This presentation is all about me - presentation skills part 1: Food for thought...

As content owner for some of the public facing events at Microsoft, I have the great honor to work with very respectful people in our industry, and big names that drive a significant amount of attendance to their sessions at events.
I also have the great honor to review session content, and presentations prior to events, going through hundreds and hundreds of slides.

The quality of those presentations has significantly improved over the past couple of years, but very frequently it's the eye for detail, the final touch of presentation and a solid delivery that make a huge difference in session feedback and scores.

And if there is something that most presenters care about, it is how great their scores are, because if they wouldn't you should wonder what they would be doing in front of the audience anyways.

That's right, this blog might be a little spiced up and salted, maybe a little peppered up too.

In this first part on presentation skills, I wanted to tackle the "Contact Slide", "About Me", "About the Presenter", "Who Ami" slide that some presenters have in their presentations.

And there is a simple set of rules you can maintain when you think about building your presentations:

1. PowerPoint is not a Word Processor, you can actually use graphics or images to bring a better message

2. The audience is typically there for the content, on which you are a subject matter expert

3. A simple contact slide is sufficient, you don't gain ANY credibility by putting in a detailed about me slide

4. A session breakout presentation is not a "market yourself and put in some promo slides" presentation

5. Stick to the basics, sell on knowledge, not on established or want to have established credibility

6. Keep it simple, if the attendee wants to find out more about you, in nowadays social media, he/she definitely will.

Now what would say more than a presentation, built to showcase on what we talk about, when referring to the overly self-centric, promotional, credibility gaining (or losing) "About me slide".

Attached is the slidedeck, also shared on slideshare -http://www.slideshare.net/dandyman72/food-for-thought-21303418

Now don't let this presentation derail or upset you, I gladly have an open discussion on this topic.

Food for thought.pptx

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Sounds good! There should indeed still be a short overview, that way people can mentally prepare for what is to come.  And get worried if the speaker is still on the first of five items after half an hour :)

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  I typically do an overview slide, guess you can call it an agenda slide and keep it to, we'll cover this, so let's get started.

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Interesting Dandy, but are you saying we shouldn't be doing agenda slides either?  Or just don't spend ages talking about what we're going to talk about a couple of minutes later, but still include them?

• Anonymous
  May 17, 2013
  Goed gezegd, ik zou het niet beter kunnen uitleggen

• Anonymous
  May 17, 2013
  Good one Dandy. I like the slide about "I will talk about this.. and then I will talk about.. and later.." I have seen several presenters describe in great detail and never get to half of those that they promised they will get to.. :)

• Anonymous
  May 22, 2013
  The comment has been removed