The great websledge

aka the art of the 3 minute presentation

The websledge present­a­tion is on slide­share, it has had a couple of minor addi­tions (ie what I should of added earlier). But it really needs an audio track, because the words are far more import­ant than the slides, plus you miss the cheer from the staff of one web design com­pany when they find the have not been left out. I will let you know if the video goes online.

Cre­at­ing a 3 minute present­a­tion for Web­Jam is harder than cre­at­ing a 30 minute present­a­tion for another event. Your present­a­tion can not any fat, it has to be tight, slick and without any extraneous mater­ial or slides. Mine was far from per­fect, but com­pared to the oth­ers on the night, I think it was one of the best in terms of present­a­tion, con­tent well that was another matter.

Ignor­ing the fact that stun­ning con­tent should win, and Scouta def­in­itely deserved too, I expec­ted Myles to do bet­ter with CTR because that really inter­ested me. I want to dis­cuss a few ways of improv­ing your present­a­tion for the next Web­Jam. And yes you need to present at the next WebJam:

• It is a great learn­ing experience.
• Once you presen­ted to 100 of your beer drink­ing peers, any other present­a­tion is a piece of cake.
• Even if you man­aged to stuff up, it is only a max­imum of 3 minutes of disaster.
• You learn the art of strip­ping down your present­a­tion to the bare minimum.
• If you thought the atmo­sphere was elec­tric in the crowd, it was intox­ic­at­ing on stage.
• Trust me you just need to do it for the buzz.

Pick your topic well in advance, be it a cool pro­ject, some­thing you are pas­sion­ate about or some crazy hair brained scheme. Research it well, col­lect screen shots, look at dif­fer­ent ways to present the same material.

Look at ways at inject­ing a little humour or a little crowd inter­ac­tion into the present­a­tion. Because that what works, well at least in gath­er­ing votes. I am sure Scouta would of won by a big­ger mar­gin, if Richard said that dot rep­res­ents my (or some­body in the crowd) recom­mend­a­tions and make a fun com­ment. Then picked another dot and explained it was a pod­cast or video that people knew, explained how pop­u­lar it is and why it was or was not linked to a par­tic­u­lar per­son, in a humor­ous way.

Visu­als, as a presenter you are stuck behind a desk you need some­thing to keep their eyes occu­pied, so unless you are dan­cing the best way is with a demo, slides or video. You don’t want com­plex slides, with a lot of text. Keep the simple, keep the rel­ev­ant. My slides had way too much text, one was irrel­ev­ant (the opera mini set­tings slide). But over­all, I was happy with my num­ber of slides. Yes I had three slides on one menu sys­tem, but that effect­ively demon­strated my point that the menu was so big.

I think Megyn’s Web­site Plan­ner present­a­tion would of had more impact if she bor­rowed some ele­ments from the Wed­ding Plan­ner movie. Like mak­ing use of the movie poster, open­ing cred­its or intro music. Adding addi­tional humour and some visu­als that where miss­ing, from an inter­est­ing presentation.

You also need to rehearse as many times as pos­sible. I thought I had a good 3 minute present­a­tion, it was close to 5 minutes for the first couple of attempts. I cut it down to 3 minutes, rehearsed it a couple more times, only to find it dis­join­ted. Changed it again and found ran more smoothly and ran 2 minutes 45 seconds. I also found myself not stick­ing to the script which was good, because

Be pre­pared for any pos­sible prob­lem, I almost won by default because Scouta’s present­a­tion relied on using their laptop which had major prob­lems con­nect­ing to the only pro­jector. I had the present­a­tion on my laptop, on a USB key in key­note, power­point and PDF format as well as a copy on Slide­share on the web.

Be ready to start as soon as you step on stage, make sure the browser or file is open, the URL is ready. I cringed every time a presenter got up on stage and wasted some of their pre­cious 3 minutes, start­ing an applic­a­tion or browser, typ­ing in a URL etc.

Most of all have fun.

So start get­ting ready, the next Web­Jam in Perth is rumoured to be hap­pen­ing in Decem­ber pos­sibly in con­junc­tion with ByteMe.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 17th, 2007 at 10:44 pm and is filed under Just geek, presentations . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.