We’ve been about on lots of plane trips recently and spoken
at a few events and got the year off to a strong start. The tongue in check nature of what I write
here is meant to provoke my dear readers into think long and hard about any
content and delivery you have planned for your own conference appearances.
1. It’s massively important to make a link as explicit and as a strong as you can to the headline of the conference and the presentation you give. You audience are being boomed at all day by dozens of PowerPoints and stimulated by nothing but free mints an luke warm coffee. They don’t want to be given an intellectual resume of your business performance, your cleverness (that’s just isolating) and you shouldn’t ask them to work hard to understand your speech. If the conference is about HR ENERGY, then your speech should be about HR ENERGY!!!
2. Write your content so a BABOON can understand it. If it contains material that hurts a scrabble player, take it out. The best guide is FEWER. BETTER. WORDS.
3. Have pictures – they paint a thousand words, but don’t get them off ‘getty’ etc. anyone can do that. Impress me with your own photography of a moment in life that you captured and made you think. If you don’t do that, I’ll just ignore you and play with my mobile along with the guy next to me.
4. you don’t need to out the ENTIRE CHART OF 1000 figures to show me result went up 65%. Just tell me. I’ll believe you.
5. If you find yourself saying “the point i’m trying to make...” in your speech. It fills the room with doubt.
6. The reaction you get is the communication you give. (yeah, thought i’d leave you with a philosophical one)
Here’s a chart of stand cliches.
In at number 5 is “man suit holding world in his hands” . Not seen this
one since “shrub in soil held delicately in palm of child’s hand” became out of
fashion. What I enjoyed about this photo was the poor resolution of the
printing. Close up he looked like he was
made of Lego.
1. It’s massively important to make a link as explicit and as a strong as you can to the headline of the conference and the presentation you give. You audience are being boomed at all day by dozens of PowerPoints and stimulated by nothing but free mints an luke warm coffee. They don’t want to be given an intellectual resume of your business performance, your cleverness (that’s just isolating) and you shouldn’t ask them to work hard to understand your speech. If the conference is about HR ENERGY, then your speech should be about HR ENERGY!!!
2. Write your content so a BABOON can understand it. If it contains material that hurts a scrabble player, take it out. The best guide is FEWER. BETTER. WORDS.
3. Have pictures – they paint a thousand words, but don’t get them off ‘getty’ etc. anyone can do that. Impress me with your own photography of a moment in life that you captured and made you think. If you don’t do that, I’ll just ignore you and play with my mobile along with the guy next to me.
4. you don’t need to out the ENTIRE CHART OF 1000 figures to show me result went up 65%. Just tell me. I’ll believe you.
5. If you find yourself saying “the point i’m trying to make...” in your speech. It fills the room with doubt.
6. The reaction you get is the communication you give. (yeah, thought i’d leave you with a philosophical one)
And now some fun...
In at number 5 is “man suit holding world in his hands” . Not seen this
one since “shrub in soil held delicately in palm of child’s hand” became out of
fashion. What I enjoyed about this photo was the poor resolution of the
printing. Close up he looked like he was
made of Lego.
In at 4 is “conference bag made from environmentally
friendly fabric”. This allows users to
gather up as many pens, leaflets and free mousmats as possible before throwing
them away in the trash to become more landfill; genius.
At 3 is conference muffins and sweets.
Nothing sells contract mobile packages, or fleet hire cars more than
sponge and sugar and an empty glass bowl where all the sweets used to be
At 2 is a BIG EMPTY WHITE BOX. So ... your brand is about
what exactly?
And my favourite from this year is an insight stand where
the monitor is ... off all bloody day!!
Not
a single insight to be found despite three juniors searching their facebook page for the
answer below.
See you next conference.
Sigh.
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