George Torok, a colleague of Peter, coauthored The Secrets of Power Marketing? with him. During an interview with George, he shared their system to creating a presentation about their book.

·  Analyze the purpose (i.e. what was the purpose of the presentation) – 50% of their time

·  Anticipate the audience (i.e. what did the audience need to know, how would they feel about the content and would they understand it) – 30% of their time

·  Adapt the message (i.e. create a message that the audience could relate to by making the message clear and simple to understand, don’t speak down to them, don’t be arrogant in your knowledge and don’t use technical language) – 20% of their time

What does this all mean?  To summarize Torok, this means that to create an effective presentation, you must know why you are giving a presentation and who your audience is. Once you have determined these two key components, then writing should come easy because you now have a road map on what you need to say and how you need to say it.  (Guffey, Rhodes, Rogin, n.d.)   

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At first, I didn’t agree with this message.  Why would I spend most of my time thinking about the purpose and anticipating the audience’s reaction? Isn’t it more important to figure out what you want to say? I usually jump right into writing a presentation without much thought to the audience and maybe not enough thought to the purpose. This is because I just want to get it finished. However, after thinking about this for a while, it started to make more sense.  Having a well-developed purpose and knowing who your audience is should make it easier to write. Why? As a simple example, if you’re creating a presentation to college students versus business professionals, you really have to know what the purpose of the presentation is. Is it to inform or is it to teach or is it something else? You also have to know your audience because they have different needs and different views on the subject and will have different questions and may even apply the information differently. Once you know this, it will be easier to write the presentation because your purpose will be clear and you will know what your audience needs to hear.

So the next time that you need to prepare a presentation, are you going to approach it differently? Try George’s advice and let me know how it goes for you.

      Check out this new video!  It is about John Douglas Jefferys, a well-known presentator, who demonstrates and talks about some things you can do to improve your presentation skills.  He uses humour to catch the audiences' attention, and the video displays synchronized words about presentation topics on screen to help viewers of the video follow along.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whTwjG4ZIJg&feature=related


Reference:

Guffey, M, Rhodes, K., Rogin, P. (2011). Business Communication: Process and Product. (Canadian 6th ed.)  Toronto, ON: Nelson. Chapter14