Stardust Global Ventures

When I started pondering this post, I began with something I wrote so long ago it’s mostly vanished into the Wayback Machine. It was sometime in early 2006 I wrote a post entitled Death by Powerpoint on my old Digital Common Sense blog. While I still own that domain, and there’s some backup somewhere, I blew the content offline long ago. I’m not at all convinced I have any responsibility to maintain old links and content like that. It was mine to kill. And it’s still in the Wayback Machine somewhere because I found this excerpt, which I share to set the foundation for my initial thinking:

PowerPoint as a tool has destroyed much of our critical thinking process. We have become a society of bullet points (3 per slide) that’s increasingly incapable of completing the thought process. And it isn’t because the tool is bad. It’s all in how we use or abuse it. PowerPoint has made it too easy for people to project slide after slide and bullet after bullet of boredom ad nauseam . . . Critical thinking and analysis is being pushed into the background.

Slides should be simple. To paraphrase Einstein, make your slides as simple as possible, but no simpler. Don’t read them. If your audience can read you’re not doing them any favors by reading the slide. And you’re boring the hell out of them. The value a speaker brings is that penchant for speaking extemporaneously about the topic on the slide. To add value. Yes, if you’re presenting material, you need to add value to the material. If all you’re doing is blasting slides and reading them, you are wasting your audience’s precious time. I can tell within 3 slides if I’m going to be engaged or bored in a presentation and I’m rarely wrong.

Elaborate
Elucidate
Engage
Elegant

Elaborate on details not in the slide. A PowerPoint slide is a skeleton. It’s a framework for discussion. It’s the means, not the end. Your role as the presenter is to put meat on the bones and flesh things out. You provide the context and weight that can’t be conveyed in a slide with three bullets. If you don’t, you’re wasting your audience’s valuable time. Elucidate to trigger thinking. Slides that are effective are those that raise questions. A slide with three boring, obvious points says nothing. A slide that triggers a “WTF” reaction from the audience, followed by clarification has impact. It makes people think. You are the catalyst to trigger neurons firing across synaptic gaps. Don’t state the obvious over and over and bore your audience into a comatose stupor. Engage the audience. Get active participation. In large groups, find engagement
behind the eyes. Tickle and tease. Tell a story. Lead the audience down a path. Make them think…. If
your audience can’t read your slides, you’re wasting their valuable time.

This was written from lessons learned teaching very technical courses for a number of years. You don’t teach a week long class on Frame Relay at the bit level and read slides. In fact, when you teach like I did, you run 165 slides a day and never look at them when you teach. The value lies in the presenter, not the handout, but I digress.

PowerPoint has in so many ways dumbed down business in the US. We have become a business community of three bullet slides, with one goofy picture. It’s the core of almost every presentation.

Raise your hand if you’ve been there. Yes, we all have. I believe it’s a pretty universally held truth that PowerPoint has led to the dumbing down of business. And all you have to to is visit your conference of choice to see yet one more from some tech startup with an idea and PowerPoint. Those startups are a dime a dozen and fly like a rock. The ones that win do real demos, talk off the cuff about their innovations, take questions and win. But again, I digress.

While PowerPoint has, in many ways, lowered our critical thinking skills, social media and tools like Twitter can and do have the opposite effect. Not always. I’m not saying that there are some pretty dumbed down Tweets out there. I know a fair percentage of the 14,000+ Tweets I’ve posted in the last three and a half years fall into that category.

Twitter, and the goal of 140 characters has brought us a value diametrically opposed to what PowerPoint did to our lives. PowerPoint begs  cutesy gimmicks. Twitter and the 140 character limitation precludes them entirely. With tools like PowerPoint we dance around the real point and aim for sounds bites and attention getters. Most of us fail miserably, and PowerPoint, and excellent tool, takes a black eye because of users who simply shouldn’t be on stage presenting. It reminds me of something I used to tell students when talking about web page development:

Twitter, and the limitation of 140 characters go far beyond PowerPoint and bring a requirement straight to the front. And the requirement’s a simple one – get to the point. There is no room for pussyfooting around, no space for kitschy graphics and animations, no time to waste.

We’ve all heard content is king used as a buzz phrase. With Twitter, content is controlled. You can’t take the stage and ramble. No dawdling (I hear my mother’s voice in my head). Get to the point and move on.

With Twitter, you get 140 characters to make your pitch, your point, your observation. It’s hit or miss. Make your point well and conversation will ensue. It might be a series of Tweets, email or a phone call, but engagement is the measure our the effectiveness of what we Tweet. Responses are simply a prime indicator of engagement. The Quality of the Engagement improves when we start from a solid foundation – the first Tweet in the thread.

Twitter is a place we find true gems. Sparks of genius abound. And there’s a lot of drivel too. Separating the signal from the noise is an exercise best left to the reader. My noise may easily be your signal or vice versa.

I hate the term social media when it’s really social marketing. We are all marketing and selling in the social networks. If you’re an active user on Twitter, you’re an attention whore. So am I. We all are. But what we’re doing is marketing and selling. We build our own individual brands, corporate brands, product brands. Our reputation. We build it with every Tweet, blog post and comment. All day every day we are out here selling the value of me to our network in one way or another.

Twitter is the platform for the perfect elevator pitch. We get 140 characters of pure power. If we use them wisely and well, we win growth in our network, we gain attention, we earn business, we succeed. The elevator pitch has been replaced with the simplicity of 140 characters.

I used to think we were losing our critical thinking skills because of how PowerPoint dumbed us down in business. Twitter does the reverse. It forces us to hone our critical thinking. Where the difference? In the past, someone presented us an idea and we had to think in critical terms about the value. We had to ask questions and analyze. Today, in 140 characters, the onus is on each of us to do our critical thinking before we Tweet. We’re limited and every character has to count. There’s no margin for error on Twitter. It’s like firing one single shot from a rifle. Once it’s fired, there’s no other course.

So here’s 140 characters in parting -