Many experts agree that the best way to get your message across is to stimulate as many senses as possible during the course of your presentation. That’s why so many presenters rely on audio to enhance their visuals.

Beautifully crafted music adds to the emotional impact of our images.

“Beautifully crafted music adds to the emotional impact of our images. One only has to see the reaction of clients to understand why we use music whenever we can,” says Massachusetts-based photographer Edward Zemba about using audio to enhance his presentations to potential customers.

Fortunately, there is a wealth of terrific audio resources available to speakers and presenters, such as:

1. Musicshake.com (www.MusicShake.com)
This intuitive application allows users to easily create their own music clips using more than 80,000 copyright-free samples. It offers a wide array of genres and instruments to choose from, and even provides a suite of voice recording and editing features. Once clips are created, they can be posted to the site and shared with others – providing a catalog of truly unique audio samples. Be sure to check out the Independence Day Remix application, for great 4th of July-themed music!

2. Royalty Free Audio

• RoyaltyFreeMusic.com (www.RoyaltyFreeMusic.com)
  As the world’s largest library of royalty-free music, this site offers clips for everything from music for callers waiting on hold, to backgrounds for advertisements. An intuitive search facility makes it easy to select from a wide array of styles, including jazz, children’s, acoustic, piano, R&B, and hip-hop music. There is also a compilation of clips for use specifically on the Web, or in presentations or Flash videos.
• Presentations Magazine (Presentations Magazine)
  Presentations is the leading publication in the public speaking and presentation market. In addition to advice and guidance, they also offer a variety of resources, including audio clips for use in slide decks. Some of the available sounds include a dial tone, a cappuccino machine, champagne being poured, a ringing cell phone, and a ship’s bell.
• Sounds of the Web (www.SoundsoftheWeb.net)
  Part of the Group Media Network, this resource has been around since 1999 and has been praised by Audio Media Magazine, Digit Magazine, and others as a pioneer in the industry. It offers thousands of music loops and sound effects to meet almost any presentation or digital media need.
• AudioMicro (www.AudioMicro.com)
  With a huge collection of micro stock audio, AudioMicro is a revolutionary collection of user-generated royalty-free stock music, sound effects, production music, production elements and music cues.
• Sound Ideas (www.sound-ideas.com/)
  Just $129 will buy you 5 CDs packed with audio clips that are the perfect enhancement to your slide deck. Over 1,400 files are included in each volume, with packages for business/office, pop culture, comedy, and other areas of interest. Files can be easily exported to the format of your choice. You can also create loops, edit, fade in/fade out, and more!

3. Make Your Own
If you’re feeling a bit adventurous, or you’re looking for something unique, there are countless audio editing software applications you can try. Check out Sony Sound Forge, Adobe Soundbooth, Dexster Audio Editor, FX Audio Editor, or Acoustica, which all run about $40 to $60 each. If you want real, recording-studio quality sound, try Adobe Audition or Sony Vegas Pro, which will cost you several hundred dollars. There are also a variety of free audio editors which you can download or use in your browser, such as Aviary’s Myna, Audacity or Wavosaur.

4. Advice and Guidance
Incorporating audio into your slide deck is more than just a matter of slapping in some background music and cute noises. There are right ways to do it, and wrong ways. Fortunately, there are many experts who have shared their best practices. From general tips and techniques, and advice on intellectual property and copyright law, to tutorials for recording presentation audio, advice can easily be found across the Web.

5. Voice Talent
If you have a script for your project but don’t want to record your own voice track there are now a good number of online services for finding just the right professional voice you need. These services generally keep a database of voice talent in a variety of languages and accents that allow you to browse and listen to each one. The more comprehensive services let you post your project to their site and help you manage it through the process sending you the finished product when it’s done. Some of the more popular voice talent databases include Voices.com, Voice123, VoiceTalent.com.

This is the first post in a series of Incredible resources for presentations. If you have an idea for incredible resources or want to add one of your own just add a comment below this post.

This is a guest post by Vivek Singh. He is a marketing manager by profession. He is also the author of the popular blog  www.allaboutpresentations.com. Visit his blog for useful tips on presentations.

If your CEO remembers the top 3 things you said during the presentation, you've done a great job.

Making a presentation to top management is very different from making a presentation to the middle/junior management. Today we will try to understand what exactly this difference is and how to successfully present to top management.

Present the conclusion at the very start
In school you would have written a précis. A précis is a summary of the main points of the story. You need to do the same thing for your top management. First you make the presentation the way you normally do. Then add an empty slide at the very start (let’s call it the summary slide). Run through your presentation and put down the main points on this summary slide.
Top management is not here to listen to the complete story. You cannot afford to build the argument gradually and reveal the conclusion at the end. Instead put the conclusion at the start. Then go on and explain how you arrived at this conclusion. Your audience will ask for explanations and details wherever they need. You need not provide too much information. Remember, less is more with the top management.

Time is money
Be short and sweet. Do not be slow and do not repeat your points. Your CEO is always busy and cannot manage to sit through hour long presentations. Neither does he have the time nor the attention span. You need to share everything you have to say in crystal clear terms and then leave the questioning to the CEO. Whenever he seeks explanation, you can go in-depth.
The success of your presentation can be measured by a simple question. “If your CEO remembers the top 3 things you said during the presentation and why you said those things; you have done a great job.”

Use Back up Slides
When you present to the top management use what is called a ‘Back up Slide’. Suppose you are presenting on cost cutting. You have done a lot of study and your presentation talks about your 5 findings; the areas your organization is losing money and how to cut costs in these areas.
You have made detailed calculations to arrive at these findings. Your presentation has these findings and then you go on to recommend cost cutting measures. You are not going to present these detailed calculations (which led you to the findings) else the presentation will stretch for hours.  In such a case, keep these calculations ready on a slide (place it after the last slide). You might be asked to prove your findings, in which case you can open these back up slides. These slides support your findings. They are to be presented when your findings are being questioned and investigated in details.

Do not try to show you have worked hard
There is a strong urge in managers to show to the CEO that they have worked hard. Because they get to spend less time with the CEO they make their best efforts to impress him. This behavior leads them to fill their presentation with minute details. The number of bullet points is treated as directly proportional to work done. The more the bullets, the harder you have worked.
This needs to stop. What will impress the CEO is a simple presentation which shares the crux in a few slides and is backed up by solid reasoning. If your presentation gets your point across clearly, the rest will take care of itself.

Give a Handout
Your CEO will be busy with his/her Black Berry most of the time. He will check his mail and get urgent calls. Understand that there are more important things for him to do. It would be great if you carry a print out of the main points of the presentation. Make it no longer than one page. If you HAVE TO share some data/charts to back up your main points, then use Annexure. In the annexure, share the chart/graph; give a suitable heading and a one sentence summary of the chart.

To read more presentation tips visit Vivek’s blog All About Presentations or read other tips in this SlideRocket blog series.

41 years ago today, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the moon. These engaging slides tell the story of the moment along with other NASA photos of earth that are the legacy of the Apollo 11 mission. These photos are from our friends at Flickr, which is embedded right inside the SlideRocket editor. Please Enjoy!

You’ve just finished giving a Webinar – and it was clearly a winner!  But, you invited thousands and only a hundred showed up.  What can you do to maximize the value of all your hard work?  Post it to the Web, where other members of your target audience can easily access it.

Many people prefer on-demand web seminars since they can watch at their own convenience

In fact, many people prefer the on-demand approach, since they can watch at their own convenience, or pause the presentation if something urgent arises, without missing any important points. But once your on-demand presentation has been made available, how do you let people know it’s there?   And even more importantly, how to you encourage them to download or view it?

Here are some of the best ways to market your on-demand presentation:

1. Go Back to the Base
Just because only a fraction of those you invited actually attended, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the others weren’t interested in what you had to say.  They may have wanted to participate, but prior commitments prevented them from doing so.  So, once you post your on-demand presentation to your Web site, be sure to go back and inform those who were previously invited.  You’ll be surprised at how many of them take the bait.

2. Make it a Call to Action
Many experts believe that the reason most marketing campaigns fail is because they lack a compelling call to action.  Unless you give recipients a solid reason to respond – for example, by offering them something of perceived value – they simply won’t reply.  Using the download of your on-demand presentation as a response mechanism is a great way to drive traffic to your Web site, and boost campaign response rates.

3. Leverage Industry Resources
No matter what market you work in, there are likely Web sites that serve as resource portals for potential buyers.  These are great places for vendors to post not only pre-recorded presentations, but white papers and other promotional materials as well.  The site administrators may even help you promote your session, to help drive additional downloads.

4.  Alert the Media
Try issuing a media alert or a press release when your session has been posted.  Perhaps you don’t think an on-demand presentation is “newsworthy”, but many publications will, indeed, make mention of these types of resources.  Editors and writers may even view the presentation themselves, to educate themselves on your product or service, or your company.

You can also form relationships with bloggers and other online journalists, who can make mention of your on-demand Webcast when they publish posts and articles on related topics.

5.  Use Social Networks
Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media outlets provide an open venue for you to share information with people who are interested in similar topics or ideas.  By setting up profiles on each of these sites, you can find people who are seeking certain types of information. And, those you connect with are probably those that are most likely to download your on-demand presentation.

Want more valuable tips on effective presentation creation and delivery? Review our archive of presentation tips and check back every week for new posts.

Talk about an engaged audience! Across YouTube, Twitter and the blogs, Old Spice has hit it big with their Old Spice Man commercials. We pulled together a sampling of great “Old Spice Guy” YouTube videos along with their associated Tweets. For kicks we added the Old Spice Man live Twitter feed to the last slide. Check it out!

We’re (all 5 million of us) impressed with how Old Spice rolled out this engaging, original and authentic commercial series. Clearly, they did their homework to define their target audience, build their brand and plan their communication. But of equal importance, they weren’t afraid to take the creative risk to stand above the fray of consumer advertising.

Congratulations to Old Spice!

In today’s online marketing world, marketers balance the tension between “marketing art” and “marketing science”.

Clearly, the roots of marketing are in art as advertising, communications, and presentations depend on things that look good, sound good and read well.  But with the advent of online marketing the pendulum has swung to favor marketing science, right? Measure everything and let the numbers tell you what to do next? In general, marketing is trending this way. But if you look more closely across marketing disciplines it’s clear art is a key ingredient, if not the main ingredient, in each area.

Art is where your science meets the marketing road

Lead generation is a great example of a marketing discipline where science has taken a central role. The numbers rule lead generation. How many leads do you need to hit your number? What’s the Cost Per on those leads? Science is in charge, but when it gets down to the “how” of generating those qualified leads, you turn to art for the better message, landing page, email subject, etc.

“The art and the science are intermingled…the science drives the segmentation, targeting and ROI metrics, the art drives the response”.

- Chris Willis, Sales Operations/Marketing Analytics, Vertafore

In order to get all your charts pointing in the right direction, you’ll need to engage with a human. But your testing, ROI measurement and iterations to improve campaign performance will be a scientific effort.

Science for analytics, art for usability

Science has truly arrived on websites, and it’s not difficult to get carried away with website analytics and search engine optimization at the expense of usability. The use of websites as generators of organic leads via search engine rankings only increases the marketing art vs. science tension.

“The pendulum swung with great force toward the side of science, but I believe (hope) it’s settling back toward a balanced middle. 
I’ve worked on a few projects over the last couple of years where measurement (particularly SEO and testing) took 99% precedence, and I believe the brand and usability suffered greatly”.

- Kristy Melgoza, Web Designer, BC Studios

As we analyze data to help drive decision-making, marketers like Kristy remind us that no matter how much we love the Google spiders, we ignore usability at our peril.

Science informing your art

Presentations and slide decks are an interesting example of where connecting with an audience is so critical that art remains the focus. Inherently visual, presentations have always been largely an art. And with the arrival of online presentations, art has been amplified by employing science to learn how to better connect with their audience by tracking presentation performance. How many people viewed the presentation you sent? Which slides are least and most effective? Science also smooths the path for presentation creators to collaborate, control their brand, and embed multimedia more easily.

“Online presentations are the basis for effective communication and audience engagement. They must engage immediately, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a science to it. Measuring presentation effectiveness is increasingly important”.

- Nat Robinson, VP of Marketing & Business Development, SlideRocket

Art drives audience engagement

Effectively interacting with people online truly is an art form. We’re all still figuring this stuff out. Even those who are really good at it are trying to understand what they’ve got on their hands. You make this a science at your own peril. Auto-responders on Twitter? Spamming LinkedIn groups? That’s going to be a tough road. Connecting one-on-one with people in the heat of the conversation…now you have something.

“I think that marketing (in my experience) needs to balance the science with the art, because, after all, we are talking about gaining the attention of, and fostering engagement with, the individual people who comprise our audiences.”

- Sarah Skerik, Vice President of Social Media, PR Newswire

In this (wholly unscientific) polling of marketers, I was struck by the patterns that started to emerge in the marketing art versus science debate. Driven largely by their area of marketing focus, the art camp rallied around social media, websites, and presentations. The science camp spoke mostly to strategy, ROI and tactical elements of things like segmentation and SEO. But the common theme running across 80% of the responses was that maintaining a balance between art and science was key. And several marketers cited this as the primary challenge they face in light of pressure from executives. And you can really boil this debate down to ROI versus Engagement. And we all know you can’t have one without the other.

Investors hear, on average, five to eight presentations each day from entrepreneurs looking to obtain financial backing for their new business ventures.  But, only a fraction of these startup companies will get the funding they want.  How do you make sure yours is one of them?

Investors hear, on average, five to eight presentations each day.

Here are some valuable guidelines to follow when preparing your pitch to venture capitalists, angel investors, and other financiers.

1. What’s the Goal?
You won’t know if you were successful, unless you know exactly what you were trying to achieve in the first place.  Whether you’re looking to secure a funding commitment, or simply spark enough interest to schedule a follow-up meeting, clearly define your objective ahead of time.

2. Sum it All Up at the Start
You’ve got one minute to grab an investor’s attention.  So, a pitch that gets off to a slow start is bound to fall flat.  Kicking your presentation off with a dynamic one to two sentence summary that highlights your idea and its potential value will help you get them interested.

3. Back it Up with Details
In order to win the confidence of investors, you’ll need to show them that you have more than just a winning idea.  In addition to explaining your high-level vision, be sure to provide some details about how you plan to execute, such as a go-to-market strategy.

4.  The Proof is In the Numbers
Venture capitalists and other investors like numbers, particularly “mega trends”. So, back your ideas and theories up with as many industry benchmarks, statistics, and metrics as you possibly can.  The more reputable the sources, the better.

5.  Leave the Spreadsheets at Home
Your audience wants to see anticipated return on investment in the form of revenues, profits, or market share.  But, boring, dry spreadsheets or profit and loss statements are not the most effective way to do this.  Instead, wow investors with charts, graphs, and other exciting visuals that clearly convey expected value.

6. Speak with Passion
If you don’t show conviction in your idea, it will be very hard to get your audience excited about it.  Strong voice inflection and dramatic hand gestures are just a few of the ways you can demonstrate your passion for your concept, and your belief in its viability.

Want more valuable tips on effective presentation creation and delivery? Review our archive of presentation tips and check back every week for new posts.

Find more great tips and resources at the Presentation Skills Launch Pad.