Episode #122: Presentation Visuals Mastery Part Three

We are continuing our in depth series on mastering presentation visuals.

When you have a presentation to give, always get to the venue early and run your slides through their projector, on their screen, in that venue. You can spot trouble immediately and make any final adjustments you need to make there and then. Often the environments are different in a way that is not helpful. This happens when you are using different computers. For example, at work I am using a Windows environment but at home I have a Mac environment. When I do things on PowerPoint on my Mac and then I take it to my desktop at work, it looks different on screen to my expectation. Something in the formatting processes changes. It is a mysterious thing to me, as to why it changes, but it changes.

So be very careful when you are shifting formats through using other people’s computers. Particularly if you are taking a USB, a disk, etc., and you stick it in the venue’s computer and then suddenly, boom! All your formatting has changed and you’ve got no time to do much about it. So always go early if you are going to use their computer, with your USB or whatever, and check, check, check.

The visuals must have some relevancy to what you are presenting. Make sure it is not surplus or distracting or competing with the message. If you have something that is really exciting on the screen, very interesting, make sure you, the presenter, doesn’t get lost in the proceedings. Particularly if you are presenting video, be very careful that the video doesn’t overrun what you’re doing. Don’t allow the video to take over the whole presentation. Use video sparingly.

It’s sad for me to see CEO’s, of major corporations, get up there and go straight to the video. They always start off their talk very passively, because they know they are just there to introduce the corporate Propaganda Department’s efforts. They miss such a huge opportunity to build a dynamic first impression, to connect with their audience, to really put their stamp on the talk. They go straight to the video, because they don’t like presenting. Or they’re not confident. Or they think somehow, that sort of dross corporate video is going to be so riveting for an audience, that the video alone is going to sell the whole message. No, no, no. You sell the message. That is job number one or the speaker. The video is a slave. The video is a servant to you. Use it as an adjunct, as supplement, not as a substitute for you. There is no substitute for you actually. You are the main thing and make yourself the main thing.

Electronic backup is good. Depending on the event, it is not a bad thing to have a second laptop there, primed and ready to go. Because things do go wrong. Have a back up USB with the presentation there. Things do go wrong. Recently I was at a presentation, and the actual IT guy himself was doing part of the presentation and he couldn’t get his presentation equipment to work. So now we audience members, have got a semi sparse balding pate confronting us. His head is crouched down over the keyboard, like a mechanic under the bonnet of a car, trying to fix the engine. His patchy, balding pate is facing us, as he is trying to get the computer to work. Not his best look probably. Things do go wrong, even for IT people who are experts in this area. So don’t think it’s always going to be perfect. Arrive early and be ready for trouble.

Don’t let the visuals capture you. Capture your audience instead. How do we do that? With an audience, there are lots of things we can look at. We can turn around and look at the screen behind us. We can look down at our screen on our laptop in front of us. We can look at our notes on the lecturn. Don’t do that. We should not be looking much at any of those things. We should be looking at our audience.

We should be breaking our audience up into pockets of six sectors. Baseball has the answer. You’ve have left field, center field and right field. So there’s three basic brackets that you can break your audience up into. Audience on my left, audience at my center, audience on my right. I’ve also noticed they have what they call the inner field and the outer field. So that inner field might be the front half of the venue. The back half is my outer field. So now left, center right. I’ve got front and back. That creates six pockets.

The key is to try and involve the audience members sitting in all six pockets. Don’t just look continuously at the left side of your audience. Similarly, don’t just look at the right side of your audience. Don’t look at the front row and ignore everyone else. We have all seen speakers do this and they are disenfranchising large swathes of their audience as a result.

Take your eye contact and involve every single group throughout your presentation. Try and look at an individual sitting on one of those sectors, for about six seconds. Less than that means it looks like fake eye contact. Too much more than that six seconds and it gets a bit intrusive. So six seconds is a good enough period of time to be making a comment. You have been looking at an audience member in one pocket and then you switch and look to another pocket. Don’t do it by numbers like a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 in order, left to right. Break it up. Look left to right randomly. Look for different sectors so it is not predictable.

Keep that audience eye contact and occasionally glance at the screen, but keep the main contact with your audience. Remember, the audience is the key thing. Your monitor of your laptop will tell you what is on screen, so you can refer to it without having to look backwards at the big screen. Although, sometimes for me, I prefer to present without glasses. I will sometimes use the big screen to just check what is being shown rather than my monitor on my laptop. But I try not to spend too much time looking at the big screen. Just glance at it and talk to my audience.

We will continue on next week with Part Four.