As a writer, one of my goals for this year was to use more stories and real-life examples in articles. The challenging part was coming up with a story or example that tied in with the rest of the article. One of the pros at this is Michael Katz of Blue Penguin Development and I’ve been studying his weekly newsletter to learn from him.

We hand out candy on Halloween. Sounds boring with no chance of becoming a story in an article? Michael did it. The funny thing was this Halloween was the first time I didn’t have to do the running-to-the-door-and-grabbing-the-candy-bowl on the way business. My 11-year-old son shocked us when he said he was too old for trick or treating. This guy loves candy more than his older sister who was trick or treating with her teen friends long pass age 11.

Not only that, but my seven-year-old had the flu, so my husband was home to help, too. Between them covering the door, I had the whole Halloween night off for the first time since we moved in our house.

I grew up in a neighborhood where most kids were the same ages as my 10 years older  siblings, so few kids came to our door. Our neighborhood made my childhood neighborhood look like country living (Fort Worth) as the doorbell rang too many times to count. During the early years, I loved standing by the door ready to open it to see what surprises appeared on the other side of the door. Creative costumes, creepy costumes and teens faking it costumes.

In the past few years, my enthusiasm dropped. The doorbell’s constant interruption left me with little I could do between ringings except for reading magazines. When you do something long enough, it turns into a bore that all the costumes — good and bad – blur.

That happens to business professionals, too. They call, they present, they meet. They can do everything right and fail to capture interest from the party on the other side of the phone call, table or desk. Like answering the door on Halloween and losing interest in the costumes, they have heard and seen it all before.

Author of Metaphorically Selling Anne Miller shares over 50 stories using metaphors, stories and examples to shake resistance and close deals in Make What You Say Pay! The diverse examples in the book cover speeches, greeting cards, elevator speeches, new concepts and more. The book has a simple layout: the story followed by Miller’s short commentary on the story and why the metaphor worked.

Not only does the short, fast read offer examples from different situations, but also uses a variety of metaphors. So no expecting a book filled with the oft-used sports metaphors. Because of the diversity of situations and metaphors, most people can benefit from the book. A developer can get ideas on how to explain technical concepts. A small business can get ideas on how to thank clients for their business.  A finance employee can get ideas on how to convert lifeless numbers into meaningful ones.

Miller sorts chapters by topic to simplify finding the right stories that fit your situation. Need to grab attention? Convince them to get on board? Stand out from the crowd? Miller includes all of these and more.

The only slight weakness is the commentary. First, all of it is in italics. Italics aren’t meant for paragraphs. Its job is to highlight short points, book titles and the like. Some feels forced, like you have to include commentary, but the story says it all and any commentary would be just repetition. The commentaries are one or two paragraphs, so they don’t take up much space. The value is in the stories. In fact, I wish there were more stories and examples. Miller invites readers to submit their stories and she plans to publish them as long as they keep coming.

Make What You Say Pay! belongs in the professional’s reference library. Almost every business professional can punch up business with a story or metaphor. Miller’s book will help find that metaphor so you’re not stuck using the needle in a haystack analogy again.

Title: Make What You Say Pay! The Language That Opens Minds, Closes Deals & Wows Crowds
Author: Anne Miller
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN-10: 1450583873
ISBN-13: 978-1450583879
Date: July 2010
Format: Paperback
Pages: 164
Cover Price: USD: $14.95 Amazon: $13.45

FTC disclosure: Reviewer received copy from publisher, which had no influence on the review.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Meryl Evans

It’s not PowerPoint’s fault that presentations have become boring and useless. After all, it just supplies the tools and it’s what we do with it that matters. Found this Hugh MacLeod PowerPuke cartoon that captures my thought perfectly.

Sure, PowerPoint comes with templates. Again, people don’t customize the presentation for their audience’s needs. They just fill in the headings and bullets without giving much thought. This compelled me to start this list of great examples.

Many of the examples are based on slides than on a person giving the presentation. After all, I rely heavily on slides. When they tell me something without making me read a book and give me an idea of what the speaker is saying (keeping me on cue if I am able to understand the speaker), then it’s most likely a great presentation.

Please email or post a comment if you know of others. (Spam sites need not apply.)

Updated: 6 April 2011

Presentations

1. 5 Ways to Make PowerPoint Sing! (And Dance!)
2. 10 Rules for Killer Business Cards 2010 Edition
3. Banish Boring Presentations
4. Beyond Monetization: Build Lasting Value Through Social Media
5. The Brand Gap based on the best-selling book.
6. The CommonCraft Show: Known for its Social Networking in Plain English — high energy and fast-paced presentations. I wanna be like them!
7. Debunking Third World Myths with Hans Rosling
8. Dick Hardt on Identity 2.0 and Who’s the Dick on My Site?
9. Effective PowerPoint Presenting
10. Flickr: All about pictrs
11. Footnotes: How feet can be entertaining.
12. Garr Reynolds of PresentationZen on presentations @GoogleTalks.
13. Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation
14. Gore speech on global warming
15. Guy Kawasaki Truemors presentation
16. History of the Button: Pick any button…
17. How to Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams by Jason Fried of 37Signals. I’ve heard (seen) him speak and he kept my attention — I could actually follow along and cared about what he had to say.
18. I Am the Media: On word of mouth.
19. Inbox Zero by Merlin Mann
20. An Introduction to Visual Thinking
21. Kill Bullets
22. Meet Henry, Mr. MBA who doesn’t know spit about presentations. Now Meet Everyone.
23. Logic + Emotion and One Year Later
24. Panipuri: Presentation on a food item.
25. Pecha Kucha: Get to the PowerPoint in 20 slides then sit the hell down.
26. PowerPoint 2007 Design Fashion Trends
27. Present! Re-thinking presentation design
28. Shift Happens: Everyone I knew was talking about it including a middle school principal, a university professor, family, and business colleagues. It’s rare when a topic crosses all parts of my life (business, personal, and educational). It caught so many people’s attention that information visualizing firm Xplane helped tweak it. The story behind the presentation and its wikispaces page.
29. Sky McCloud Presentation: Cartoonist Scott McCloud’s daughter tells about their trip across the country in a creative way.
30. Social Media: Good except for the blinding red slides.
31. Sustainable Food Lab: An organization bringing sustainability to food systems.
32. Steve Jobs’ iPod Introduction: I read about the presentation in The Perfect Thing, which had me in awe. Remember I don’t hear presentations very well, so reading about it had an impact — thus, the real thing had to be as great as it sounded. Of course, the iPhone and Macintosh (1984) introductions. Slides from the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference.
33. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design): Contains many great presentations — not many examples of slides. TED blog.
34. Thirst: We all need to do our part to help with the water crisis or prepared to be thirsty… and when we go without water for a week…
35. Translation as Vocation: Exactly that.
36. Two states of matter they didn’t teach you about in school [PPT file]: My third grader came home from school and asked me how many states of matters there were. I answered three: Solid, liquid, gas. He told me there were five. We researched this on the Internet and this PowerPoint presentation was the first thing we found. That’s all it took for us to understand it.
37. Unlocking Cool: What a trend hunter does.
38. Usability Anonymous: 12 Step Program for Better User Experiences
39. Visual and Creative Thinking: What We Learned from Peter Pan and Willy Wonka
40. What Is Design?
41. What the **** Is Social Media? One year later…
42. WOMM: Why word of mouth marketing works.
43. Zimbabwe in Crisis: Breaks my heart.

Resources

1. 10 Modern Powerpoint and Keynote Templates that Deliver Clear Presentations: Awesome templates.
2. 11 Ways to Visualize Changes Over Time: Design ideas for when you need to show changes.
3. 43 Folders Best Presentation Tips
4. Absolute PowerPoint: Can a Software Edit Our Thoughts? [pdf file] By Ian Parker — From The New Yorker
5. Alltop Public Speaking blogs
   
6. American Rhetoric: Top 100 Speeches
7. Animotoritize: Help Banish Boring Business Presentations
8. Bad, bad, bad presentation. Do the opposite!
9. The Best Kept Secret of Great Presentations includes examples of great presentations
10. Beyond Bullet Points teaches how to tell a story with PowerPoint without resorting to useless templates. Think of it as presentation turned into visuals. Fabulous book and resource.
11. Brainy Betty: PowerPoint templates.
12. Briefcase Books: What Makes a Great Presentation? [pdf file]
13. Death by PowerPoint (YouTube version) and SlideShare version
14. Doc Searls’ It’s the Story, Stupid
15. Don Norman’ In Defense of PowerPoint
16. Ellen Finkelstein’s PowerPoint section
17. Guy Kawasaki on 10-20-30 presentation rule (video) and blog entry
18. “How to” Visual Effects in PowerPoint
19. The London Speaker: Toastmasters of London with plenty of good info.
20. m62 visualcommunications: Resources and tips.
21. MasterViews: Tons of tips, articles, and resources on presentations
22. Mother Tongue Annoyances: Lose the ums!
23. Official PowerPoint Home Page: Templates, training, articles, downloads and more
24. PowerPoint Extreme Makeover: Too long, but good info.
25. The PowerPoint FAQ
26. PowerPoint for Educators: Tricks and samples
27. PowerPoint in education: Many resources and samples.
28. PowerPoint in education: More examples of using PowerPoint in the classroom.
29. PowerPointless: Waving Goodbye to Bad Presentations
30. Presentation Revolution: Great stuff on storytelling
31. Presenters Online: Epson-sponsored resource for multimedia knowledge
32. Presenters University: Resources, articles, and forum
33. Seth Godin’s The Hierarchy of Presentations
34. Seth Godin’s Really Bad PowerPoint (and how to avoid it) [pdf file]
35. SlideBoom: Share live presentations online.
36. slide:ology by Nancy Duarte. Book’s companion site.
37. Slideshare: Share presentations online.
38. Sucking the Suck Out of Presentations
39. Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes: Download the complete text.

Blogs

1. Bert Decker
2. Brad Montgomery
3. Business Presentations
4. Communication Nation
5. Dave Paradi’s PowerPoint Blog
6. Great Public Speaking
7. Guy Kawasaki’s Pitching and Presenting posts
8. Indezine: Blog and free PowerPoint templates.
9. The Extreme Presentation Blog doesn’t like Guy’s 10-20-30 rule and makes a good point. About time someone argued against the rule. Seriously — how many people follow this rule? Many of the great presentations don’t.
10. Pistachio Consulting Blog
11. PowerPoint Blog by TLC Creative has a pre-show checklist for downloading so you can verify all systems go or fix anything that’s stalled.
12. PowerPoint without Bullet Points Blog
13. The Presentation Examples Blog
14. Presentation Helper
15. PresentationZen: Wonderful blog on everything presentation. Garr published a book on the topic.
16. Professionally Speaking
17. Public Speaking Blogs list
18. Six Minutes and its massive list of public speaking blogs
19. slide:ology
20. Speaking about Presenting
21. Speak Schmeak
22. Speak to Lead
23. Tony’s PowerPoint Weblog
24. The YouBlog: Ideas on presentations, persuasion, selling, and communications.

Fun and Humor

1. Claymation with PowerPoint
2. How Not to Use PowerPoint
3. Origins of PowerPoint plus a sequel and other shows
4. PowerPoint Ballad
5. PowerPoint Karaoke: Make a PPT file of multiple presentations slides and cue ‘em. Each singer ad libs a presentation.
6. Presentation Pitfalls: Don’t Let This Happen to You Can you find all of the errors?
7. Read at Work makes it possible to read fiction and poetry… after all, it’s in PowerPoint and it looks like a real desktop.
8. Tim Lee PowerPoint comedy

• An Introduction to Social Networks
• Improve your writing: Contains the advice you see in most articles like this one, but it never hurts to brush up.
• How bad blogging could hurt your company: Blogging is not for every business just like businesses won’t market in every medium. Past entries on this topic.
• 33 Dos and Dont’s for Your Next Presentation. [Thanks, Freelance Folder]
• The Business Implications for Second Life
• A Quick Guide to Marketing Your Book on the Internet
• Greatest Copy Shot Ever Written: Fascinating insight into the famous slogans, taglines, and headlines.

Maybe because of my hearing loss, I tend to notice the slightest changes in facial expressions. I never thought anything of it until a friend mentioned it. She invited me to stay for dinner and I accepted. About 20 minutes later, I noticed her facial expression changed slightly.

I told my friend that I changed my mind about staying for dinner as I forgot about something the family needed to do at home. She was stunned because she knew I had figured out that her husband wasn’t happy with the dinner invitation. Reading body language and facial expressions help with business situations.

Learn about the 8 body language killers [Thanks, CEO Consultant]. The article says words count for only 7% of a presentation. The rest comes from voice and visuals.

The warnings take the perspective of a person giving a presentation. Recognizing these will help you adjust your presentation or interview to avert disaster as it’s never too late to try to turn things around.

Beyond Bullet Points is an excellent book that shows you how to create effective presentations with PowerPoint. The software isn’t the reason presentations have turned dull and unfocused — but the abuse of using the templates. PowerPoint templates come with generic phrases and some users don’t bother changing the headers.

Kids today learn how to use PowerPoint in school to use for presentations. If they’re anything like my daughter, they love to go wild with lots of colors and animation. Since they rarely give the kind of presentation found in the templates, maybe there’s hope kids will move away from the generic style.

Some colleges like University of Chicago require submitting a few slides of PowerPoint as part of their admissions process — to give the students a chance to show their creative side.

The book recommends focusing on telling a story along with using a theme/motif. If you’re going to squeeze text to take up all the space in every slide — then you might as well as e-mail the presentation. No one wants to hear a presenter read the slides. The author’s site, Sociable Media, provides templates for creating presentations. But the book explains how to go about using the templates.

What memorable presentations have you seen or given? What made them successful?

I love the Metaphor Minute newsletter from Anne Miller, author of Metaphorically Selling. Each issue comes with a short example of how to use metaphors in business and presentations. The latest issue shows how someone finally got her point across using fishing as the metaphor:

Corporate executives who cling to the old “dialing for dollars paradigm drive me crazy – especially if they want their reps to crack into corporate accounts. In today’s business environment, it doesn’t work. But for some strange reason, my repeated attempts to correct their errors in judgment falls on deaf ears. It’s like they have a total blind spot in their brain about this matter.

How can I make these idiots understand? I’d ask myself. Clearly logic wasn’t working. It took some serious thinking, but I finally figured out how to get it through their thick heads that new sales strategies were needed.

But first, a bit of background: I live in Minnesota – “Land of 10,000 Lakes.” Fishing is a hugely popular sport here, even in the dead of winter. Our hardy outdoorsmen drill holes in the ice and sit in little shacks in the middle of the lake for hours on end. If you’ve seen the Grumpy Old Men movies, you know what I mean.

The decision makers I was talking to understood fishing. So I created a metaphor that helped them understand why their salespeople were struggling. Here’s essentially what I said:

Bob, you’re telling me that you want your sales reps to reel in the big ones, right? But you also said you’re extremely frustrated by their lack of success. In fact, you’ve been unable to hire people who are capable of doing this.

(Bob nods his head, agreeing with me.)

Selling today is a lot like fishing. Every lake has its trophy fish and all the anglers are out to catch it. But my chances of catching this lunker are pretty slim if I’m not a savvy fisherman. As you know, here are so many things you need to take into account if you want to be successful:

For example, what kind of fish do you want to catch? Is it a catfish, walleye, muskie or sturgeon? Or perhaps you want to go dolphin fishing – in which case you should be on the ocean.

What about the bait? Should you be using minnows, worms, frogs or artificial lures? And what size should your bait be?

Then what about the appropriate equipment? Will you have access to a boat or not? If so, is it a canoe, yacht, bass boat or rowboat? How about your rod & reel? How thick should your line be? Will you be casting, trolling or sitting still? Do you have a depth finder?

What type of environment are you fishing in? Does your trophy fish prefer deep pools, shallow waters and lily pads or hiding under rock piles. Since we know that fish behave differently if its 80 degrees and sunny versus a frigid -10, what are the weather conditions?

Am I not right that you go through all this thinking just to try to catch a trophy fish? (He nods in agreement.)

Bob, like I said earlier, selling is a lot like fishing. You can’t expect your people to be successful reeling in the big ones if you just send them out to the lake and tell them to keep casting. It doesn’t work that way.

Bob finally got it! Why? Because I related selling to something he loved and understood.

c.2007, Anne Miller, author, “Metaphorically Selling,” amiller@annemiller.com

How have you used metaphors or creativity to get a point across or in a presentation?

Over the last few years, comments have popped up on how PowerPoint ruins many presentations. That’s backward. Presenters ruin presentations by using PowerPoint. PowerPoint isn’t the criminal here. The crime comes from people not using creativity in designing their presentations. Weird Is Good (near the end of the article) took a ingenious approach in a lecture on the Civil War. Here’s a quote:

Now I had the leisure to ramp up my presentations. I clicked on the PowerPoint icon and wandered into the realm of digitally enhanced oration. Most historians consider images, bullet points, and film clips show-biz flash. If old-time audiences could sit and listen to Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas discuss slavery for hours without photos or outlines, why can’t modern students endure a lecture about their debates without the indulgence of eye candy?

I sympathize with those retro sentiments. We have all watched computerized slide shows induce brain-deadness in otherwise vibrant human beings. They stare blankly at the screen and repeat every word that pops up there like zombified parrots. Instead of revolutionizing academic presentations, PowerPoint has — and this is a true miracle — dulled them further.

Jon T. Coleman, the professor who wrote the article, put “punk” in the PowerPoint as he discussed facial hair. Yes, facial hair.

I use the tour of Civil War facial hair to teach two lessons. The tour is a fun way to demonstrate how to raise a historical question, find a thesis, and formulate an argument. It’s an exercise in essay writing.

But it’s also a goof. I’m not really interested in discovering why generals and politicians on both sides of the most deadly struggle in American history grew such fabulous whiskers. I wanted to do something strange and pointless with PowerPoint. And in so doing, I hoped to make academe a little better.

Not weird. Imaginative!

Doing Presentations Right

Maybe it would help to treat every presentation as if the computer or device that contains the presentation will die minutes before the presentation begins. You have a backup computer? OK, what if that backup dies, too? Not likely? Regardless, the point is to avoid letting PowerPoint be the presentation. If you need inspiration, Metaphorically Selling is a great resource for coming up with innovative ways to present information.

Good speakers use PowerPoint or whatever application as a complementary tool to their presentation. But too often, presenters succumb to PowerPoint like a boss I had in the past would would read the slides and then add a little commentary before moving to the next slide. Edward Tufte declared PowerPoint is evil because of presenters like my boss. Boomberg’s Andrew Ferguson shares his beef with PowerPoint.

How often do we get to use creativity? A presentation offers the opportunity to exercise our imaginations and put it to good use. MasterViews provides many resources, tools, and ideas for creating successful and memorable presentations. Next time you need to do a presentation, rather than thinking of how much work it is and how it interferes with your busy day — consider it an opportunity to do something different and stand out.

Who knew selling could be fun? Learn how to use metaphors in making the sale. The book isn’t just for people who do sales, but anyone who has to do any kind of persuasion even for marketing a one-person business. It’s a surprise this book isn’t better known as it’s a superb, fun, and educational read.

Why not just buy a book on language or read up on metaphors? Miller uses examples of applying metaphors in business situations, something you won’t find in metaphor-related books.

The book starts off with the “Sorry Seven,” seven kinds of people who tend to put listeners to sleep. The book is divided into four sections. The first shows why you should use metaphors in making your case. They help appeal to both sides of the brain. Miller uses Robin Williams and Joe Friday to represent the right and left brains respectively. This is a clever way to remember which side of the brain is which in terms of telling (Joe Friday) and showing (Robin Williams).

Section two shows how to create effective metaphors with a four-step workout (no running involved). Section three is about applying the power of metaphors in the selling process. You’ve heard “Practice makes perfect” and section four is about practicing with the metaphors. In this section, Miller encourages becoming a clipper for clipping quotes and other gems. She also shares her valuable collection of quotes to get you started.

This book not only serves as an educational read that’s as fluid as reading a work of fiction, but also as a reference and a workbook as the end of each chapter has worksheets to practice using metaphors.

Title: Metaphorically Selling
Author: Anne Miller
Publisher: Chiron Associates
ISBN: 0976279401
Date: December 2004
Format: Paperback
Pages: 168
Cover Price: USD: $14.95 Amazon: $10.17