PowerPoint whys and hows

Public speaking coach (and Facebook friend) Nick Morgan recently published 10 Rules for Creating Successful Power Point Presentations. He gives a comprehensive and practical guide based on one major principle: slides are for illustrating. Not for explaining. Not for describing. Not for selling. Explaining, describing, and selling are the speaker's job. The slides are there to make a visual impression that reinforces the audience's reaction to what the speaker is saying.

Things that belong on slides:

• Photographs
• Charts and graphs
• Single numbers

Things that do not belong on slides:

• More than five words at once
• Agendas describing the presentation

This is all great advice for PowerPoint presentations that are being used to accompany a speaker. But I've worked in many organizations where PowerPoint is also used to create presentations and proposals that are intended to be read on their own, either after a live presentation or in lieu of one. For the audience's sake, though, we need to respect the difference between PPTs created for different purposes... which means resisting the urge to give a live presentation using slides created for private reading.

So what about those presentations that are meant to be consumed without a speaker? Ideally, those should be illustrative too. Consider the effective, cheeky and pleasing "What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later" by Marta Kagan. Agree or disagree with its conclusions, this piece demonstrates that speakerless slides don't have to mean blocks of text, lists, and bullet points:

What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later

View more documents from Marta Kagan.

Try writing a press release without these 10 words

Robin Wauters at TechCrunch let loose this weekend with a list of "10 Words I Would Love To See Banned From Press Releases." The rundown:

1. Leading/leader
2. Best/most/fastest/largest/biggest/etc.
3. Innovative/innovation
4. Revolutionary
5. Award-winning
6. Disruptive/disruption
7. Cutting/bleeding-edge
8. Next-generation
9. Strategic partnership
10. Synergy

I have to admit that I've used almost every one of these words in at least one press release since I started in PR.*

Wauters' points about these terms are mostly spot-on: if you have to say outright that your client is a cutting-edge, innovative, bleeding-edge leader in their industry, you probaby have not done a good enough job legitimately demonstrating what makes them so. Award-winning matters to no one other than the company that won the award. Disruptions and revolutions are presumptuous to predict in advance, and next-generation is usually just a self-aggrandizing way of saying new.

So why do companies and their agencies keep using these words in press releases? I think it's often a combination of two factors:

1. They're writing a release about something that doesn't really warrant one.
   If you've got truly interesting, head-turning, game-changing news, it should be easy to write about it without resorting to meaningless hype phrases. If it's difficult to communicate the importance of your news without these words, it's probably not incredibly newsworthy - at least, not to the mainstream media. It could still be newsworthy to customers, investors, or a small group of trade journalists... why not make the announcement through a blog post, newsletter, or personalized pitch instead?
2. They're trying to justify having written a release by overstating the importance of the announcement.
   Some companies just plain want to issue a press release, whether for better search engine optimization, for beefing up the "press" section of their website, or just for making the CEO smile. These are all perfectly acceptable reasons to put out a release, for some companies... but for some in this situation, there is a pressing need to rationalize the time it's taken them to write, revise, and get approval on a press release, and the cost of distributing it. What's so wrong with just sharing the facts? If you're uncomfortable putting out minor announcements without calling them "revolutionary," you'll risk diluting the impact of your more noteworthy announcements by earning a reputation with journalists as The Agency Who Cried Innovation.

* The one I've never used is "synergy." Do people really do that?

Why apostrophe abuse make's respecting the writer impossible

This wall is to educate visitors about Navy Pier "and It's Gigantic Ferris Wheel."Seth Godin posted the other day about my absolute least favorite thing in the written world: flagrant apostrophe misuse. Says Godin:

When I get a manuscript or see a sign that misuses its and it's and quotes, I immediately assume that the person who created it is stupid.

I understand that this is a mistake on my part. They're not necessarily totally stupid, they're just stupid about apostrophes.

It's a moral failing on my part to conflate the two, but I bet I'm not the only one.

Unlike Godin, when I see an apostrophe misused in a professional or commercial context, I don't immediately assume that the writer is stupid. I assume something much worse: that the writer is not stupid. That the person knows that well-established guidelines on apostrophe use exist, but simply doesn't care enough to learn or adhere to those guidelines - or worst of all, is actively resisting adherence to those guidelines because they're "too complicated."

Personally, I find maps and navigation "too complicated." I have a terrible sense of direction, seriously deficient spatial skills, and an uncanny ability to get lost within a one-mile radius of my own home.

I could probably get better at this if I learned some tricks and devoted some practice, but frankly, it's not that important to me, and it's not necessary for most of what I do every day. But if I were a pilot, or a U.S. Marine, or an ambulance driver, I'd never be able to keep my job if I refused to address this deficiency. And yet, this is exactly what happens when people whose job it is to use written language throw up their hands and say, "I give up. I'm so confused. It's too complicated."

Nope, can't respect that. Sorry.

Of broadcasts and boats

This post was originally published on PR Nonsense, for March Communications.

As the self-appointed supervisor of new media engagement (a title I made up exactly one moment ago) at March, I’m often called upon to explain to colleagues and clients alike what blogging is all about. “We need to get into blogging!” they say... much in the same tone that I might suggest “I need to start investing!” with nary a clue as to how it works beyond the most basic conceptual level.

So it was with satisfaction and a tinge of glee that I stumbled through M3’s Green Data Center Blog onto this brilliant article by Andrew Sullivan in The Atlantic: Why I Blog. It is not a short article, but I implore you to read it – take it on the train with you... here’s the printer-friendly version.

Sullivan, a journalist, is able to get to the heart of blogging in a way that we in PR can understand:

[...] the key to understanding a blog is to realize that it’s a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks.

Think about broadcasting versus publishing. This makes intuitive sense for most of us – obviously a blog is more akin to a 24-hour news channel than a weekly (or even daily) paper... and yet, I still see people every day of the week approaching blogging as if they’ve been tasked with writing a doctoral thesis. First comes the idea, then comes about a week of procrastinating, then a draft, then revising, approving, waiting, worrying... Sullivan describes what happened when he finally got into the swing of “broadcast publishing” at Slate:

I wrote as I’d write an e-mail—with only a mite more circumspection. This is hazardous, of course, as anyone who has ever clicked Send in a fit of anger or hurt will testify. But blogging requires an embrace of such hazards, a willingness to fall off the trapeze rather than fail to make the leap.

The number of bloggers who make careless faux pas in content or tone is dwarfed by the number of bloggers who never get anything published because they’re too busy hemming and hawing over whether it’s good enough. It’s good enough. Do it. Now.

As for why we should bother in the first place – what makes broadcasting better than publishing, what makes online better than print, Sullivan appeals to the connective properties of blogging:

A blog, therefore, bobs on the surface of the ocean but has its anchorage in waters deeper than those print media is technologically able to exploit. It disempowers the writer to that extent, of course. The blogger can get away with less and afford fewer pretensions of authority. He is-more than any writer of the past-a node among other nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and the track-backs that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation, rather than a production.

Everything you broadcast online is woven into the fabric of the global discussion of that topic. This post is not a lone scrap of cloth – it is sewn into other material about the philosophy of blogging, about Andrew Sullivan, about The Atlantic, about Slate and beyond – an integrated piece of the quilt of discourse. It’s not all about you. But you are a part of it.

Neat, huh?

They give me a maximum allowance of four mixed metaphors per post here, so I’m out!