Comedy in the clouds

I haven't really had time to post anything this week as I have been busy putting together a presentation for an executive symposium my company is hosting next week.  I have 20 to 25 minutes to pitch the services we offer around building a cloud... But if you have ever seen me present you know that I need to work that in to a 20 to 25 minute comedy routine that conveys my message.

It sounds easier than it is in actuality.  I have to take the exciting topic of private cloud, the stack, the business value, the financial impact, tie it back to services that support the creation of this vision, and make people laugh and remember what I am saying.  If you want to learn a bit about the process I go through read on after the jump.




The easiest way for me to describe this process is, "think of the jokes you want to make and back the content in to them."  In other words how can something funny be used to describe my content.  In this case I use an old video clip from Saturday Night Live as my visual aide.  Set against that as a back drop I put in the content that I need my audience to connect with.  The video is extremely visceral and always gets a great reaction (both negative and positive) which means I have their attention.  The video is funny as well, so to keep the humor going, I try to convey my additional ideas with humor that follows the theme.

For this one, thanks to one of the guys on my team, I have a still photo of a girl holding an umbrella with fish raining down on her from a cloud.  I know it doesn't make a lot of sense in a blog post, but in the presentation, pure genius.

Once I have the jokes and have the content filling in the blanks, I create my slides.  I used to have lot's of pretty charts and graphs and colors and crap...  Mostly I had them because I was taught that people love charts and graphs.  What I have learned over time is this, "Even people who love charts and graphs hate them in a presentation."  Sometimes they are necessary, but almost never.  If your presentation is 40 minutes long and you have charts and graphs you will loose most of your audience.  I speak from experience on this.

I did some research, after seeing an amazing presenter named Garr Reynolds do a presentation for 5,000 people.  Every person I could see was enthralled with what he was saying.  He went through at least 150 slides in 45 minutes, but it felt like 20 minutes and 0 slides.  I could hear people comment on "this being the best presentation ever."

The next speaker was a senior vice president from a top tier consulting and research firm (who I will not name) that speaks with great authority on IT related topics.  His presentation was probably no more than 20 slides in 45 minutes, but it felt like hours and a million slides.  Putting this guy and his content on after Mr. Reynolds might have been  the worst marketing decision ever but it did help me.

I used to be the IT industry guy... My presentation looked just like his... I struggled to put together 20 slides.  I put people to sleep.  I thought I was doing pretty good until that fateful day.  Now I realize that charts and graphs are not the answer.  Okay... Now to get back on topic.

I build my slides mostly as visual reminders of what I wanted to say.  Whenever possible the picture is comical and ties in to the theme.  This serves two purposes.  One, if I can't remember exactly what I want to say, at least there is a funny picture I can reference.  Two, people learn so much better when they are in a good mood.  The slides have very few, if any, words on them.  This means I can't possibly be reading from my slide.  Reading a slide is just as bad, or worse than putting in tons of charts and graphs.

The last thing I try to do is convey all the stuff I want my audience to remember in the first 15 minutes.  I use the last few minutes just to recap or say much less important stuff.  If I must go over 30 minutes, I really try to liven up the end with more humor than content.

All of this is done for one reason.  People buy from people they like.  If you can make them laugh, give them valuable information, keep it relevant and keep it quick, they will like you.  If you can't keep trying, eventually you can get it.  My speaker ratings went from 1 or 2 out of 5, all the way to 4 or 5 out of 5 consistently.  I am no longer the dreaded "eye-chart" guy.