On screen presentations are great, but often they can be overkill if you’re presenting to only one or two people.

A “Walk-Through” deck has been a typical solution in which a presentation is printed and paged through while sitting next to your viewer (or “audient” as some of used to say.)

This can be effective, but it still lacks a sense of immediacy and interactivity. Seth Godinpublished a blog post recently with a new solution that I wanted to share:

The Modern Talking Pad.

Seth apparently has been having success lately with a bound deck that he removes information from and then fills it back in in real time while sitting with his client.

Jan Schultink who writes the great Slides That Stick expands on Seth’s idea and gives an example in his blog post:

Take a look, let me know what you think and if you have done something similar or do so in the future. I’m going to start suggesting this to some of my guys for smaller meetings…

Guy Kawasaki is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and a former product evangelist for Apple. 

In his current role as an investor, he hears hundreds of pitches a year and so has some pretty strong feelings about how people present information (often very badly.)

Among other things, he is known for his strict 10/20/30 Rule that states “A PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.”

While you’d be a bit foolish to break this rule if you went to Guy asking him to invest in your business, I do think this is not a guideline that can hold up in all situations.

Nonetheless, it’s good advice to keep in mind as your slide count balloons, your text starts getting smaller and smaller and you find yourself with 60 minutes of material all of a sudden for what was supposed to be a 30 minute meeting…

Read more about the 10/20/30 Rule and more about presentation at Guy’s blog and in his book, The Art of the Start.

One of my favorite video podcasts is Apple’s Quicktips.

It’s a handy little regular series of 1 minute videos by Apple employees each of which teaches a particular Mac trick or feature. The real reason I like it though is that there is absolutely nothing extraneous about them.

Produced by anybody else, there probably would be opening and closing graphics, wordy introductions, added production values, attempts at humor, etc.

But Apple strips away almost everything that is extraneous to the particular message being communicated to pack as much information into as little time as possible.

One example? The Apple employees skip the “Hi, my name is…” and let an on screen graphic communicate this info. 3 seconds saved. 

How long did your last presentation take? Could the same amount of information have been communicated in less time and with less “stuff?”

Subscribe to the video podcast via iTunes here.

Remember this guy? 

How about now?

“I’m not only the Hair Club president, I’m also a client…”

Sy Sperling wasn’t the coolest guy around, but he made his pitch deeply personal–something which few people are brave enough to do these days.

I just finished a pitch for the opportunity to help publicize a malaria drug in Africa. The team leader on the pitch wanted to stress to the client that he and the company knew Africa and the marketplace intimately. “I mean, I’ve been there, I’ve already done this,” he said. 

“Do you have any pictures from your trips…?” I asked.

And so, instead of stock imagery of African children we used actual snapshots from his travels, like this one.

“It’s Sunday and I was on a reporting assignment for Voice of America covering polio eradication efforts,” he told me. “I was walking across the street and saw this father smiling and carrying his child to church. I was struck by his joy and happiness, so I stopped him…”

Not really the kind of story you could tell in a pitch using iStock Photo…

We’ve all said to people, “Nobody wants to see your vacation pictures…” But what if those pictures are actually relevant to the story you’re telling? 

A few months ago I designed a presentation for an executive at Ebay that focused on the site’s fixed price items and how it’s no longer just for auctions. The speaker began not with success stories of average users, but instead put up the images of everything she had personally bought over the past six months for her and her family. 

Her presentation was a big deal in front of a huge industry audience. Many might have thought that this was no time to make it “cute” or “clever.” Someone else might have just wanted to hit the audience over the head with persuasive numbers and revenue opportunities. But this speaker knew that though Ebay and its partner sellers are businesses, it all ultimately comes down to individuals. And so she started by humanizing her talk using the best possible case study: herself.

How can you personalize your next pitch?