Also, if you haven’t had a chance to check it out yet – PresentationGod.com is now up and running! It is still a bit basic, but at least it is live.

Here is my confession:  I love creating web sites. The problem: none of them have worked for me.

If you have followed me for quite some time, you have probably noticed that I have created sites here, there, and everywhere.  I know, I know. I hardly know where I live online as well.  It has all been in my attempt to find the right platform, the right voice, the right feel for my personal brand.

Most of these sites were built on Wordpress – a platform I truly love.  In fact, this web site lives on Wordpress. However, Wordpress hasn’t  been the right fit for me personally. Why? I found myself focusing more on my plug-ins and my blog’s look and feel rather than the content.  That’s why today I want to let you know that if you want to follow me – Scott Schwertly – I have moved everything over to Posterous.  It’s now where I live online.

So, what does this accomplish?  It accomplishes a ton of things:

- I have simplified my life. I now only have 2 sites:  Ethos3.com (my corporate identity) and ScottSchwertly.com (my personal identity).  PresentationGod.com will soon launch but that is for my book.

- I can post cool videos like this one without having to upload stuff to YouTube, Vimeo, or Viddler.

- I can share more thoughts, more often.

- You can get a better glimpse of my personal life. I love presentations, but I do have other passions. Simply, I can be myself.

- Posterous updates everything. I am no longer going to get consumed with monitoring and updating Twitter and Facebook.

With all that said, I am going to turn this blog in the days ahead to strictly an Ethos3 news and team blog. It’s about time you hear from my teammates. My personal thoughts on life, business, and presentations will all be on ScottSchwertly.com moving forward. You can subscribe here.

Thanks for all that you do.

What will you find in this eBook?

• 37 pages of fun presentation terms and definitions
• Valuable presentation lessons and takeaways
• Insightful thoughts and observations about presenters and presentations

Stuff Presenters Like not only provides entertaining and clever presentation insights but also practical advice for readers that will empower them immediately. Download an excerpt.

Buy Stuff Presenters Like for just $14.99

If you have been following my tweets (@scottschwertly) you may have heard that I am writing a book.  It’s called How to Be a Presentation God: Build, Design, and Deliver Presentations that Dominate! and it reveals the secrets for how to build, design, and deliver a fire-breathing, wing-flapping, roar-bellowing behemoth of a presentation.

This has been a dream of mine for quite some time, and I am very excited! After many book proposals and failed attempts, a publisher has finally given me a chance – actually, one of the largest publishers in the world has given me this fantastic opportunity. I am thrilled to be partnering with Wiley on this project. Time is of the essence now. My script is due on August 6th and the book will be in your local bookstores by February 2011. I’ll be sure to keep you posted on all the details here and via Twitter.

Special Note: The above banner is a just a tease of the book cover.  It is still a work in progress.  More details coming soon.

Diamond Transition:

The 80s may be a ten-year stain of memory on your brain that, looking back, you might have preferred to save for later tasks like remembering whether or not you have enough milk while at the grocery store. However you interpret the indelible Rorschach blot spanning the 80s department of your cerebral cortex, you have to admit one thing: the 80s were freakin’ awesome. There was good and bad, friend and enemy, popular and not. There was football, and there were cheerleaders. There was none of this millennial stuff, with the yoga, Pilates, self-esteem, and so on.

These days, there’s a sport for everyone, and everyone has a chance to be captain, but in those days you played football or spent lunch in your locker. Back then, high schools had real jocks, and they were always quarterbacks. Remember your high school quarterback? Remember how, after scoring a touchdown, he would take his helmet off and his glorious mullet would unroll like a red carpet, bouncing lightly as it extended well beyond the nape of his neck?

That, my friend, is exactly what the Diamond Transition is to presentations. As a healthy mullet was like Samson’s locks to your high school quarterback, so the Diamond Transition once captivated audiences everywhere as they listened to tales of “inter-nets” and personal computers from speakers whose eyes darted about beneath the upturned garage door sunglasses they sported. Nowadays, unfortunately, your high school quarterback has fallen from grace. He cut his mullet, and though he’s still an alpha wolf, he’s alpha wolf at a furniture store, where he runs the stock room. Such has been the fate of the Diamond Transition, forced to exist as it is in an Avatar world.

The Takeaway: Put it in reminiscent yearbook presentations to catapult your audience into the past, willing or otherwise. Apart from this specific use, avoid at all costs the Diamond Transition.

For the depraved among us that sit around watching for the demise of influential people, I have some bad news: Everyone Communicates, Few Connect is not John Maxwell’s memoir of apostasy, denouncing a lifetime of values-based leadership. In fact, the latest installment of leadership guidance from the celebrated church and business leader is a continuation of an old theme: leadership is about influence; influence is about connections.

There is more bad news (this time for everybody): apparently, achieving interpersonal connections is not a function of blog optimization and tweet frequency. Supposedly, smart phones cannot perform Maxwell’s connection techniques. We’ll actually have to engage with other people. In an age more or less defined by the rapid elimination of physical barriers to communication, Maxwell points out a troubling little detail: at some point along the way, the message has to justify the medium, and people have to be listening.

What’s Hot
Storytelling existed long before the iPhone 4 and Maxwell relies somewhat heavily on personal anecdote to convey the ideas in the book, rather than emailing you a “Connections” app upon purchase. This is putting his money where his mouth is, but it also reflects a core principle: communication is about content; connection is about how content is received. On a macro-level, most of us are aware that an individual’s affect influences the way information is perceived. In Everyone Communicates, Few Connect, Maxwell exhorts leaders to be more mindful of how they prime their audience. And no, the answer is not with swag. You may think that’s a joke, but a common mistake among communicators is misidentifying the motivations of an audience, a foible that often yields less—rather than more—influence with intended recipients.

What’s Not
If not overtly guilty of redundancy, Maxwell teeters on the edge at times. The book’s purpose is clear from page one, making it easy to follow and on par with Maxwell’s other titles, but in the middle the message languishes a bit before coming to its conclusion.

The Bottom Line
In truth, the message is strikingly similar to Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Effectiveness is not reach, but a mixture of empathy, sincerity, and direction. This is to Maxwell’s credit: Dale Carnegie wrote to an audience suffused with…printed media and telephones. Today, the unscrupulous leader wields tools of devastating reach: social media has made it easy for millions to wave a hefty club at millions of so-called listeners. We could use the update.
Everyone Communicates, Few Connect is Maxwell’s voice of reason, imploring any who care to distance themselves from the ephemera of daily futility and enter a realm of true, lasting influence over actual, living human beings. We communicate more than ever before, but connections are what we crave. Maxwell wisely notes that leaders providing meaningful connections will be the ones that master their messages; all others will drown in a sea of tweets.

I am giving away 5 free copies of Everyone Communicates, Few Connect signed by John Maxwell himself. Leave a comment about your connection exploits for your chance to receive a copy.

Spielberg: [speel-burg] a presentation master who, plucking the masses’ heartstrings as though they were a golden lyre, creates presentations that alter the course of peoples’ lives, of history, and of the very laws of nature itself.

Let me disappoint you: the Spielberg is an ideal that is aspired to; it does not yet exist. All around the world presentation attendees are sitting in firmly padded chairs, breathing manufactured air, and writing with hotel pens as they wait for the Spielberg to appear. The Spielberg, it is said, will change the world: whales will be saved, raises will be given, cubicle walls will crumble to the ground, etc. The Spielberg will motivate us with a perfect blend of humor, substance, and emotional appeal so that, perhaps for the first time, we will be able to walk away from a presentation thinking that we liked that guy.

Of course, the Spielberg can’t take all the credit. The Spielberg will have so many people to thank. His spouse, for lying awake each night for weeks listening to the strained comfort of a speaking voice, the same punch lines, and the same “stage laugh” again and again and again. The Spielberg will like to thank the intern for 63 trips to Starbucks without ever botching an order for a iced-triple-grande-soy-sugar-free-vanilla-light ice-two-raw-sugar-latte, and for collecting facts and figures for the presentation from three uninterested and “busy” intercompany departments, client testimonials, and the Library of Congress. The Spielberg will like to thank Momma and Papa Spielberg, who from an early age placed a great deal of importance on using complete sentences…you get the point.

It will take a village to raise the Spielberg, a village that knows presentations backwards, forwards, and side-to-side. The Spielberg can only come when we are ready for him, and there is so much more to do. For starters, it is hard to imagine the Spielberg ever even dropping by until bullet-point lists are kept in museums like the Smithsonian, right next to papyrus parchments with hieroglyphics on them.

The Takeaway: Great presentations are the outcome of enthusiastic collaborations from experienced teams united in a common purpose (i.e. making great presentations). Revolutionizing an industry starts with the trenchant efforts of every presenter to settle for nothing less than an excellent presentation.

With his insightful, practical, latest work, Garr Reynolds demystifies the doing of dynamic eye-candy and pens an everyman’s guidebook to uncommonly good design. Reynolds’ follow-up to his popular Presentation Zen, this new volume – Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations – picks up where that other book left off, taking presenters on an informative, informal tour the basics of successful design.

What’s Hot
This book is so well organized and full of practical, time-saving techniques, tools and concepts one feels empowered and informed within the first few pages. This book will absolutely boost your design game up several steps in no time. It’s easy to imagine that this volume will find itself a dedicated spot on the shelves of many presenters. This is the kind of book that creates a cult.

What’s Not
Those with a great eye, a lot of practical experience or an educated understanding of design fundamentals may not find much to glean here. This is definitely a volume aimed at newbies and still-hungry intermediates.

The Bottom Line
We all spend a lot of time focused on the big picture of presenting: storytelling. However, the look of a given presentation can make or break our entire pitch. Don’t forget: a picture is worth a thousand words.

Reynolds’ book isn’t a step-by-step instruction manual or a textbook, but it is an extremely practical, common-sense guide to design-for-people-who-don’t-know-design. For instance, Reynolds demystifies the controversy of which font to use. He cuts to the chase, eliminating all but 8 of the most familiar fonts, making a muddled mess into a manageable molehill in one page of insightful advice. Have trouble with color schemes? Of course you do. Who doesn’t? Reynolds simply walks readers through another quickie about how to use Adobe’s Kuler color-scheme-generator. Problem solved.

‘Zen gets down to brass tacks on subjects from matching colors to content to using images and video in your presentations. Reynolds keeps it simple throughout, never positing a concept where a short-cut or a trick will suffice.

‘Zen also goes beyond simple slide-design to include great guest-cameos from experts like Scot Kelby and Stephen Few taking point on troublesome topics like optimizing photography in a presentation or designing the perfect graph.

If you feel you have room to improve as a designer – or you are absolutely clueless – you will find much to love in this breath-of-fresh-air disguised as just-another-design-book. Not only is this the kind of guide that will inspire new creations, it’s the kind that you’ll be giving as a gift to every presenter on your team.

Rewind:

Tapes, VHS cassettes, and movie reels are so obsolete at this point that a link to the standardized Webster’s definition of rewind might be in order. Of course, we can track backwards on CDs, DVDs, mp3s, etc. also, so why look specifically at tape-bound devices?

Simple: the unbelievable frustration we used to experience as we spent our lives rewinding tapes, stopping and starting again to see if we hit the right spot, paying fines at Blockbuster for failing to uphold our end of the $3.99, one-night rental agreement. “Be Kind, Please Rewind” is one mainstay of old-time morality we’re all happy to let drift away.

The most important part of the rewinding analogy, though, is the relationship between the cassette being rewound and the rewinder—that individual making the decision to rewind the content for a second experience. Tapes never rewind themselves, although many do dream of one day having the moxie to exercise such executive autonomy. The fact of the matter is that tapes have not advanced to a level of self-awareness that allows for them to accurately identify moments of sensory input that should be seen or heard twice. In military experiments, top-performing tapes still failed to rewind themselves to the funniest parts of Dumb and Dumber after months of intensive training.

There is some doubt as to whether or not presenters have this capacity, too. Certainly, an increased level of moxie is necessary to repeat one’s words or ideas. Even more so, though, said act would require a true connection with the audience to properly gauge their willingness to be subjected to an involuntary rewind of the sensory experience they just waded through. Proceed with caution.

The Takeaway: The world’s most famous speeches all employ repetition, but we can forget how many individuals have tried to use the rewind to lesser effect. If it is absolutely vital to communicate a certain idea, use all other means necessary—smart design, timing, hand gestures, etc.—before resorting to a literal rewind of the presentation.