When asked to deliver a professional presentation many of us can come up with a collection of thoughts we want to share with the audience. However, these often feel like a string of sentences that don’t necessarily produce a cohesive whole. And certainly don’t captivate. So how do you turn your ideas in an effective presentation?

Public speaking is an art and may take years to master at the level of a professional orator. However, all of us can incorporate a few key concepts and make our presentations more effective and captivating. There are four major characteristics of an effective professional presentation: it is informative, engaging, well-timed, and contains two or three captivating, memorable sentences.

1. An effective presentation needs to be informative. It delivers information, data, graphs, techniques, and other components which are of interest to the target audience and have the potential to inform, improve, or even transform professional practices. Make sure the information comes in a variety of formats, such as statistics, applications, examples, and does not overwhelm the audience with excessive volume.
2. Successful presentations are engaging to the audience and maintain their interest. In some situations it may be appropriate to solicit audience questions or participation. If you are looking for an interactive effect it is preferable to ask open ended questions, such as “would someone like to provide an example of this?” rather than yes/ no questions, such as “have you ever encountered this?”. At other times the presenter may role-play or otherwise practice a tool with the audience to reinforce the message and break down any barriers to application such as unstated doubt about effectiveness or difficulty imagining how to actually apply the concept.
3. A skillful presentation should be well-timed. This means two separate things. On one hand, it is important to monitor the length of the presentation to ensure that its duration is not so short that it leaves the audience with a lot of questions or a sense of incomplete coverage of the topic. At the same time, the presentation should not be so long that it bores, becomes diluted or circular, or introduces too many subjects at once. An additional aspect of good timing has to do with the choice of the subject itself. It is crucial for a presenter to have good awareness of the types of experiences, attitudes, levels of knowledge, etc. the audience may share in order to ensure that the topic (good as it may be) does not address an outdated issue or jumps ahead of the current interest of the audience.
4. In the long run, good presentations are remembers as a set of captivating, memorable sentences. The audience will quickly forget the majority of the content of any presentation and will likely not review most of the notes taken. However, when a skillful public speaker populates the presentation with two or three fascinating, humorous, insightful sentences, those stand an excellent chance of being remembered. Cautiously choose which sentences to emphasize – they need to be the most important or most innovative part of your presentation. Make sure the sentences you pick are short, flow well, and don’t use jargon. Incorporate each sentence in two or three parts of the presentation. These should come up as a natural summary of the concept rather than purposeful repetition.

Short presentations are becoming an integral way of communicating information to today’s busy professionals. Even if public speaking never becomes your favorite with a little effort and attention to the four components above, any presentation you deliver can be taken from mediocre to captivating and effective.

At a time of great economic uncertainty and daily financial headaches, we all need some comic relief. With great appreciation for the unknown authors of the enclosed tale, here is our light-hearted (or realistic?) interpretation of what has been taking place on the stock market. This truly gives a new meaning to calling Wall Street a jungle!…

Here is how the stock market really works.

Once upon a time a man appeared in a village and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each.

The villagers, seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest, and started catching them. The man bought thousands at $10 and as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort. He further announced that he would now buy at $20. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again.

Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer increased to $25 each and the supply of monkeys became so little that it was an effort to even see a monkey, let alone catch it!

The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $50! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on behalf of him.

In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers. “Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected. I will sell them to you at $35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each.”

The villagers rounded up with all their savings and bought all the monkeys.

Then they never saw the man nor his assistant, only monkeys everywhere!

Now you have a better understanding of how the stock market works.

Source: Unknown,image:believekevin.

Have you ever wondered what clients get out of a website? Do they simply see a site as a listing of information the company wants to share with them? Or does the Web convey a deeper message about the firm? A recent study in the European Journal of Information Systems focused on scientifically examining the impressions that people form after having viewed a company website. The results were fascinating.

Creating a website is about impression management. This concept has been turned into a virtual science by marketing experts, psychologists, and technical specialists. The strategy of both multinational corporations as well as small companies can be greatly enhanced by a well-developed website. The study found that after viewing a website people constructed a detailed image of the organization including assumptions about the experience, innovation, competence, and customer-orientation of the company. These impressions stemmed from features such as the site’s content, graphics, layout, external links, fonts, and use of advanced technology.

An important insight gleaned for psychology is that users tend to approach a website with a certain generic image in mind, called schema, which serves to shape expectations. As long as the site meets the general expectation of the clients, people’s minds will fill in the missing information to match what would be found in comparable sites. This has two implications for the company creating a website:

1. Make sure that your overall site design is consistent with other companies in your industry so that viewing it activates a desirable image (schema) in your viewer’s mind.
2. For business characteristics that are very important to you, do not leave room for the viewer’s mind to fill in the gaps but provide the information yourself. For example, if you want to create an impression of customer-orientation, create a publish feedback/ contact link and explicitly state your commitment to customer service.

Creating a website for your business can be a daunting task. However, with some help from the latest research any company can dress up its site and achieve the image that would best serve its business purposes.