Jump Out of Your Skin

We’ve all been there.  You need to create a business presentation in a short period of time and you are not prepared.  Well here a few simple tips on how to at least wing it.

PowerPoint Template

Have a PowerPoint template that you use each time for your presentations.  Don’t use the standard Microsoft Office ones as they have been used by half the world.  Here is what you should do.

• Open up PowerPoint.
• Make modifications to the standard very basic template so that it looks like you want it to look.  Here are some tips.  Create a smart coloured heading.  Reduce the standard font sizes.  Put your business name in the footer.
• Put a subtle shading in the background using Slide Master.  Then stop.  The content is what wins and this is just a presentation for a quick review.  There are lots of other subtle things that you can do with time to a template that I will cover in a later post.

Standard Sections

When you are happy with your look and feel fill in some standard sections.  All presentations should have the following sections.  Title, Agenda, Questions prompt and Backup Data slides.  Create these and use them again and again and it will mean 3-4 less slides for you to create.

Simple Sections

Do not over elaborate in your sections.  If you are caught for time then put in simple bullets and talk to the bullets.  The best presentations are when people talk to the content and not from the content.  People really hate reading PowerPoint slides.  I am assuming that you know what you are talking about so this is where you will shine not in talking out lines of information

Backup Data

Keep a consistent set of backup data.  You will use it again and again. Work on this as your core database of information.

Here is a very simple example that took me 10 minutes to put together.

This song has made made me happy this week. No tech talk in this post short and sweet.  This song is on constant rotation.

Estelle – Come Over ft. John Legend (Live)

This is about my ongoing love of the AutoHotKey (www.autohotkey.com) tool which I use primarily for shortcuts and spelling corrections when I type quickly.  For twitter I created one which does this

::rthanks::Hi Thanks for following me I appreciate it. I have decided to follow you as well.  Happy Tweeting !!

I know you can set up autofollow messages but I do not do this with this account at least so I use the above for a quick answer tool. So I just type rthanksand the text expands to the text following. Cool.  Try it.  I have used the entire list of Wikipedia misspellings in an autohotkey script to correct hundreds of  misspellings and expanded it to add more like below which I also regularly mistype.

::mometn  ::moment
::mometn::moment
::pleae::please
::Desing::Design
::sued::used
::hth::hope this helps

I know I do not have a lot of followers but 8 days ago I sent out a Tweet about having 333 followers and thought it was an interesting number.  Today 8 days later I am coming near 600 followers and possibly the 666 (hence the number of the beast) I sat back and tried to analyse how I had doubled the number of followers in 8 days with approx 40 new followers a day. So here is what I think happened in the interim to increase that number

A Lot of Time On Twitter

To be honest I am spending a lot of time on Twitter reading tweets, looking at links.  With Tweetie on my IPhone that makes it a lot easier.  I monitor my Twitter stream and get to know who is on it to improve interaction.  Building your socila networks is hard but enjoyable – I have already made some friends on Twitter for solid information sharing and @grainnemurphy even came out for a run with my running group last Saturday so its nice to have met her (unfortunately she runs faster than me so might have to get rid of her).

My Re-Tweets

I think retweeting is an important thing to do to share interesting information with my followers.  If I see a post that is interesting, relevant, thought provoking or just simply funny then often as not I will retweet it.  When you retweet you are putting your content out to all your followers and the people following them so they might also find it funny and follow you.

Interesting Tweets

I try and send interesting Tweets in the first place.  I usually send the following mix of Tweets

• News Articles that I read on RSS that I think others in my social network might find interesting to read and perhaps RT. I have looked and not many people do RT my articles so I am hoping to improve the quality of what I send.  I use Google Reader to read my feeds and a couple of times a day I blast through the new news and pick out what might be interesting.
• Technical Tit Bits: I do not do long complex blogs on technical items but like to what I call a 30-60 second fix type of blog where someone can take a time out from what they are doing, implement the tip and carry on.
• Humour -  I occasionally send out something which I think is funny – most times it isn’t but I laugh.

My Bio on www.twitter.com

I spell out what I am interested in my bio on www.twitter.com.  Hope this is some influence.

Ireland – Ireland – Ireland

There is a growing number of people on Twitter in Ireland and I sense that Irish tweeters and bloggers tend to follow relevant people in that area.  I use www.twellow.com to look for interesting Irish people to follow.

Pure Chance and Spammers

Often the number of followers I have increase when I just get a few spammers who follow me and start sending me a ton of rubbish.  I quickly block them.  It reduces the number of followers but it is really quality and not quantify you want.

Follow me on @kdaly100 if you wish to see my Tweets