My First Entry into the World’s Best Presentation Contest – Please Vote

By Jon, on October 17th, 2010
Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email

Over the weekend I published my first entry to the 2010 World’s Best Presentation Contest, hosted by SlideShare.net. This is the first year I’ve entered, and I’m excited to show you what I’ve got and how I got there.

I plan to enter another presentation, but that one I’m going to keep under wraps for now.  I fear if I tell you too much, you might pass out from excitement. [roll eyes here]

For my first entry, I created a presentation that gives a high-level overview of what the emergence of social media means and how businesses can get started. I also included some real world examples of companies doing it right and a few cool stats about the most powerful tools out there.

I’ve embedded the presentation below, but I’d be SUPER APPRECIATIVE if you visited my SlideShare page and, if you like it, voted it up (free membership necessary) by clicking on the thumbs up button. The judges will only vote on the Top Voted presentations, and I’m hoping to be one of them.  You can vote up as many presentations as you’d like.

We’ll take a behind-the-scenes look at the making of this presentation after the jump.

Social Media for Business

Framework:
I rarely use anything that resembles a template. I simply think they’re too restrictive and serve an unnecessary purpose – to feature a company’s branding. If you need to put your logo, website, and tagline on every slide to remind the audience who they’re talking to, then you have bigger problems.

Color Palette:
I chose to use a brown/orange/white color scheme, with brown as the default slide background color and orange/white as the default text colors. I seem to be a fan of orange. Just look around my blog. Both brown and orange are underutilized in my opinion, and I love when presentations go against the norm. They become more unique and memorable, and that starts with the color palette.

Icons:
I used to different sets of icons, the first being the hand-drawn icons on the title page and the second being the white icons on slides 35/36. The hand-drawn icons can be downloaded for free here, and the white icons can be downloaded for free here.  I love how unique the hand-drawn icons are, and the white icons are smooth and help add clarity to the slides explaining hub vs. spoke.

Fonts:
If you read my blog often, you’ll know I’m a huge fan of using non-standard fonts. The default font for the presentation is American Typewriter, which I believe is a Mac-only font (not 100% sure). It comes standard with PowerPoint for Mac 2008, but I don’t see it used very often. The secondary, handwritten font is Handwriting-Dakota. Neither font will show up in SlideShare. To ensure the fonts transferred correctly, I saved the document as a PDF (Print > PDF > Save as PDF) before uploading it to SlideShare.

Images:
Using my favorite new site, Compfight.com, I found nearly all of my images on Flickr. Compfight is a Flickr search engine (better than the engine within Flickr) that can search text or tags while filtering for different copyright levels. This way I could search for photos that only offer Creative Commons copyrights. Other images not found on Flickr were purchased on iStockPhoto.com.

As many images as possible were used full-bleed, which means they extent to all four corners of the slide. Imagery is extremely powerful in aiding recall, but make sure you choose images that accurately convey the theme of the slide. I originally had a cool image of a blue door with keys in it for my “Transparency” slide, with the idea that the keys are unlocking the door. However, after having a few people review the presentation, common feedback was that they perceived the image as a locked door – completely opposite of what I wanted to convey. Since audience perception is reality, I went back to the drawing board to find a more appropriate image. That’s where I found the clear bottle, which both conveyed transparency and also fit my color palette – even better!

Length:
My topic was so broad that it would be impossible for me to cross every bridge necessary. A book could be written about the idea that social media is not new – it’s been around forever and only the tools have changed. I tried to create a presentation that was both useful, relevant, and could be consumed fairly quickly. If it were to be presented in person, there would be about 25% less slides. Which brings me to the text…

Text:
Because this presentation needed to live and convey all the necessary information on its own, I had to add more text than I normally would. This is particularly noticeable on the full bleed image slides, where you first see the one or two words that convey the meaining of the slide, but a second, handwritten sentence shows up to expand on the main idea. This second sentence wouldn’t show up in a live presentation. The presenter would provide this information in order to expand on the main educational point of the slide.

I hope you like it. It’s a pretty good representation of how I try to use effective design to entertain the audience and complement the information the presenter is conveying. I will certainly let you know when my second entry has been submitted.

Again – it would mean a lot to me if you voted up my presentation.  If you do, send me an email at Jon {at} PresentationAdvisors {dot} com so I can personally thank you for your support.

Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email
Comments
«  
  »