PowerPoints can often make or break a career and we need to master the art of creating good looking PowerPoints, especially if we are working in the corporate world. Here are some good reads and tools from across the web and the blogosphere to help you get started in creating a good design.

Remember like experts say, creating a good PowerPoint is a work of art - the visual appeal and construction of words should harmoniously depict and help in what you intend to say.

1. Office 2007 - Firstly, before anything else, lets get the weapons and ammunition right. I kept on repeating this but the US army is the top armed forces in the world not because the Americans are stronger than the people in other countries, but majorly because of the superior weapons they have. So taking that into account,  how about upgrading our own hung MS Office 98s and XPs to Office 2007 (Microsoft is not my client), if you are not already. The visually appealing shapes, templates, and designs you can create so easily in Office 2007 will seem like impossible in the other previous versions of MS Office.

2. Templates - You can use the MS Office themes and download more from here. However one problem with using these templates is that everyone uses them, so your presentation looks like a college student’s homework. You can break free from the default flashy and extra colorful Microsoft templates and use your own templates. Check out the designs of some award wining presentations here. You don’t need to be a master designer. A white background is suitable for almost all types of presentations. Here is a simple one I have used way back, in a plain white background with one picture.

Ok I realised it looks much better on the PowerPoint, but nevertheless to prove a point, I am not deleting it.

3. Layouts - Chuck the standard layout designs and create your own style. All slides need not have the standard layouts throughout, meaning you can move around where you put the text and the pictures. For myself, I stopped using the default ‘Title’ and ‘Title and Content’ layouts long time back, because I see that layout in every other presentation.

For instance, for proposing a event speaker opportunity to a client, this slide below should be sufficient. The presenter has to know the details of the events at his/her fingertips, or have it in a piece of paper though.

3. Fonts - Personally I prefer Calibri. Yes that’s the default font in MS Word in MS Office 2007. It is a sans serif font, the family that is preferred by experts.

Regarding the font size, everybody has his/her own views on this. Read on what experts say about font here at Digital Inspiration. Though a 30 point font size might not be practical for our PR plan and pitch proposals, I suppose font size shouldn’t go down beyond 16. I said this considering what works basis the sizes of most of the conference rooms I encountered. But this might not be ideal for events. So when Guy Kawasaki says 30 font size, probably he must be refering to big events where he give his presentations at.

4. Content - Most experts agreed on writing in phrases, not complete sentences. One or two phrases per slide should be enough. Now the problem with such presentations is that they need expert presenters. For those of us who are few years into the business, we cannot start talking for 5-10 minutes by looking at a picture. Sure I can talk about my blogging habits for hours, but not on the IT consulting industry’s issues and trends in India, unless I have done a big homework. But hey, maybe that’s the clue - homework.

5. Pictures - Pictures are the soul of the presentation. Without pictures, presentations become such a drag and corporate blah blah. Right pictures help bring out an idea more clearly for the audience. I also read somewhere, maybe Seth Godin’s blog, that your words on the slides are for the intellect of your audience, your pictures are for appealing to their emotions. Anything to grab that contract.

I also have another point. If you don’t write much, you don’t reveal much of your ideas in written if you need to leave behind a copy of that ppt at the end of the presentation.

Alos, Ellen Finkelstein says a very valid point that bullets are boring and if you write in bullets, people start reading them and stop giving attention to what you are saying. She says instead of having three bullet points in one slide, you can break them into three slides.

For examples this slide ….

can be broken into this…

this…

and finally this….

You can find pictures for your presentations on Google Image Search. Or if you worry about copyrights, then Stock Xchng provides free images. For Indian images try Dinodia.

6. Golden Rules to Remember from the Masters - I won’t say much here. Read on from the masters. These are my two favorite posts on PowerPoints. The first is a ten tips list from Garr Reynolds. The second is a post from Seth Godin giving his superb tips. Be sure to check these two links out.

Also are 10 points to learn from the world’s best PowerPoints contest as a checklist. Then here are 10 do’s and don’ts from Micrososft Small Business Center.

7. Tips and Tricks -  Learn how to frame your presentation on a Word file and then later import it into a ppt, with formatting intact here. This will be good to just concentrate on the content without going for the design in the initial stage. Then there are also more tips and tricks on this page as well.

More PowerPoint readings - The PowerPoint FAQ.

Do you have any tips to share, or some nice powerpoint slides toshow off, well share the tips on the comments. You can upload your slides on Box.net or some other place and share the link in the comments. If we have enough of the nice ones, we will list them out on the blog together.

Militant as I sound, it must be the general pall of slow down in Bombay, IPOs tanking, doomsayers with the recession din, the taxi strike, the weather, and the general non happenings of the week.

The only things that I am a little excited about are some tools for research that I have had a chance to play with recently. These have long been used international PR firms and it is quite interesting to to see their slow acceptance and investment in these tools by Indian PR firms too.

We live in a world of Information Overload and Insight Scarcity. Have you ever wondered when a 26-year old from a management consulting company presents at an industry forum, leaving everyone spell bound by trends and the insight he or she spouts? Similarly how investment banking professionals get the detailed information to discover synergies that decide when to merge and acquire companies, or top Sales people to design and sell solutions for their customers? These are the tools that leading professionals use to know about their customers, markets and industry in real time!

I don’t have the time!

In the PR business, whether it is preparing for a meeting with your client; writing a new business pitch or presentation, or writing a pitch note for the journalist, there is always a chronic shortage of time. In a landscape dotted with delivery milestones, reviews, internal processes and various other mundane activities that are urgent but not important these reserach tools come really handy. They help save time in searching for information, time which is then saved for analyzing and surfacing insight to finally arrive at a positioning statement or stance in the media. It further helps do a snapshot of where a client is at, and where he aspires to be in terms of peer group companies and competition. If you have the first two licked, finding a workable communication strategy to reach these objectives finally comes on the horizon.

What is required is actionable intelligence to optimize your communications strategy, this intelligence today is not just about the good old print medium but requires media analysis across traditional and social media. The ability to benchmark competitors, find PR weak spots, defining focus areas-which sectors, which markets? Finally an ability to track the drivers of your clients’ corporate reputation!

I am referring to the information databases, news aggregators and news wires, prominent among which is Factiva, a tool that is an effective news aggregator and search tool. Besides the latest news on a Company or topic that you may be researching across sources of media reporting on a company or topic, the issues at hand, stick price changes, key executives and a lot of other information it would take you weeks to gather from multiple sources.

In addition, Factiva has something known as Search 2.0 that throws up graphs and through other pictorial visualization tools like heat maps really useful to depict trends. Trends that can help you understand the success of your PR campaign; the effectiveness of your spokesperson and measure your success to show bang for the buck!

There are others such as Datamonitor, Hoovers which are again general business research tools. In addition, you will discover deep dive tools for different domains such as a Gartner, Forrester, IDC, for Information Technology, and Ovum for Telecom related information. Similarly for information of a financial nature there are tools like a Dow Jones, Reuters Knowledge, Thomson Financials, and Bloomberg. I can go on and on but will close here to say that there are best-in-breed research tools out there for pretty much most domains and these can change you life if your information needs are critical for your business decision making and survival in reputation management.

In a time often replete with 25 hour work days; these tools help you climb a growth curve which would be pretty much uphill if not impossible as a PR professional, without the help of these tools. In these days of consolidation in the PR space, it may well prove the magic bullet to enable the local tigers and independents to hold their own as they scale up the ladder to compete with their MNC peers who are old users of these tools.

The challenges in adoption are of overcoming inertia and building a research-based PR culture besides of course having some bean counter sign a cheque. Mind you some of these databases do not come cheap but the benefits in time saved and the value of the information that news aggregators provide, more than justifies the investment.

The information age is here and the question is does your organization have an information strategy and tools to take the next big leap?

We as Public Relations or corporate communications professionals are incessantly asked about the ROI (return on investment) on a particular initiative. What I’ve put together below could be a way to answer to that crucial question. We could actually look at it as three different aspects or phases of measuring the success of a particular public relations campaign.

Three levels of measuring public relations effectiveness have been identified by Dr. Walter K. Lindenmann, Senior Vice President and Director of Research at Ketchum Public Relations. He labels the basic level “outputs”, the intermediate level “outgrowths” and the advanced level “outcomes”.

1. Outputs measures message transmission and the initiative response
2. Outgrowths measures message reception with immediate reaction
3. Outcomes measures attitude and behavioral change

Outputs

Outputs of a particular PR campaign will be with respect to the initiative that was undertaken; like that of a press release announcing a product launch being sent out and ‘x+1′ number of publications carrying it. A direct impact of the proposed plan of targeting ‘x’ number of publications. The client is quite satisfied since we send him the scanned copies of clips as well as the detailed status on the achieved media coverage. This is termed as Target Media Reach. Few more ways to measure the output and the success of the campaign are:

Circulation – provide the circulation figures in case of print media. Similarly, providing TRP for television on real time basis and listenership for radio, this is revised on a weekly basis. The possibility of the total potential exposure to the message in the feature or the news article can be hence calculated.

Target Audience Reach – have you targeted the right media to reach your target audience? Case in point would be a cornflakes company targeting parents highlighting the nutritional value. In such a case, it is imperative to include niche magazines like Parenting, Prevention and other vertical publications in our media plan. One challenge here, that could be faced, is that of periodicity of the magazine. We could look at creating and including customized initiatives around the vertical magazines to gain mileage and required publicity. This will surely help in reaching out to the desired target audience with the desired, customized messaging, rather than merely relying on coverage through a press release being sent to them.

Impressions – the number of times an article has appeared in a particular publication should also be calculated. These articles should be checked for all the right messages. Then, these articles then should be multiplied with circulations figures.

Delivery of Message Points – We are in the profession to form the right impression. For that, we need to create the right messages, in the right media and to the right audience. If all the messages that were designated (or desired) to be published, are published, we would be successful in our campaign?

Competitive Analysis – All the above mentioned parameters can be used similarly for the competing brands and evaluated and compared to our brand. From a tactical perspective, this helps in gauging the competitor’s media presence in terms of media type and frequency, which helps us implement our own media plan much more efficiently and effectively.

My next article will highlight success based on the other measurement techniques under Outgrowths and Outcomes!! Let me know if you want to add any other parameter to Outputs.

(This is the first in the three part series on measuring the success of a Public Relations Campaign)

Tech Tags: pr public+relations india

As web 2.0 sites keep coming out in hordes everyday and we find ourselves lost in the middle, having registered ourselves in different identities in different sites; the concept of ’social media bio’ is slowly feeling a need to surface. Some days back I read about Rohit Bhargava having developed his own social media bio. Lucky him as he could fiddle around with his html. Blogger doesn’t provide such luxuries on the ‘about me’ page.

Then today I found LinkMyBox, a new site that describes itself as ‘a shareable Profile Aggregator that lists all your personal Websites, Social Networks, Blogs, Contact Info, Photo Albums and other Profiles in a box’. You can also show off your home or office addresses on embedded Google Maps. Visitors can scrible on your guestbook on the Comments Page. The site is worth a checkout!

My only wish is for more page customisation options and more widgets so that I can make mine look bit more like Rohit’s, and all links are reachable from one page instead of hoping across tabs.