Remember: even when you’re using a slide deck in a presentation, you’re not a slave to it. Believe it or not, you can still break up the talk by utilizing other visuals. You can still walk to a different part of the room, away from the screen. And, you can still switch to a black slide and draw something simple and meaningful on a whiteboard. Your Powerpoint deck is one tool of many in your presentation toolbox.

In that spirit, here’s today’s video blog, featuring a surprising visual used by Bill Gates. Now, start thinking, can you incorporate a memorable experience in your next presentation?

Please share any ideas for visual SHARPs that you’ve been using (and like Gates, hold the malaria)!

Use black slides. It’s common knowledge that we’re dealing with serious PowerPoint abuse in business these days, but what do I mean? Slide decks that are used for in-person, spoken presentations are being relied on to BE the presentation itself, and we have become narrators. We project our notes up on the screen in bullet point form. This is not what PowerPoint was intended to do. We’re presenters, we’re giving a presentation, and our PowerPoint decks are visual aids. To use a deck effectively in a spoken presentation, the first thing you need to do is use black slides to transform your presentation experience.

What are black slides and how do I use them?

A black slide is a plain, simple slide with an all black background. No company watermark or master deck background.

To use them, first create your whole PowerPoint deck, and then insert a new plain, all black slide. Duplicate it a few times (Command D/Control D). Then, drag and drop them wherever you want to facilitate conversation, explain a concept in more detail, or transition to a new idea. You do not need to put a black slide in between every single slide in your deck, but use them to break up concepts. Here’s a visual example of what I mean (my notes in italicized red):

Why are black slides important?

1. Black slides clear the screen behind you.

Once you’re done with the picture, graph, or supporting information, you need to remove distraction by moving to a black slide. The black slide creates the illusion that the projector is off, and brings all eyes back to you, so you can influence your listeners. Simply put, you can walk in front of the projector without accidentally putting on a shadow puppet show. Almost all meeting rooms are poorly designed so that they have the projector screen right in the middle of the room or stage. It should be at the right or left, so YOU can be the center of your presentation, not your slides.

Move to a black slide and use that time to explain something in more depth, tell a story, facilitate some group conversation, or transition to a new idea. Steve Jobs understood this concept and used it in most every keynote he gave. Jobs knew that to influence, he needed to bring the focus back to him and use his slides as visual aids.

2. Planning with black slides totally changes your mindset.

Black slides make you think ahead about the flow of your presentation and your use of the deck.

From my experience, the majority of business presentations are poorly conceived, in that they are actually created in PowerPoint. It may be easier to go straight to the deck and start typing away, or pull in oldie-but-goodie slides, but it’s not effective. Decide what you want to say and map out your presentation first, then go through and decide where a slide visual will help support and amplify your points. Support could come in the form of simple graphs, pictures, video clips, and other SHARPs to bring memorability.

Every time I teach this concept toward the end of a training day, I ask my participants to estimate how many slides I’ve used all day. And every single time, the highest guess is no more than half of the slides I’ve actually presented. Participants are shocked when I show them my deck. Why? Because it didn’t feel like a PowerPoint heavy day due to the use of black slides. (And I use a lot! I’m talking nearly 150 slides!) My slides are simple and used to support my presentation, not BE my presentation.

3. Black slides help you avoid the “B button.”

Sometime people ask me, “Well, can’t the B button do all that?” Hitting “B” on your keyboard while in PowerPoint presentation mode will black out the screen, but it’s a second rate alternative to actually inserting a black slide.

When you want to move forward in your deck, you have to hit the B button again, showing the previous slide in order to move on. It’s jarring, especially if you’re far beyond that point, and can distract from the momentum of your talk. But, keep the B button in your presentation emergency tool kit, in case you’re in the middle of a talk and forgot to add an actual black slide.

Warnings:

• Do not use black slides on webinars. We tried it and viewers thought their webinar programs were on the blink.
• Do not email around your deck with black slides in it. If you need to send something around, first create your deck and save that version for emailing. Then save a duplicate and add in your black slides for live presentation only. As Garr Reynolds states so well, “slideuments” are a different story. For some deck emailing tips, read here.

Have you used black slides before? Let me know how it has gone, or if you have any questions on how to use them in the moment.

(*This may not be a nationally recognized holiday.. Ok, it’s not, but it should be! We’ll be sharing PowerPoint best practices all month to strengthen your game.)

Be Aware, and Beware!

There's been a lot of buzz – and new insight – into what to do about people twittering while you are speaking. Olivia Mitchell did an outstanding guest blog on Laura Fitton's Pistachio site, and the next day on Chris Spagnuolo's Edgehopper, wrapping up a busy week with her own summary post. All great food for thought – but let's not get carried away. The "back channel" will only be useful in a small number of communicating environments – at least for the next year or so. Here's why:

The great majority of Twitterers, and bloggers for that matter, are early adopters, and tech/social media savvy. They probably would be lost without their computers/PDA's/phones (I know I would.) However the majority of the business world uses the tools, but don't lose themselves in the process. And I'm afraid that the thrust of the current Twitter buzz advocating twittering during speeches will cause an expectation of good communication that will not be met – and will lead the majority of people (like most of our clients) down the wrong path.

Now there ARE great new possibilities, particularly with high tech audiences like at SXSW, and others. So there’s the good, the bad and the ugly.

Let’s start with the ugly:

• Until there was Twitter, there was only ‘Blackberry Abuse,’ which we blogged on awhile back. Here it was rude for people to go to their Blackberrys (or PDA's/iPhones) during a meeting or speech to IM or check email – but they did it anyway. Because they were bored!
• The solution to Blackberry Abuse was to be INTERESTING as a speaker. Engage and excite your audience and they will be compelled to listen, and watch!
• That’s still the solution to the almost 90% of speaking situations where Twittering would not be appropriate (see below). But we're beginning to see an expectation that people SHOULD Twitter, it’s OK, it will be constructive, and it’s not really because they’re bored. But the majority of Twitterers WILL be twittering because they are bored, because the majority of speakers are unfortunately boring. And so now we have a valid excuse to put our heads down, get our minds on the tweet and not the message, and be rude to the unsuspecting speaker.
• Confusion will reign.

Now for the bad:

• In probably 80-90% of most business and conference settings speakers have a message to give – at keynote speeches and large company events – the large audience venues. It is not a groupthink or collaboration (see below for “the good.”)
• You can't read and listen effectively at the same time. This has been well documented by Edward Tufte and others, and I'll personally confirm that with my past 30 years experience in the communication and speaking business. It is cognitive dissonance in action.
• Think of the problem with PowerPoint presentations filled with text, (also well documented in this blog and Presentation Zen and others.) We’ve all had the sad but common experience of reading ahead, as the speaker says, “Now stay with me.” And of course we don’t, and since we can’t read and listen at the same time we have cognitive dissonance.
• And it’s even worse with Tweeting. If you think you can’t read and listen at the same time, it’s even worse to try to text and listen (and read) at the same time. If you have a group listening to a speaker (supposedly) and tweeting about the speaker’s 140 character sound bites (supposedly) and looking at the text and PowerPoints, and reading other Tweeter’s tweets, and looking up urls – chaos reigns in the mind. The speaker has lost control, and there is not only NOT better communication – it is far worse and more fragmented.
• In this large conference/event/speech setting where the speaker has a point-of-view and a message to deliver, the speaker is responsible for the experience. You can’t command “No Blackberrys. No Twitter!” – because people will do what they want to do. But there are other ways – the speaker cannot abdicate his or her responsibility. He or she should be should be interesting, engaging and powerful, using arresting stories, visuals and Black Slides!

A new perspective – the good that will come out of this:

• The growing dialogue and power of Twitter is opening up new ways to communicate, and we are just on the forefront. This is what this recent buzz is leading to, and take the time to read all of the ideas and comments in those blog links below – you’ll get some idea of where it is going.
• Workshops, social media sessions, Jelly!, BarCamps, et al are far different than the traditional more formal speeches mentioned above. Although they won’t replace them anytime soon, they are offering new collaborative possibilities, and it is these where Twitter and the ‘back channel’ will flourish. Likely ALL the sessions at SXSW 2009 Austin in two weeks will be Twitter enhanced, providing a high level laboratory – much should come out of that.
• On webinars and teleconferences there is much more potential for using Twitter, and this back channel becomes very useful where you don't have the speaker present, and need more visual engagement.
• The thousands of smaller meetings and business conferences going on everyday should be living laboratories for experimenting and trying out some of these new ideas of Twitter that have already shown promise.

See Olivia, Pistachio and Edgehopper for dozens of examples of the benefits of Twitter in today's growingly diverse communications experiences. But don’t lose sight of the fact that in most speeches today, Twittering during a speech won’t be of use – but abuse.