Business

I am not a branding specialist or a marketing guru, but two areas of promotion that I see most poorly used by professionals are business cards and PowerPoint presentations.  Business professionals seem to set aside their pursuit of excellence when using these tools and are willing to accept mediocrity - which in business is the opposite of being excellent; which is also business death. 

I was amazed at the poor use of PowerPoint by the attorney presenters at the conference I attended in San Francisco last week.  One particular attorney, a leading expert in software licensing and SaaS law transactions, used all capital letters in italics text and different color fonts, loading up each page with words from one margin to the other.  She also did not prepare for the change in formatting that was caused by the lecture center's computer settings - so the lines of the oversized font crunched into each other.  The slides were unreadable.  She apologized on each slide for the illegibility, but at that point it was over.  We were bored, and she had lost her audience.

Here are Seth Godin's points to proper use of PowerPoint:

Bullets Are For the NRA

Here are the five rules you need to remember to create amazing Powerpoint presentations:

1.    No more than six words on a slide. EVER. There is no presentation so complex that this rule needs to be broken.

2.    No cheesy images. Use professional stock photo images.

3.    No dissolves, spins or other transitions.

4.    Sound effects can be used a few times per presentation, but never use the sound effects that are built in to the program. Instead, rip sounds and music from CDs and leverage the Proustian effect this can have. If people start bouncing up and down to the Grateful Dead, you’ve kept them from falling asleep, and you’ve reminded them that this isn’t a typical meeting you’re running.

5.    Don’t hand out print-outs of your slides. They don’t work without you there.

The home run is easy to describe: You put up a slide. It triggers an emotional reaction in the audience. They sit up and want to know what you’re going to say that fits in with that image. Then, if you do it right, every time they think of what you said, they’ll see the image (and vice versa).


~~~~~~~
Also see:

Why I Hate PowerPoint

Purple Cow - Be Remarkable