If you have an important idea to spread, you’ll probably want it to spread beyond only the folks sitting in the room. Using social media tools can help give you and your idea further reach. Since it takes hours to prepare for a big presentation, it makes sense to get as much visibility for it as possible.

I got a sneak peek at a very interesting research study from Dan Zarrella (check out his book) over at HubSpot. He’ll be hosting a webinar about the findings from his paper The Science of Presentations. He analyzed extensive surveys and Twitter feeds to determine how social media tools can make an idea–in this case a presentation–contagious.

The audience surveyed was primarily social media folks so the first statistic was a bit of a surprise for me. Even though people spend a vast amount of time in presentations, thirty-five percent of respondents said they tweet about presentations never or less than once a year. Then, later the research showed that most presentations are tweeted for the audience to share information or novelty insights. In other words, people like to share things they’ve never heard before. So if you tie those two statistics together, it sounds like most presentations aren’t very informative or novel enough to tweet about. Let’s fix that!

There are tons of interesting insights from the study. And if you attend his webinar on Thursday August 19 at 1pm EDT and you’ll get a copy of his new e-book.

Here’s what I particularly enjoyed from the study:

1. 52% surveyed said they’ve joined a presentation because of a tweet. I’ve personally seen that happen. While delivering a presentation at Web2.0 in NYC about 20 minutes in, there was a nice surge of new attendees. I found out afterward that a Twitterer with a hefty following said my presentation was good so folks bolted from the boring sessions. Make sure your presentation is the one people are flocking toward, not from!
2. Notify the audience at the beginning of your presentations that you have an automatic PowerPoint-to-Twitter application running like SAP PowerPoint Twitter Tools. Using a tool like this auto-tweets important points as you’re presenting. This allows the audience to focus on your presentation and simply retweet your key points.
3. People are more likely to Tweet or blog about a presentation if they like the person giving it. The study also pointed out that the excitement and passion of the speaker impacted whether they would share via Twitter.

Caring about Twitter is important. Reviewing your Twitter feed after a presentation is like being a fly on the wall near the water cooler after your talk. People share what they thought was insightful and repugnant. It’s a great feedback mechanism for you as a communicator and also for the quality (or novelty) of your idea.

The end of the e-book has some great points about simplicity that you should print out and post on your wall. Also, Austin Carr over at Fast Company interviewed Dan on insights from Dan’s study and feedback on how simplicity works for Steve Jobs. It’s a nice read.

Listen in as Nancy chats with Alex Osterwalder about his latest book, Business Model Generation. Alex offers insight on how to create and manage successful business models, and explains how his visual approach allows him to illustrate complex concepts clearly and beautifully.

Language and power are inextricably linked. The spoken word pushes ideas out of someone’s head and into the open so humankind can contend with adopting or rejecting its validity. Moving an idea from its inception to adoption is hard but it’s a battle that can be won simply by wielding a great presentation.

Presenting those ideas can either evoke puzzled stares or frenzied enthusiasm. The outcome is determined by how well the message is delivered and how well it resonates with the audience. After a successful presentation, you might hear people say, “Wow, what she said really resonated with me.”

But what does it mean to truly resonate with someone? While doing research for Resonate, I learned about lovely  phenomenon in physics. If you know an object’s natural rate of vibration, you can make it vibrate without touching it. Resonance occurs when an object’s natural vibration frequency responds to an external stimulus of the same frequency.

Below is a beautiful visualization of resonance. My son poured salt onto a metal plate, then hooked up to an amplifier so that the sound waves traveled through the plate. As the frequency was raised, the sound waves tightened and the grains of salt jiggled, popped, and then moved to a new place, organizing themselves into beautiful patterns as though they knew where they “belonged.”

How many times have you wished that students, employees, investors, or customers would snap, crackle, and pop to exactly where they need to be to create a new future? It would be great if audiences were as compliant and unified in thought and purpose as these grains of salt.

And they can be. If you adjust to the frequency of your audience so that the message resonates deeply, they, too, will display self-organizing behavior. Your listeners will see the place where they are to move to create something collectively beautiful. A groundswell.

The audience does not need to tune themselves to you—you need to tune your message to them. Skilled presenting requires you to understand their hearts and minds and create a message to resonate with what’s already there. Your audience will be significantly moved if you send a message that is tuned to their needs and desires. They might even quiver with enthusiasm and act in concert to create beautiful results.

End Note: Visualizing sound is called cymatics. Evan Grant did a lovely TED talk implying at the end that maybe even the earth was formed from a sound.

Not many people know that Garr is the one who talked me into writing my book. He sent me the outline to his first PresentationZen book and I covered topics that he didn’t include in his. So how many more books can be created on the topic? Plenty!

Garr’s new book PresentationZen Design is beautiful. He carefully studied all the design principles and ensured that he expressed them in a unique way from either of our books. There are multiple perspectives on how to apply the principles, and the book is packed with visual before and after samples that not only tell you the principle, but show you.

I have bopped my hand against my head several times wishing I’d expressed some of the concepts as well as he did. His white space section is amazing–makes me wish I had an entire section devoted solely to white space. His idea of consciously designing the white space first instead of focusing on the elements is profound and the before and after examples throughout the book I’m sure will be everyone’s favorite part.

I feel like I’ve had a front row seat to the development of his book. It’s a painful process I tell ya. Watching all the blood and sweat he put into the book was tough, but wow it will all pay off by transforming thousands of presentations around the world. I’m buying it for all my designers as a mandatory read. Great job, Garr!

Once Garr finished the book he took his very pregnant wife to Maui for the first time (my favorite place on earth). Now that he’s back to the grind in Japan, I wanted to send him a little congratulatory gift, sung to the tune of Tiny Bubbles.

Wow…I haven’t pulled out my ukelele since college sorority rush (and that didn’t go so well). But I adore Garr and the book is fantastic. Aloha Garr and Happy New Year from me!

Mitch Joel is president of Twist Image, a agency with offices in Toronto and Montreal. I met him at TED two years ago. It’s nice to read a book by another CEO who is running an agency and taking on the role of author—I can empathize with the challenges. Mitch did a fantastic job encapsulating the entire online ecosystem. I wish this book had been published a year ago when I dove into social media, it would have been like having a mentor.

No wonder Six Pixels of Separation is on Seth Godin’s reading list and received fantastic reviews and on the “popular book” list at 800-CEO-read.

In the book, Mitch addresses many topics–some I already knew, but he framed them in a way that helped me understand them more clearly. He brought context to my social media journey. This book can help you gain a strategic vantage point into how you’re perceived on the web. As an entrepreneur and author, many meaningful relationships have developed for me through Twitter and other social sites. It’s actually changed my destiny in many ways, but up until now it’s been happenstance, rather than intentional.

I’ve come to know some unspoken rules that were initially unknown to me–like how once I’m out blogging and twittering, I need to feed the community and not ignore it. I’ll admit that right now I am grateful when I can get a blog posted, let alone dive into comments and communicate with the community. Not making the time to respond to comments is like breaking one of the commandments of blogging and it can give a negative perception of my brand. Participation is an opportunity to demonstrate my leadership.

Mitch’s writing style is strategic, smart, and accessible. Each chapter is written as a series of short stories. It’s insightful, yet snackable content. He weaves personal stories among conversations with businesses that everyone would recognize. After reading Six Pixels of Separation, I feel like I’ll have smarter conversations at cocktail parties and be on top of lore and trends. Thanks Mitch, I’m inspired to be smarter in how I connect to my global audience!

Six Pixels of Separation Blog

Six Pixels of Separation on Amazon

There are few of us who, at at one time or another, have either exaggerated or shaded the truth by either bragging or playing down a story. What we say may not be an untruth, but we want to emphasize one fact to a certain party, and a different fact to another.

The same bragging or playing down can appear artfully in many types of charts. When and how do these distortions occur? They may be cleverly planned or happen unwittingly during the production of the visual.

Two distortions of the grid that occur most commonly:

1. The flexible grid: One of the easiest ways to give more or less movement to the trend of a curve is to expand or contract the horizontal or vertical axis of the chart. The chart below shows a correctly scaled trend and six ways the visual image changes by expanding or contracting the grid layout.

2. Skipping the grid: A familiar layout in reports and advertisements is seen here:

In order to dramatize the story, a little fudging is done with the time scale. It’s not noticeable at a glance that the time sequence is not uniform. It seems to be a neat, clean-cut, see-how-we’ve-grown story. Also, the dates being aligned parallel to the base line make the irregular date plotting less noticeable.

If you look at the chart below, it shows what the trend looks like when laid out with the correct grid spacing for each year. Amounts plotted for the given years are the same as in the chart above. Spread out this way is not as dramatic, but is the true story.

The opening line in my new MOST favorite book is, “The response to a visual presentation will determine its value.” No, this is not a newfangled book on presentations written this year, it’s the book “Practical Charting Techniques” written in 1969 by Mary Eleanor Spear, the statistician of governments and Presidents. My good friend Glenn Hughes at Hues Works turned me on to this book and it’s a gem.

Apparently in the “olden days” when I was 7 years old, presentations were made with careful planning and close collaboration between the communicator, the graphic analyst a, and the draftsman because that would yield the best results. These three roles would collaborate to ensure that the presentation has only ONE interpretation.

I love the above graphic because it depicts exactly why presentations are broken today. There used to be three significant roles played in the development of a presentation and each role was done by a highly trained specialist. Today, anyone who builds presentation has all three of these roles folded into one eliminating collaboration all together, yet we’re not officially trained in any of these skills.

By collaborating around the chart, it ensures that each chart makes:

1. A statistical fact more graphically explicit
2. A point of view more significantly emphasized
3. An economic situation more clearly visualized.

The viewer’s first impression upon seeing a chart is vital. Attract him, and you can hold him if your message is clear and concise. Do not clutter up the chart. Trying to tell too much will only confuse the story.

Next time you have an important presentation that uses charts or data of any kind, at least meet with someone else to get another perspective on whether you’re using the data in the most effective way.

I love the book “Great Speeches for Better Speaking” by Michael E. Eidenmuller, Ph.D. He also happens the guy who has lovingly put together American Rhetoric http://www.americanrhetoric.com for us all to enjoy—I virtually live on that site.

Eidenmuller has spent his life devoted to collecting and analyzing speeches and he comes across with a humble authority as he writes. It’s a smart book that’s written in a very accessible style and tone. He wonderfully analyzed 6 speeches, put them in their historical context and explains how the situation, content, structure, style, delivery and rhetoric played a role in the speeches. The book comes with 2 CDs of all the speeches–that’s 110 minutes of speeches. I listened to the speeches first and then read the book and it was very powerful. He covered speeches by Ronald Reagan, Ed Kennedy, Douglas MacArthur, JFK, Barbara Jordan and Mary Fisher. I recommend this multi-sensory learning experience to all of you. It was not only a nice history lesson but will help you construct better presentations in the future.

We’re proud (and so thankful!) to announce that slide:ology has spent a full calendar year in the Top 100 Computer and Internet books on Amazon!

The photo below shows Nancy and Michaela opening the very first box of books from the printer! We’ve come a long way since then, but we still hold the same joy and excitement for slide:ology, both its message, and its success.

It’s a hard act to follow, but we hope that the next book continues the trend! Thank you, everyone, for reading.

It’s hard to stop Nancy Duarte once she gets started talking about design. And that’s exactly what happened when she met Jimmy Guterman, executive editor of MIT Sloan Management Review, at the most recent TED conference. It’s no surprise that Nancy views the world through a design lens, a skill which she has used to help world-renowned executives, politicians and thought leaders develop presentations, but it may surprise some to know that it is also her personal management philosophy. She sat down with Jimmy and shared her thoughts about how design thinking can be the one of the most powerful tools for effective management.

“Design is used to convey many ideas… but design is also crafting communications to answer audience needs in the most effective way. This type of  ‘design thinking’–the adoption of a design methodology into an organization’s communications platform–can motivate employees to pull together in times of difficulty, turn supporters of a cause into evangelists or influence consumers to remain loyal to a brand even if there is a less costly option.”

“Creating clarity through context and meaning is at the heart of it,” says Nancy. Managers can spend a lot of time clarifying. Managers are often the bridge between stakeholders and their teams. This makes communication an essential tool for moving goals forward. “Often managers…rely heavily on data and information to tell the story and miss the opportunity to create context and meaning…leaving lots of room for interpretation, which can spawn multiple cycles and limit advancement.” Getting to the point quickly and aligning resources is more valuable and critical to the success of a company than ever before. Read more about Nancy Duarte and Garr Reynolds’ thoughts on How to Become A Better Manager By Thinking Like A Designer. (Note: sign up is required.)