 1,300 individuals have successfully passed the IMU program.
To complete the Inbound Marketing Certification, DiPietro completed 16 in-depth classes covering each facet of inbound marketing and passed a comprehensive certification exam. (View the full list of classes: http://inboundmarketing.com/university/classes)
The courses are taught by a knowledgeable faculty of professors, including New York Times’ best-selling author Chris Brogan, Google’s Analytics Evangelist Avinash Kaushik, Internet celebrity Gary Vaynerchuk, best-selling author and international speaker David Meerman Scott, and more. (View all professors: http://www.inboundmarketing.com/university/professors)
This certification is administered by HubSpot.
About InboundMarketing.com
InboundMarketing.com is an online community and certification program for marketers. The site’s content teaches a new style of marketing that emphasizes business uses of social media, content creation and search engine optimization for marketing. InboundMarketing.com is hosted and moderated by HubSpot, Inc. Register for InboundMarketing.com at http://inboundmarketing.com/user/register.
About HubSpot
HubSpot, Inc. provides Internet marketing software that helps businesses get found online, generate more inbound leads and convert a higher percentage of those leads into paying customers. HubSpot’s software platform includes tools that allow professional marketers and business owners to manage search engine optimization, blogging and social media, as well as landing pages, lead intelligence and marketing analytics. Based in Cambridge, MA, HubSpot can be found at http://www.hubspot.com. HubSpot’s free marketing tools can be found at http://grader.com.
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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 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”:
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.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)
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)
In a recent discussion with ISA leaders regarding how to lessen the number of emails it sends members, the topic of Facebook fan pages came up. The context of this discussion was focused on how ISA could be at least as effective at marketing its publications while reducing the number of emails it sends. I was asked to explain specifically how a fan page compares with email marketing, and I came up with seven advantages:
1) “Opting In” vs. “Not Opting Out”
People must take an affirmative action to “become a fan,” which says a lot more than “I choose not to opt out.” From a marketer’s perspective, these become your top shelf, number one, gold plated prospects. And you treat them that way.
2) Marketing Upside
When someone becomes a fan, all of their friends see it. This has tremendous marketing “up side.” When someone doesn’t opt out of emails, nobody knows and there is zero additional up side.
3) Build a Community
Fans can interact with one another on the fan page, providing book reviews, answering questions, talking about their favorites, etc. This is the very essence of Web 2.0.
4) Analytics
Facebook provides detailed statistics with regard to interactions that occur on fan pages. This makes is very easy to quantify the value of the page over time. Typical email marketing solutions provide counts of the number of times a message is read or a link is clicked. However, Facebook has additional metrics that can measure interactivity and “buzz.”
5) Reach
Fan pages are open to everyone on Facebook (that’s 325 million users) – not just your email database.
6) Demographics
The fastest growing age demographic on Facebook is 35 to 45 year olds. This is a critical demographic for many organizations.
7) Cost
Fan pages are FREE. Enough said.
Let me know if I missed something.
There are man interesting discussions happening right now concerning the International Society of Automation (ISA) and its current travails with regard to its membership, publications, and exposition. For those not familiar with the situation, this volunteer organization has been around for over sixty years and has come upon tough financial times, not unlike most organizations. Two of its major revenue generating enterprises (its InTech magazine and ISA Expo trade show) have declined precipitously and are necessitating major changes.
The dialog is starting to reach a boil with comments like those recently posted on Jim Pinto’s web site by former ISA Executive Director Glenn Harvey. I wanted to focus on just one statement in his response, in which he said “Who knows, but if large numbers of members do not call for change, ISA will keep doing what it has been doing and the results will be the same.” Although I certainly don’t disagree with him, there is a larger message here for institutions in general; in our Web 2.0 world, that’s not the worst thing that could happen to you.
Do-It-Yourself Institutions are possible in the world of Web 2.0
When it comes to institutions like ISA, dissatisfied members used to have two choices; to stay with the institution and either live with it or try to affect change, or to find a better institution that more closely aligned with the member’s needs and desires. If there wasn’t a suitable competitor, then the institutions had very little need or incentive to change or adapt. If competition is a factor, then the institutions would generally react only when and if they started to lose members.
But today there is a third and more unsettling option for these dissatisfied members – they can simply do it themselves. As the transaction costs of building, organizing and managing organizations approaches zero (thanks to the explosion of free Web 2.0 applications), members who are dissatisfied with their institutions can simply go and build their own. Why pour time and energy into fighting an established bureaucracy (an exhausting, sometimes nasty endeavor), when one can instead simply invest the same amount of time and energy into building the institution they wanted in the first place.
If you think I’m overestimating the power of Web 2.0, then you need to read my blog more often (just kidding). But seriously, I’ll illustrate this with two examples. The first is a presentation by Guy Kawasaki about how quickly and inexpensively he was able to launch a company:
The second example is a project on which I’m currently working as IT Director for a NH gubernatorial campaign. I was able to put together an entire IT infrastructure for the campaign that includes staff collaboration tools, shared calendar, web site and email hosting, web site design and development, customer relationship management (CRM), and e-newsletter services for less than $90 per month and under$500 in up front costs. The entire system is cloud-based, which allows the campaign staff to work remotely and eliminates the need for purchasing software licenses.
So, the catch phrase is no longer “If you build it, they will come.” Now, it’s “If you don’t build it, they will.”
