The Mobile Presenter

I come from an Open Source background. We share things. We make them available for others to use, adapt, improve upon, or turn them into something else entirely. Therefore, I usually share the slides for my talks. For this, I used to use SlideShare.

While SlideShare is already useful just for looking at slides, you will actually have to register to get the most out of it. Not only will you be able to upload your own and download other people's slides (if the author allows it) but you can also follow speakers and be notified when they publish new presentations. In other words, it's yet another social network. In fact, since SlideShare is owned by LinkedIn, it is part of a social network that you may already use.

I recently spoke at an event where all of the talks had a moderator who introduced the speaker and then sat in the front row, equipped with signs, indicating to the speakers how long they had left: 15 minutes, 10 minutes, 5 minutes - time's up!

They also had another helpful sign. It read: "Repeat the question."

Just a few quick thoughts about I problem that I was just struggling with while preparing the slides for a presentation:

As explained elsewhere, using visuals will help your audience remember the content of your presentation. Another thing that will help them remember is repetition. So you should repeat your main point or points at the end of the presentation. Consequentially, this summary of your presentation should also repeat the visuals.

But sometimes, the visuals that you used earlier in the presentation don't quite work when repeated in the summary. What can you do?

Inexperienced speakers are often afraid that they may be forgetting an important point of their talk or that they get stuck and can't remember how to continue. Which is one of the reasons why so many presentations have lots of text on their slides.

Cue cards would seem to provide a solution to this problem. They're handy when you get stuck and since you now have the text of your talk at hand (pun intended), you can use more visual slides and still make sure not to forget anything of importance.

Back in April, I did an interview with Jenny Blake over Skype. It's part of a series of interviews with speaking professionals that will air in the week of August 25 under the name of the Speak like a Pro virtual conference. You can watch the 25 interviews for free during that week or purchase the set later.

I'm tempted to write "24 speaking professionals plus yours truly", because really the line-up is somewhat humbling. It includes several of the people that I've learned much of what I know from, including Nancy Duarte, Pam Slim, and Susan Weinschenk. I'm also happy to point out that the lineup includes a friend of mine, surgeon Ross Fisher, who gave a great talk at TEDxStuttgart back in November 2013.