Presentations: How to set up the room

Monday

A lot of books or blogs talk about how to give a good presentation. How to make the slides. How to avoid too many bulletpoints. How to tell the story. But there isn't a lot of information about how to set up the room. I saw this interesting post from Seth Godin, also a great presenter, who had some remarks I didn't consider before. Here is an abstract.

Screens: Big screens are a lot more reasonable than they used to be. Get the absolute biggest and brightest you can afford. Bigger! Big screens, near the speaker. Really close to the speaker. That's a big help for the audience and for your energy.

VGA cables: Have more than one. Switchers are cheap. Nothing worse than having speakers stumbling around swapping laptops. And put the cables and the laptops up front, not in back to be controlled by a tech guy who doesn't care quite as much as you (or the speaker) does.

Music: Every time you introduce a speaker, play loud and inspiring pop music. Not for long, but enough to cue people to remember the way they feel at the Oscars and stuff. After all, those memes are there waiting for you to leverage them.

Marching bands: Yes, they're cheap. No, people don't like them particularly. I've seen this done a number of times, and people are more amazed and aghast than impressed.

Aisles: Watch a room fill up. People always sit on the aisle, don't they? Don't do rows of 40 or 50 chairs with no aisle. Have lots of aisles. Every ten chairs or so. Why not? Makes it faster to get in and to get out, and doesn't hurt your density so much.

Lights: Make it dark in the audience. Make it light on stage. This works every time. Practice the lighting in advance, even for a smaller group.

Have a look at the entire article.

If you to see Seth present, here is his presentation "All Marketers are Liars" - Seth Godin speaks at Google.

Seth is also a renowned speaker, and was recently chosen as one of "21 Speakers for the Next Century" by Successful Meetings Magazine and is consistently rated among the best speakers by the audiences he addresses. Seth was founder and CEO of Yoyodyne, an interactive direct marketing company, which Yahoo! acquired in late 1998. He holds an MBA from Stanford, is a contributing editor to Fast Company magazine, and was called "the Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age" by Business Week. This video is part of the Authors@Google se