When Powerpoint Attacks: 6 survival tips

If you forced me to rank the places where I would most prefer not to look like an idiot, the Harvard Kennedy School would come in fourth.   Or maybe sixth.  Some of history’s most eminent figures have spoken there, like Jack Donaghy.
But even after a successful tech-check before the presentation, things can go terribly wrong.  Especially if you’ve embedded videos into a powerpoint presentation.

I was attempting to show two commercials, but another video popped up, and what’s worse, the audio was out of synch with the video.  But here’s what I’ve learned:

1)    Take a deep breath and relax.  You’re still in control of how you respond.  One of the most important lessons I’ve learned from a decade of standup comedy is that audiences are incredibly empathetic.   If you’re having a good time, they are.  If you’re stressed out, they are.  Audiences want you to be successful.   It’s important that you understand and remind yourself that they are rooting for you.

2)    Bring backup.  I always carry a copy of my presentation on a USB stick and load the file on a backup presentation computer if available — the AV folks usually have one.

3)  Bring a short 3-4 minute video about your topic on a DVD.  Give it to the AV folks during the tech run-through.  If there is a problem, they can play your video to give the audience something to watch other than you sweating, while the tech folks are resolving the issue.

4) Take an improv class.  You may have to do it on a dare.  I came very close to running out of my first improv class in 1998 at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade theater.  It was scary to get through, but has changed my life.  Give it a shot.

5) Have an alternative slide-free version of your story ready to tell.  It’s important to be ready to present a compelling case without powerpoint slides, as I sometimes have to do when negotiating with my wife.  Hard to believe but history has witnessed a few speeches that went pretty well without foils and an overhead projector:  the Gettysburg Address, the Sermon on the Mount and King Henry V’s Crispian Day speech.  To be fair, one of those speakers relied on 3×5 index cards and was a fictional character.

6)    Get a Mac.

Inbound Marketing Summit

Here’s yesterday’s presentation from the Inbound Marketing Summit.  I’ll follow up in the next few days with posts covering the comedy writing homework assignment, the Hyde Park chapel story, and answer a few questions I received via twitter.  Steve Garfield’s interview provides a little more detail.

It’s nice to be warm again.

VisibleGains B2B Video Roundtable

I spent some time this week at our Tewksbury, MA office  meeting our mobile networking team, headed up by Ash Dahod, recently profiled in the Boston Globe. What a fun group.  I filmed an into for a video travel blog we’ll be producing when one of my colleagues Angela Singhal-Whiteford treks to Kuala Lumpur, Mumbai and Delhi to visit with customers.

David Meerman Scott invited me to speak Friday afternoon at the VisibleGains B2B video roundtable, along with Steve Garfield and others.   I shared a funny video and talked about some of the interesting things we’re doing with video, including the upcoming Doobie Brothers Cisco TelePresence event.

Update:  Here’s a comprehensive review of the Doobie Brothers concert from Howard Lichtman.

SXSW panel: Late Night Comedy meets Corporate Video

Our proposed panel has made it through the first round of the SXSW Interactive selections, and now we need your vote to make it to the show.  Scott Teems, SXSW Film Festival winning director for THAT EVENING SUN and I (contributor to SNL, Letterman, Conan, The Onion) will discuss a few of our corporate YouTube video hits that earned recognition from The New York Times and Comedy Central, as well as lessons learned from near “fireable offenses.”   Bestselling author David Meerman Scott (New Rules of Marketing & PR, Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead) will join us.

We’d appreciate your vote for our panel (voting ends 11:59 CDT Friday, August 27.) It takes a minute to register for an account, then click here [note: the panelpicker page doesn’t allow for listing of all panelists, hence the above post]

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/7744

Mad Science: Making Water Smarter

John Cohn, of Discovery Channel’s “The Colony” and I filmed our third Mad Science episode in the dead of winter, on Lake Champlain, in an unstable canoe.  Maybe not the brightest idea.  But it was a blast.

Check out our previous episodes, Micro-forecasting and Smart Grid.

Mad Science: Smart Grid

Mad Science

Our new video series featuring John Cohn, from Discovery Channel’s “The Colony“

BtoB Mag: “Comedian Tim Washer and IBM’s viral campaign”

From BtoB Magazine:

COMEDIAN TIM WASHER RARELY TAKES HIMSELF seriously, appearing     everywhere from “Saturday Night Live,” to Budweiser commercials, to a plethora of late-night talk shows. But in 2004, the strictly humorous man landed a new job—this one with IBM Corp., whose brand would hardly be considered comical. IBM, in an attempt to poke fun at its newly established Mainframe Division, hired Washer for a series of viral videos featuring absurdist marketing humor for IBM’s then-new System z technology. The campaign took off, garnering almost 500,000 views for the six-part series on YouTube—with each video providing a link, and driving traffic, to the Mainframe informational Web site. Last month, Washer appeared at a Business Development Institute seminar on corporate social media practices. Though now several years removed from his Mainframe campaign, Washer praised IBM’s willingness to embrace creative absurdity in the corporate marketing world and warned the audience that fear was the greatest hindrance to a company’s ability to maneuver successfully in the social media realm. —Dillon White

Advertising Age: IBM’s Zany Viral Video Chief

Earlier this week AdAge reported on the case study I discussed on the use of humor in corporate web video.  I showed a few clips including one from our Smarter Planet campaign.  “Mainframe: The Art of the Sale” earned some great press coverage.  The San Francisco Chronicle blog “What are They Drinking in Armonk,” ZDNet compared it favorably against Microsoft’s broadcast ads with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates, industry luminary James Governor blogged “Selling big iron the David Brent way,” and Comedy Central selected it as a finalist in its Test Pilot’s contest.

Marketing’s Fifth P

Congrats to our director/editor of this trilogy, Scott Teems, who won his second film festival (2 for 2) on Saturday night.  View the full series at this link.