In August, Google CEO Eric Schmidt famously said that every two days we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. Visual communications, especially presentations, are an opportunity to distill complex information into digestible pieces. Here’s a collection of visual communication blogs to inspire your next great presentation.

Visual communicators use metaphor, symbols, and graphics to simplify complex information.

1. Vision Jar
Johanna Rehnvall shares new directions in presentation design in this excellent blog – rich with resources and thoughtful posts. She’s got a heck of a design eye and a knack for spotting innovative trends.

2. Duarte Blog
The best collection of storytelling and business communication tips out there. Nancy Duarte’s team covers everything from Great Moments in Presentation History to How to Spread Your Talk.

3. Note and Point
If you are a presentation designer, you’ve got to check this site every day. Note and Point posts the cream of the crop from the presentation world. Their mission? “Filling the gaping void of inspiration for those of us who use projectors.”

4. Presentation Zen
Garr Reynolds is the presentation sensei, the patriarch of Presentation Zen. Garr dishes out practical advice so that you can realize your presentation idea in its most beautiful form. Also check out his posterous. Ah, my work is done.

5. This is Indexed
When your standard graphs, venn diagrams, and metaphors just won’t do, this delightful and witty collection of infographics is sure to inspire.

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I find inspiration in the strangest places and last night I as I watched Grey’s Anatomy on ABC I was surprised to find myself thinking about presentations. Here’s the setup. The Chief of medicine Dr. Webber tells his heads of department that he has a spare $1M and invites them to pitch him on why their department should get the money. The jockeying and competitive head games ensue as each doctor tries to win the money and we get to watch a fantastic cross section of personalities giving presentations to the chief.

Statistics, Relevancy, Emotion, Passion and Delivery could win you $1M

(Spoiler Alert: Don’t read beyond this point if you don’t want to know how this episode turns out)

Now to take this post beyond the water cooler I’m going to ask you to visit ABC’s site and fast forward to 14m 40s to see the winning pitch by Dr. Hunt. By all means watch the whole episode but the 1m 14s of this pitch convinced me that THIS is the way to win $1M in less than 90 seconds and here’s why.

Statistics: Dr. Hunt uses statistics to highlight salient parts of his argument. He doesn’t overwhelm us with them but uses them in support of his main point, lives could have been saved.

Story: Dr. Hunt relates the specific case of a doctor who’s death could have been prevented. This makes his pitch more personal and makes us empathize with his plight. Again this story is relevant to his main argument. Doctors with disaster training could have prevented these deaths.

Relevancy: Dr. Hunt makes his story relevant to the people involved. Himself, his colleagues and the person he’s pitching too. Nothing can sway an audience more than, here’s what this means to you.

Emotion: If you’re talking about something that stirs up emotion for you then it’s ok to impart that to your audience if done in an appropriate way. We’re all human and this is the kind of thing that can make an audience go quiet and really listen to what you’re going to say next.

Passion: Although Dr. Hunt is not loud or vociferous. You can feel that this is something he’s passionate about. Honestly if you’re not passionate about what you’re presenting, you may want to ask yourself, why you’re doing it. Passion is key to creating an engaging presentation.

Delivery: This is a TV drama so the caveat is that this is a dramatic performance. Dr. Hunt pauses to make his point, sighs, reflects and then delivers the crushing question. Can you live with this? Don’t underestimate dramatic effect, it’s a powerful tool in your presentation arsenal. The challenge is not to overdo it, you need to remain authentic in your delivery.

Dr. Hunt won the $1M for delivering an impassioned and convincing pitch in 74 seconds. Why aren’t all presentations like this?

In my eyes, attending a virtual trade show from the comfort of your office chair (or local coffee roaster in my case) trumps the conference hall, airports, and booths of the exhibit hall.  After all, today’s trade show attendee is on a business mission—seeking real answers from real people who know their stuff.

The Oct 28th virtual trade show “The Art and Science of B2B Marketing and Sales”, hosted by the marketing cloud, is an ideal place to bring your toughest sales and marketing questions.  I’m a customer of several participating companies including Marketo, Jigsaw, and of course, SlideRocket.  And while I get plenty of interaction with all of them, it’s not often that I get to take a step back and hit their top thought leaders with strategic questions.  I won’t need an appointment, I don’t even need to find their booth on a map – I’ll just click straight into their online booth.

Check out the Marketing Cloud Virtual Trade Show

Virtual Presentations From the Cloud

An online event hosted by marketing cloud service providers puts you about as far away from actual software as you can be.  Yet, you’ll be hard-pressed to find another show that makes it this easy to access so many demos, assets, and experts.

Look at the breadth of topics covered at the virtual trade show. They tackle head-on the key questions that I grapple with every day:

• Of all my demand generation programs, which ones should I consider killing?
• After demos to senior executives, what’s the best way to keep the conversation going?
• How can I cost-effectively attract more long-tail organic traffic?
• What is, and how do I maximize, the “life-time value” of a purchased email list?
• How can I measure the specific impact of our PR and Social media programs?

I’ve already picked out the virtual presentations where I’ll get these questions answered.   And with a full day of “booth” availability, you can imagine the number of questions I’ll be asking after my 3rd cup of coffee down the street at Ironside.

Recommended reading: Art & Science Unite in the Marketing Cloud

We are very excited to announce a new suite of interactive features, a powerful dashboard interface, and a fresh look and feel, allowing you to engage your audience in an intelligent and measurable way.
View the presentation.

Interactive Forms and Polls
It’s now possible to engage and interact on a whole new level with SlideRocket’s forms and polls. Survey your audience, connect directly with your viewers, and see the results in your presentation analytics – even when you can’t be there to present.
How to add forms and polls.

Real-Time Comments
Create an interactive conversation within your presentation in real-time. No more marked-up printouts or unnecessary emails clogging your inbox. Get viewer feedback and access the best ideas from your team while you work.
How to add comments.

Actionable Analytics
With SlideRocket’s new analytics, you’ll have more actionable feedback about your audience than ever before – including viewing duration, responses to forms and polls, comments, and viewer contact information. Now you can use presentations to generate leads, qualify prospects, assess audience understanding, gain greater insight, and follow up intelligently.
How to track your presentation with analytics.

Centralized Dashboard
SlideRocket’s new design highlights new views and is easy to scan and navigate. All your presentation controls are organized in the new dashboard, where you can manage settings, sharing, collaborating, history, export, and analytics from an easy to access control center.
Check out SlideRocket’s new dashboard.

SlideRocket has turned dull static presenentations into two-way conversations, allowing you to use presentations in ways never before possible. We are thrilled to round out our suite of interactive and dynamic features with forms, polls, comments, and enhanced analytics.

So, what do you say? Let’s go where no presentation has gone before.

Nothing will help your audience relate to you (and the content you are presenting) more than stories and anecdotes. Whether they’re about people you know or places you’ve seen, or even if you’re re-telling a story you’ve heard elsewhere, they’ll add a personal touch to information that will help draw your audience in, and make what you’re saying more purposeful, understandable, and believable.

Nothing will help your audience relate to you more than stories and anecdotes.

But, even some of the best speakers lack solid storytelling skills. Luckily, there are a ton of great resources that can help you enhance your presentation with terrific stories and anecdotes.

1. Draw from Your Own Experiences
You’re life is more interesting than you think it is, and your past experiences may be quite entertaining to your audience. Perhaps a few stories about your feisty toddler can add a dose of humor to your presentation about dealing with difficult employees. Or, telling them about that time you hiked a challenging five mile trail in a hail storm may enhance your speech about getting and staying motivated. Feel free to embellish for dramatic effect.

2. Books
Hit up a nearby bookstore or your local library. Literary references make ideal stories for presentations and speeches. And, choosing popular books, or beloved classics that people remember fondly, are likely to strike a chord with your audience.

3. Awesome Stories (awesomestories.com)
This self-proclaimed “story place of the Web” provides countless fictional and non-fictional stories in a variety of categories such as famous trials, biographies, movies, history, religion, and sports. Here, educators and other presenters can quickly and easily find stories and their original sources, instead of spending hours upon hours searching national archives, libraries, universities, museums, and historical societies.

4. Anecdotage (anecdotage.com)
This site is home to the largest collection of celebrity anecdotes on the Internet. There are several thousand quotes and stories to choose from, covering a wide range of topics. An intuitive search facility allows you to search by keyword, or by your favorite politician, actor, musician, or other personality.

5. Story Arts Online (storyarts.org)
This educational Web site, created by author and storyteller Heather Forest, was initially designed for teachers, librarians, and students. However, much of its content is focused on the use of stories to enhance speaking and facilitate improved listening, and can provide much value to presenters and speakers of all types. Be sure to check out its comprehensive story library.

This is the continuation 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. See the whole incredible presentations series here.

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

It’s time to head back to school and educators and students alike are preparing themselves with the tools they need to sail through the year. It would be hard to get through the school year without making a presentation. It would be just as hard to get through the school year without collaborating on a group project. Collaborating and presenting have value because, hand in hand, they help groups synthesize and then clarify research and learning.

For students, collaboration and presentation are absolutely tied together.

Integrated Presentations

John Kuglin, a consultant for the US Department of Education, has identified a shift in the way education institutions collaborate and present.  Kuglin points to cloud-based tools such as SlideRocket and Google Docs that integrate through Google Apps. “These tools ‘speak’ to each other now,” he says. “Once you move off platform-dependent software, such as PowerPoint, and move up into the cloud, your collaboration abilities increase significantly.”

Imagine a collection of data stored in a Google spreadsheet. Try embedding Google documents into a PowerPoint presentation. Impossible, right? But when cloud-based tools such as Google Docs and SlideRocket and “speak” to each other, collaboration doesn’t stop when it’s time to present.  Multiple team members can easily pull online content into a single presentation, and then tell a meaningful and engaging story that helps people remember what they’ve heard.

Online Curriculum

Sarah Weston is the curriculum director for the Open High School of Utah, a charter school.  “When we look at giving our students tools, I always look for two things: web-based and collaborative,” says Weston. “This is because our infrastructure is cloud-based and our curriculum encourages group work.”

Weston says that single sign-on access to SlideRocket through Google Apps saves time and cuts down on the number of accounts she creates and manages. Teachers embed presentations in their online courses, track statistics, and assess how the lesson was received.  Students can work in teams, collect shared data in Google Docs, and organize their data in a presentation – regardless of location. “When I describe it to my new teachers,” says Weston, “I call it PowerPoint on steroids.”

Unprecedented Collaboration

Through presentations, facts and data gain meaning. “I look at SlideRocket as a tool that will allow unprecedented collaboration to occur,” Kuglin says, “but I also look at it as a tool that pulls together the work done in ‘building’ tools, like Google Docs, and displays it in such a way that communicates and conveys the ideas behind that work to other people.”

Using cloud-based tools in an education setting is not only about extending opportunities for collaboration, it’s about preparing students for careers where presenting and storytelling are critical communication skills. Kuglin explains, “It doesn’t matter what field you’re going into, you’ve got to be able to collect, organize, and pull your thoughts together – typically with a team – and then present those thoughts in a way that is understandable to other people. Collaboration and presentation are absolutely tied together.”

Education institutions can gain access to SlideRocket’s integrated and collaborative presentation tools through the Google Apps Marketplace.

Many presenters, particularly novices, struggle to find a presentation style that works best for them.  Luckily, throughout the years, after much trial and error, many successful techniques and methodologies for presentation creation and delivery have emerged, giving speakers a variety of existing approaches to “borrow” from.

From top left: Lawrence Lessig, Masayoshi Takahashi, Seth Godin, Mino Monta

Here, we’ll describe and evaluate some of the most famous – and popular – presentation methods.

1. The Takahashi Method
This extremely unique method calls for the use of very, very large text.  The goal is to use no more than a handful (preferably, less than three) of easy-to-understand words, or a single image or photo with no accompanying words, on each slide, to deliver a very clear, very high-impact message in a very short period of time.  Many believe that this approach forces the audience to listen to the speaker, since the slides alone do not demonstrate all the content to be delivered.

2. The Lessig Method
Based on the style of Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig, this method is quite similar to Takahashi’s approach in its simplicity.  Presenters who use this technique incorporate only a brief quote, a short sentence, or a photo with a caption onto their slides, and spend only a few seconds on each.  But, while Takahashi-style presentations are often rather short – usually ten slides or less – Lessig presentations are often quite long, sometimes hundreds of slides that are passed through very quickly.  The idea behind this method is that the rapid-fire pace of delivery prevents the audience from growing bored or getting distracted.

3.  The Godin Method
Although not yet formally recognized by presentation pundits, this method, made popular by best-selling author and marketing guru Seth Godin, focuses mostly on the element of presentation slide design – particularly, how to select accompanying visuals to enhance messages appropriately.  Godin promotes the use of bold fonts, contrasting colors, striking images, and other clear, compelling visuals to better convey thoughts and ideas.

4. The Monta Method
Like the Takahashi approach, this technique originated in Japan.  Introduced by a knowledge worker in the tech field, it emulates the personality and charisma of a popular game show host.  Presenters are encouraged to use questions and answers on all their visuals.  When the question is posed to the audience, the answer is kept covered or hidden, only to be revealed once attendees have tried to “guess”.  The advantage of this approach is that it is highly effective at keeping the audience interested and engaged, and thus, their attention is less likely to wander.

This is the continuation 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 or see the whole incredible presentations series.

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

Twitter is having a growing impact on presentations and you really have two opportunities to use it to greater effect. The first is to use Twitter to better engage your immediate audience, and the second to engage your larger audience beyond your webinar or conference.

In 140 characters or less: How Twitter gets you a larger, more engaged presentation audience

Twitter Tips To Engage Your Immediate Audience

• Invite people to Tweet to their followers
• Create a #hashtag
• Dish out 140 character sound bites
• Have a “friendly” monitor the Twitter back-channel
• Take breaks for Twitter feedback – or put a Twitter feed right in your presentation
• Invite people to Tweet their questions to you

The objective is to surprise your audience with innovative use of Twitter and juice engagement by enabling them to actually participate in and influence your presentation. In case you get any wisecracks or tomatoes, prepare yourself with a self-deprecating one-liner and a knockout comeback. Positive, negative or humorous, this interaction will only deepen audience engagement.

Put a Twitter feed directly in your slide presentation. Register for a SlideRocket Free Trial on the right to get started

How To Expand Your Audience With Twitter

We all know the effort involved in creating effective presentations, getting people to sign-up, and getting them to actually show up. And with 50% of people frequently tweeting about presentations (thanks to Hubspot’s Dan Zarrella for that stat) it behooves you to take advantage of this channel to get the greatest return on your marketing effort. Getting people to send the tweet is only the beginning. Put the right infrastructure in place ahead of your presentation and you’ll amplify the effectiveness of your Twitter efforts:

• Create a landing page
• Enable easy social media sharing
• Post your presentation beforehand
• Record a voice overlay

The landing page gives your Tweeters a place to point their followers, while enabling sharing for Twitter, Facebook, etc. on your landing page boosts the viral effect. Posting your presentation ahead of time to your blog or website ensures that you don’t have that inevitable delay between the presentation and making it available – Timeliness is critical! The voice overlay is essential to give your larger, non-attending audience a chance to hear the context behind your slides. This also frees you up to create clean slides with stunning imagery without having to fall back on bullets and dense text to get your message across – your voice will do it for you. Plus, it’s a great occasion to practice!

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

SXSW is the place for innovators to strut their stuff and set the course for emerging technology. As the official presentation provider for SXSW 2010, we saw a lot of impressive presentations during the Interactive conference and we’re looking forward to seeing more in 2011. Now is your chance to vote for the presentations you want to see at SXSW. your voting accounts for about 30% of the decision-making process for any given programming slot so take a moment to register, peruse and choose the ones you’d like to see.

This year, we submitted a couple of sessions of our own. If you’d like to hear more about building game changing companies we’d love to share so vote below.

• Startup 2000 vs. Startup 2010: Cloud Power
• Startup Survival Guide: Beating the 800lb Gorillas

In the spirit of startups and innovation, head over to our SXSW Accelerator 2010 presentation gallery where you can watch game-changing ideas take flight as they were pitched to a panel of expert judges.

We can’t wait to see you at SXSW 2011!

Tired of arial, times new roman, and other boring, over-used type styles? Looking to jazz up your slide deck by displaying your text using fonts that are cooler, sleeker, or more stylish?

There are a variety of Web sites and other resources devoted to the creation, sharing, distribution, and use of unique, visually appealing fonts.

Well, you’re in luck. There are a variety of Web sites and other resources devoted to the creation, sharing, distribution, and use of unique, visually appealing fonts that convey your personality and your presenting style.

Here are some of the best places to get new fonts for your presentation, or to learn how to make your own:

1. Dafont.com (http://www.dafont.com)
You’ll find it all here – gothic fonts, international-themed fonts, even fonts that celebrate popular holidays like Valentine’s Day, Easter, or Halloween. And, they’re all free. With more than 10 thousands fonts to choose from, plus over 2 thousand accents, there’s something for everyone, no matter what your need or preference.

2. 1001 Free Fonts (http://www.1001freefonts.com)
Since it launched in 1998, this site has served as a primary source of new fonts for more than 150,000 visitors. Its font search engine provides access to one of the Web’s largest font database, containing more than 30,000 commercial fonts.

3. Fee-Based Font Sites
While many of the font sites on the Web are free, there are several sites that offer higher-quality, professionally-designed fonts, for a price. These include

• Adobe Type Library, Providing stunning, elegant, and beautiful typography since 1985, Adobe Type offers more than 2,500 typefaces.
• Bitstream, and – what many consider to be the best font site out there today – MyFonts. If you want to stay in the know on the latest fonts then the MyFonts newsletters are a great resource.
• Ascender Corporation is a leading provider of advanced font products specializing in type design, font development and licensing. They also own the FontMarketplace which features the downloadable FontSelector a tool that makes it easy to pick fonts by Occasion, Personality and Type Style on Windows operating systems.

4. FontLab (http://www.fontlab.com)
If you don’t find what you need on the Web, and you’ve got some above-average design skills, FontLab makes a great font software package. Create fonts from scratch, convert fonts from various formats and enhance them to meet your requirements, add logos, signatures, or images, and more.

5. Font Tutorials
Looking to create new fonts, without purchasing or learning a new software application? Learn how, using tools you’re already familiar with. For example, Chank can help you learn to make fonts using Fontographer. Divide by Zero has tutorials on designing fonts with Photoshop and Typophile is also an excellent resource.

6. Installation Instructions
Found the perfect font for your presentation, but not sure how to download and install it? If you’re a Windows user, you can access Microsoft’s instructions. If you’re on a Mac, you can learn how to set up and use new fonts on Apple’s support site.

This is the continuation 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 or see the whole incredible presentation resource series.