Do Your Slides Pass the Glance Test? - Nancy Duarte by Nancy Duarte | 11:00 AM October 22, 2012 An audience can’t listen to your presentation and read detailed, text-heavy slides at the same time (not without missing key parts of your message, anyway). So make sure your slides pass what I call the glance test: People should be able to comprehend each one in about three seconds. Think of your slides as billboards. Keep It Simple Research shows that people learn more effectively from multimedia messages when they’re stripped of extraneous words, graphics, animation, and sounds. So when adding elements to your slides, have a good reason: Does the audience need to see your logo on each slide to remember who you work for? It’s also important to stick to a consistent visual style in your slide deck. Consider the “before” slide below. Instead, streamline the text and incorporate simple visual elements (and save teleprompter text for the “notes” field, which the audience can’t see). Flow. Contrast. White space. Hierarchy. Unity.
5 Keys to Connecting with Your Customers on Facebook It’s a lot easier than you might imagine. As you enter the world of Facebook social marketing, you may worry that it will both complex and challenging. That concern deepens when you have to wade through marketing jargon terms like The marketing reality is much simpler as soon as you translate gobbledygook words into meaningful ones. is just jargon that means you need to engage with your customers. Most marketers understand the need to engage with their customers. #1: Provide a Solid Reason to Go to Your Fan Page Why would anyone visit your page? #2: Converse with your customers Engage people in conversation by providing exciting content, by asking for your customers’ opinion, by genuinely seeking their input out the direction of your business, etc. You don’t have to launch a new online business to accomplish this. #3: Make it Easy for Them to Connect How easily can your customers engage with you? Do ask fans for their opinions, but respond promptly to all opinions—good and bad.
Organization & Preparation Tips | Garr Reynolds Official Site Before you even open up PowerPoint, sit down and really think about the day of your presentation. What is the real purpose of your talk? Why is it that you were asked to speak? What does the audience expect? In your opinion, what are the most important parts of your topic for the audience to take away from your, say, 50-minute presentation? Before you begin to formulate the content of your presentation, you need to ask yourself many basic questions with an eye to becoming the best possible presenter for that particular audience. Who is the audience? What are their backgrounds? What is the purpose of the event? Is it to inspire? Why were you asked to speak? What are their expectations of you? Where is it? Find out everything you can about the location and logistics of the venue. When is it? Do you have enough time to prepare? No matter how great your delivery, or how professional and beautiful your supporting visuals, if your presentation is not based on solid content, you can not succeed.
The lecture I recently wrote that Understanding by Design is agnostic about any specific method or pedagogy. The bottom-line question has to do with validity: given the goals, what follows? Thus, it makes little sense to say “I never lecture” or “I always do authentic assessments” as if it were a question of ideology or personal taste. As educators, we should use the methods that best work to achieve our goals. To that end, let’s consider as dispassionately as possible the oldest instructional method in formal education: the lecture. As the etymology of the word suggests, the original lectures were readings. What could not be more obvious as efficient pedagogy? A deeper look at pedagogical purpose. Here are a few commonly-given reasons for lecturing: Students need to know core information. In a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the value of lectures, Robert Talbert proposed the following purposes for which lectures are well suited: Modeling thought processes. Backward Design.
The 7 Cs of building a social media strategy After using social media for a while, a lot of people and companies decide that they need a strategy. Of course, that approach is like putting the cart before the horse. To ensure success, think about your social media strategy in the context of the seven Cs. 1. Like all good communication, it is best to start by determining your target audience. For example, one of their top social media communities for a business-to-consumer brand such as Oreo is Facebook. Finding out where your community interacts on social media is the first step of a successful social media strategy. 2. After you figure out how your community engages with social media, you should determine what content you’re going to share with your followers. For example, if you want to grow your personal brand, what articles are you going to share to highlight your expertise about your job or personal interests? To learn more about the importance of content, you may want to read the Content Marketing Institute blog. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
About Us Four things lecture is good for - Casting Out Nines A lot of my posts here are about alternatives to the traditional lecture-oriented classroom. Based on that, and on somewhat testy comments like these that I leave lying around the internet, you might get the idea that I am firmly anti-lecture. But that’s not entirely true. There are times and places where lecture works quite well, even better than the alternatives. Here are a few purposes for which I think lecture is well-suited: Modeling thought processes. Notice that what I don’t include in this list is the one thing that lectures seem most commonly used for: information transfer. Notice also that I do not count whether a lecture is inspiring or not. But while running an entire class in the lecture format is probably not best for students, lectures do have their place, and when it makes sense to give one, we should do so with clarity, organization, and rhetorical skill. Image:
Publications How Do You Value Your Brand's Social Connections? 09/11 In today’s digital marketing world, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest have become a powerful identity and communications grid that establishes intelligent connections between marketers and their prospects and customers. It is crucial to understand how social connections overlap with your internal prospect and customer databases, how these segments differ, and how they can affect business outcome. Indeed, social connections tend to be worth more. In Syncapse’s benchmark study “The Value of a Facebook Fan: An Empirical Review,” which evaluated 20 of the world’s leading brands, our team found that: On average, fans spend an additional $71.84 on products for which they are fans compared to those who are not fans. Fans are 28% more likely than non-fans to continue using the brand. Knowing the value of your social connections becomes the foundation for understanding and optimizing direct social marketing investments as well as larger integrated marketing strategies.
4 Marketing Hazards to Avoid In their book No B.S. Guide to Marketing to Leading-Edge Boomers and Seniors, marketing experts Dan S. Kennedy and Chip Kessler offer small-business owners a handy guide to targeting the leading-edge boomer and senior market. In this edited excerpt, the authors outline four errors that can crash your well-planned marketing campaign. There are specific hazards in communicating with and building trust with leading-edge boomers and seniors. Related: Why Should Your Customers Trust You? 1. 1. Assume you're a financial advisor and your prospect brings up the matter of gold. These are the kind of land mines waiting for you to step on them. 2. As a matter of fact, it’s a bad idea to assume anything. 3. Formative experiences for the leading-edge boomer include the Cold War and nuclear threat, the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, the draft, the assassination of JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King, Jr., the sexual revolution, and Watergate. Related: 5 Tips for Boomer-Friendly Retail Design 4.