That got me thinking that a partial solution would be to have a Google Analytics profile that only includes organic search traffic. This isn’t a profile that you would use for cross-session analytics, but it’s one that would allow simplified segmentation, reduced cases of sampling, and, perhaps, a more complete data set.

As it turns out, it was pretty simple to set up, and it seems to do the trick.

Step 1: Make a New Profile

Create a new profile under the same web property that you’re using for your site and name it Organic Search Traffic Only:

There’s nothing magic about this. The key is that this is a profile that uses the same web property ID as the profile where you’re running into sampling issues with your SEO analysis. We’re just going to take that same feed of data coming in as visitors visit your site and carve out the subset of that data that is traffic from organic search referrals.

Step 2: Apply an Organic Search Filter

The next (and final) step is to create a filter and apply it to the profile such that only organic search traffic is included.

In the new profile you just created, select the Filters tab and then click New Filter:

From there:

1. Give the filter a name like “Organic Search Referrals”
2. Select Custom Filter as the Filter Type
3. Set the filter as an Include filter
4. Set the Filter Field to Campaign Medium
5. Set the Filter Pattern to “organic”
6. Save the filter

The screen below shows the filter settings:

Step 3: Sit Back and Let the Data Roll In

The profile is only going to include data from the point you set it up going forward. But, it will accurately reflect (to the extent that any web analytics package can accurately reflect this) new versus returning visitors for all time (well, since you initially implemented Google Analytics), because it’s getting that data from the cookie that already exists on users’ machines.

Initially, I saw some odd data on the unique visitors front, which I can semi-intuitively understand…but not quite explain.

Suffice it to say that, once you have the profile up and running for a week or so, you can select the Non-paid Search Traffic segment in your main profile and compare it to the All Visits segment in your new profile, and the numbers will be virtually identical. But, you can now do SEO analysis with a base set of data that only includes search traffic.

Is that handy?Similar Posts:

• Google Analytics = Strawberry?
• Web Analytics Platforms Are Fundamentally Broken
• A Quick Explanation of Sitecatalyst Events for the Google Analytics Power User
• SEO Tips and Thoughts at Web Analytics Wednesday
• Web Analytics Tools Comparison — Columbus WAW Recap Part 2

© Tim for Gilligan on Data by Tim Wilson, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
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Facebook, Facebook, Facebook.

Ours is a tumultuous relationship of unrequited frustration, is it not? I am an analyst, therefore (apparently), you scorn me. And, by “scorn,” I mean “ignore.”

You never responded to my letter last year. You don’t return my calls. (Well, that’s not entirely true: you put salespeople on my calls whose general response to any question is, “Buy Facebook media.” I get it. That’s their job, but they act like they’ve parachuted straight out of Mad Men and are pushing traditional mass-blast advertising. Ironic, no?)

Facebook, I’ve dug into the data. Your own documentation states:

Posting regularly with engaging content gets more people to talk about your business with their friends. As a result, you end up reaching more people overall.

Yet, the data you provide us tells a very different story. We debunked this particular claim — that getting people to talk about your content leads to greater reach – a month ago.

So, What Can We Debunk This Month?

Lately, I’ve been digging into a more basic mystery: you claim that, the more someone engages with a page’s content, the more likely that person is to get presented with more of that page’s content in the future. That seems pretty reasonable. Of course, you hedge at the same time:

No matter how engaging your Page posts are, not all of your fans will see them in their News Feed. In order to make sure that more of your fans see your posts, you should create a Page Post Ad

Can we quantify that “not all of your fans…” statement? AllFacebook.com did just that when they published a pretty alarming article last week based on Edgerank Checker data. Their study showed that, on average, across 4,000 pages, only 17% of total fans were being reached per individual post by the brand. “Zoiks!” were the cries that echoed through the halls of community managers the world over!

To be fair, not everyone is on Facebook all the time, and, while that number matches data we’re seeing overall, it also leaves out the fact that these don’t appear to be the same 17% day in and day out. When it comes to looking at the 28-Day Total Reach from Page Posts measure you provide, we see numbers that are more in the neighborhood of half of a page’s Lifetime Total Likes (when there is no Facebook media running — it’s much higher than that if that exposure is being purchased from Facebook).

Is 17% really all brands can expect, or is it all they can expect if they’re doing a lousy job posting content?

Are Brands Simply Not Publishing Engaging Content?

We’ve been working pretty hard to learn what kind of content our clients’ fans like, as well as how often and when to post. That put us in a good position to dig into the data to see how we were doing, especially in light of the drop we felt we were seeing in the Reach of posts across a range of our clients’ pages.

We looked at data from a half-dozen pages. These pages were all devoted to major consumer brands, had Lifetime Total Likes ranging from the low 100,000s to multiple millions, and cut across a range of different verticals. Is “6 pages” on the order of the “4,000 pages” from the Allfacebook.com study? Well, no, but we were working with over 600 status updates, and it quickly became apparent that we’d dug in enough to draw some pretty sound conclusions..

For the chart below, we removed the handful of posts that were clearly data anomalies (skewing both wildly high and wildly low) and then, for each post, took the Lifetime Engaged Users for the post (the number of unique people who clicked anywhere in the post within 28 days of it being posted, regardless of whether the click generated a story or not) and divided it by the Total Reach for the post.

It’s not the cleanest of graphs, but it seems pretty clear that, if anything, these pages are, overall, making some headway when it comes to producing more engaging content.

The idea here is that the only people a post has a chance of engaging are people that it reaches. So, we have Total Reach as the denominator. This is similar to the Post Virality calculation that you, Facebook, generate for me…but we’re looking at a lower level of engagement than “generated a story” — just looking to see if fans are interacting with the post in any way. Because, in theory, if they are, then you will be more likely to present them with subsequent posts from the same page.

So, Engagement Isn’t Dropping. Presumably, Reach Isn’t, Either?

In the post engagement chart, there’s nothing all that shocking. What does get alarming, though, is when we look at the average Organic Reach (unique users who saw the post directly as a result of the page posting it — not because a friend talked about it, and not because the brand ran paid media to extend the reach of the post). We divided that organic reach by the Lifetime Total Likes for the page to see what % of the total fans were reached by the post organically.

Again, outliers (high and low) were removed (this included locally-targeted posts, where the reach, obviously, was very low relative to the total likes for the page). Each point on the chart represents all of the status updates on that day from our sample:

Wow. I’m not a data scientist, so the above doesn’t have any true statistical rigor applied to it. Rather, it is an exercise in what a stats professor once preached to me: “Start off by plotting the data! That’s going to tell you a lot!”

It’s pretty conclusive, I think, that a Facebook algorithm change (and related UI changes — but the algorithms drove what content appears anywhere for a user, regardless of the UI) in late September gave brands a temporary ability to reach a higher proportion of their fans. That, undoubtedly, led to any number of community managers thinking they had been listening and learning and publishing more engaging content.

Then, (alas!) November arrived. And, suddenly, Reach plummeted.

WTF?

It’s not that I’m opposed to paying you for reach, Facebook. I’m totally okay with paid media being part of my social media mix. But, if I have to pay you each time I want to reach someone, the numbers start to get hard to justify. If someone likes my page, and then they engage with my content, why don’t they keep getting my content for some period of time?

Here’s what I think happened (and, frankly, I’d respect you a bit more in the morning if you just came out and admitted it):

1. You put some sharp people in a room and told them to come up with a good EdgeRank/GraphRank algorithm
2. While you have “a lot of data,” that algorithm still was largely driven by that team’s instincts around what weighting should be given to different factors
3. There was a fair amount of teeth-gnashing, and the team even tried to do some testing of the algorithm before rolling it out. But, that’s a taller order than it sounds.
4. The algorithm got rolled out.
5. You had no idea what was going to happen. What looked good on paper looked, well, different in practice.
6. For various reasons — none of which have been openly stated — the algorithm has been quietly tweaked a couple of times. In one case, it was related to the Timeline rollout, but, by this time, the algorithm had become the red-headed stepchild of Palo Alto. No one really wants to own it, because no one can really figure out what will make it “work.” After all…the algorithm-heads are all just down the street in Mountain View! (zing!)

How close am I with the above speculation? I don’t have inside knowledge (as noted earlier, you don’t call, you don’t write), but I’m not sure what other explanation makes sense.

Know that you’re killing us — the analysts who are trying to drive learning and optimization! At least set up some sort of open dialogue. We don’t need to see the full formula. But, we need to have useful information about how to do things better. And we need to know when you’re tinkering with the algorithm and what the likely result of that tinkering will be. Otherwise, we can’t trust the data, which means we can’t learn from it. Without data we can use, it’s hard to justify investment and action.

© Tim for Gilligan on Data by Tim Wilson, 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
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So, Why a New Design?

I updated the design for two reasons:

• The old design was starting to wear on me. There were a number of little alignment/layout/wrapping issues that I had never quite managed to fix, even as I tinkered with the blog functionality (for instance, my social icons never quite lined up well). I also figured out last fall that the nested table structure pretty much precluded me from getting the mix I wanted of fixed and liquid elements. In short, a redesign just seemed in order.
• Responsive web design is here. This was more of the direct-tie-to-my-day-job reason for the overhaul. Various sharp people at Resource Interactive have started pushing responsive web design as something that should be actively considered for our clients. As I dug into the topic, I realized that: 1) this blog is a good candidate for a responsive design, and 2) there are some analytics implications to a responsive design, and I needed somewhere to experiment with them.

So, this site is now using a fully responsive WordPress theme.

What Is Responsive Design, Exactly?

As I understand it, responsive design is an “Aha!” that grew out of the increasing need for web sites to function across a wide range of screen sizes and experiences and platforms: laptop monitors, desktop monitors, tablets (iOS and Android), and smartphones (also iOS and Android). The idea is that, rather than having a “desktop site” and a “mobile-optimized site,” you can have “a site” that works effectively on a wide range of devices.

There are two keys to this:

• The site needs to be viewable in different devices – 3 columns that display on a desktop monitor may need to become a single set of stacked content on a smartphone. Or, a list of links in the sidebar on the desktop may need to become a dropdown box at the top of the page on an iPhone.
• The site needs to support the most likely use cases in different devices – this is a stickier wicket, because it forces some strategic thought (and possibly research and testing) to think through what a visitor to your site who is using an iPhone (for instance) is likely looking to do and how that differs from a visitor to your site who is using a desktop.

Both of these are questions that have always been asked when it comes to developing a “mobile-optimized version of the site,” but they’re a bit more nuanced given that responsive design isn’t a “separate site.”

Wow, Tim, I’m Impressed with Your Coding Skills!

Don’t be impressed with my coding skills.

I did a little research and then shelled out $35 to buy the Rising theme. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t a fair amount of tinkering (and more tinkering yet to be done — I certainly have not fallen prey to a need to have the perfect site designed before pushing it live!), but the end result is an improved site. And, more importantly, having a site that actually works well across devices (Try it! Just resize your browser window and watch the sidebar at the right. Or, fire up the site on your smartphone and compare it to your desktop.)

Now, of the “two keys” above, I really focused on the first one. This is a blog, after all. Regardless of what device you’re on, presumably, you’re here to consume blog post content.

I’m still working with the palette (too little contrast between the hyperlink color and the plain text color), the font selection (I’m not in love with it), and the header logo (pulling what strings I can to get a professional to contribute on that front), but I’m reasonably content with the change. Let me know if you have any tips for improving the design (I’m not proud!).

Where Does Analytics Come into All of This?

While I have access to tons of different web analytics accounts across a range of platforms through our various clients, I don’t actually have a great sandbox for trying things out (you would think our company’s site would be a good testbed, but the reality is that there are so many competing agendas for competing resources there that it’s seldom worth the effort). Luckily, this site has built up enough content and enough of a presence to get a few hundred visits a day, which is enough to actually do some tinkering and get some real data as a result.

Here’s my list of what I’ll be toying with over the coming weeks:

• Responsive design analytics — we’ve had “screen resolution” and “device” reporting for years, but responsive design introduces a whole new twist, because it’s truly experience-centric. I’ve done a little digging online and haven’t found much in the way of thinking on this. While I don’t think it’s possible to directly pull CSS media query data into the web analytics platform, it should be possible to use Javascript to detect which responsive layout is being used for any given visitor and then pass that information to the web analytics platform (as a custom variable or a non-interaction event in Google Analytics). And, it should be possible to record when an onresize event occurs. In both cases, using this data to segment traffic to determine if a particular layout is performing poorly or well, as well as how visitors move through the site in these different experiences, seems like a promising thought.
• Facebook Insights for Websites — I’ve had this running for a while, but, as part of another experiment, I switched over from using my Facebook user ID in the meta data to authenticate my ownership of the site to using a Facebook app ID. That’s a better way to go when it comes to “real” sites, and I’m now actually doing some tinkering on some client sites to fully validate what happens, so look for some thoughts on that front in the future.
• Detecting the Facebook login status of visitors to the site – this is some experimentation that is actively in work. It’s the implementation of some code that Dennis Paagman came up with to use Facebook Connect and Google Analytics non-interaction events to detect (and then — my thinking — segment) visitors based on whether they’re logged into Facebook or not at the time of their visit to the site. This seems like it has intriguing possibilities when it comes to determining what types of social  interactions should be offered and how prominently. I’ve hit a minor snag on that front and am hoping Dennis will be able to help get to the bottom of it (see the comments on his blog post). But, if I get it figured out, I’ll share in a post down the road.
• Site performance – anecdotally, it seems like this site is now loading more slowly than it did with the old design. The Google Analytics Site Speed report seems to indicate that is the case, but I don’t feel like I have enough data to be conclusive there just yet. I have signed up for a site24x7.com account, which is a platform we use with some of our clients for a couple of reasons: 1) to see what it reports relative to Google Analytics (it’s a fundamentally different data capture method, so I’m not going to be surprised if the results are wildly divergent), and 2) to get more reliable data if I start playing with changes to reduce the site load time. In hindsight, I wish I’d signed up a month or so ago so I had good pre- and post- data. If I had a nickel for every time I wanted to have had that, I’d be a wealthy man!

In a nutshell (a gargantuan, artificial nutshell, I’ll grant you), I’ve got a backlog of topics, some of which will require some additional experimentation. This blog post, I realize, is almost more of a “to do” list for me than it is a “how to” list for you! Oh, well. They can’t all be winners!

© Tim for Gilligan on Data by Tim Wilson, 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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Tip No. 10: Respect the Audience

This last tip is more of a perspective than a tip.

It’s last because it’s the tip that drives the reason for paying attention to all of the other tips.

It’s last because it’s a tip that is all too often flagrantly ignored.

It’s last because it can be a little scary.

The experience that prompted me to write this series was my participation in the inaugural #ACCELERATE conference in San Francisco last fall. As it turned out, I was the last presenter of the day — one of the 5-minute Super #ACCELERATE presentations.

Here’s one way I could have viewed my presentation:

It’s only 5 minutes, so I should try to do something pretty solid, but, if it falls flat, it’s only a small fraction of the overall conference.

Here’s how I actually viewed the presentation:

 It’s 5 minutes, but it’s 5 minutes in front of of 300 people, so that’s actually 1500 minutes, or 25 hours. If I swag that the fully loaded cost of the members of the audience is, on average, $50/hour, then I need to deliver a $1,250 presentation!

Okay, so it’s a little tough to really make this math work is a 5-minute presentation, but think about a 20-minute presentation ($5,000) or a 30-minute presentation ($7,500) or an hour-long presentation ($15,000). Change the hourly cost however you see fit, but do the mental exercise to consider the opportunity cost of the presentation — the total amount that is being invested by the audience members who could be doing something else rather than listening to you present. That is the amount of value you should fully commit to delivering with your presentation.

Each member of the audience is paying to watch your presentation, regardless of whether they had to pay a monetary fee to sit through it.

They’re paying with a finite and valuable commodity: their time.

Recognize that. Respect that. Do everything you can to make it a worthwhile investment on their part.

Photo by Eric T. Peterson

Similar Posts:

• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 2 — Pay Attention to What Doesn’t Work
• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 3 — NO SLIDEUMENTS (a Picture IS Worth 1,000 Words!)
• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 4 — Go with a Flow
• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 6 — Bring the Energy!
• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 8 — We Have Five Senses. Use TWO!

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Tip No. 9: Make it Personal, Descriptive, and Tangible

Imagine someone you know giving a presentation about how to present effectively and saying the following:

“Studies have shown that the most effective presentations incorporate personal anecdotes and are descriptive and tangible. This increases the likelihood of the audience being engaged and, thus, actually paying attention to the content being presented. You should really try to come up with things that have happened to you or that you have done and relate those to the audience so that they are more interested in you, which means they are more likely to pay attention, which means they will be more likely to retain what you have presented. You should also avoid abstract examples — abstractions are harder for the brain to process, and it’s easy for the brain’s subconscious to simply give up and zone out.”

Now, imagine someone covering the same material, but doing it as follows:

“I once had to give a presentation to 300 co-workers at my company’s annual meeting. I had five minutes to talk about measurement and analytics, which I knew was a topic that wasn’t inherently of interest to the group. This was one of a series of five back-to-back presentations in a modified Pechu Kucha format — 15 slides, with the slides auto-advancing every 20 seconds. I came up with the idea to use my 5-month, 2,100-mile backpacking trip form Georgia to Maine on the Appalachian Trail as an underlying theme to stitch together the 2 points I was trying to drive home in my 5-minute talk. It turned out to be an incredibly effective presentation, which, almost 2 years later, people still remember and reference. You see, by incorporating a personal anecdote that I could relate to the topic I was covering, I actually made the content more engaging and, thus, more memorable.”

Which of the above presentations-about-presenting do you think would be more likely to “stick”?

In their book  Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Chip and Dan Heath work through an acronym — S.U.C.C.E.S. — as to what it takes to effectively convey ideas. While the book goes well beyond presentations, their mnemonic nails this tip pretty well:

• Simple
• Unexpected
• Concrete
• Credible
• Emotional
• Stories

Really, this tip is about concrete, credible, emotional, and stories. It’s totally, totally, totally fine to start developing your presentation using abstractions. That’s probably what you’re going to have written down when you come up with your answer to the question: “What do I want the audience to take away from my presentation?” (Tip No. 7). The trick is to identify every generality and abstraction in the flow of your presentation and try to come up with a way to make each one more tangible, either by adding in specific examples or by introducing an analogy (personal or otherwise). Not only will this make your presentation more memorable, it’s fun (and it can really help when it comes to tracking down meaningful images — Tip No. 3!).

Three examples (yeah, I damn well better include tangible examples, right?) of this tip in practice from the three guys at Web Analytics Demystified:

• Eric Peterson presents on how he works with Best Buy to re-tool their analytics program: he co-presents with Best Buy (tangible example), and he uses a “house” analogy to illustrate, with pictures of ways houses can evolve (additions) as well as be rebuilt (when needing a new foundation or entirely new floor plan)
• John Lovett talks about his history as a licensed skipper (personal anecdote) and then uses naval navigation as an analogy for developing social media metrics programs
• Adam Greco uses a chess analogy to describe some of the key aspects of implementing a successful web analytics program…and relates that his younger son beat him at the game (both a personal anecdote…and one that he then ties back to web analytics)

As with all of the other tips in this series, the key to this one is that the goal isn’t simply “entertainment,” but, rather, relating examples and anecdotes that reinforce your key message.

Picture by Steve Snodgrass (modified by me to put the circle-slashon it, and, to be
clear, it’s making a point — I actually think the original piece is pretty cool)

Similar Posts:

• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 2 — Pay Attention to What Doesn’t Work
• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 3 — NO SLIDEUMENTS (a Picture IS Worth 1,000 Words!)
• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 10 — Respect the Audience
• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 4 — Go with a Flow
• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 6 — Bring the Energy!

© Tim for Gilligan on Data by Tim Wilson, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
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Tip No. 8: We Have Five Senses. Use TWO!

One of the most interesting books I’ve read over the past few years is Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School by John Medina. In easy-to-read prose, with lots of interesting examples, Medina lays out 12 “rules” of how the brain works — acknowledging up front that there is an infinite number of things we don’t yet understand about the brain, but that there actually are a number of things that we absolutely do know. The book focuses on the latter (for a slightly deeper read on my take on the book, jump over to this blog post from a couple of years ago).

Many of these the presentation tips in this series can be tied directly back to Medina’s brain rules, but this post is focused on three specific ones:

• Rule #4: We don’t pay attention to boring things
• Rule #9: Stimulate more of the senses
• Rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses

Now, obviously, when it comes to presentations, you typically only have two senses to work with: sight and sound.

From Medina’s book:

We absorb information about an event through our senses, translate it into electrical signals (some for sight, others from sound, etc.), disperse those signals to separate parts of the brain, then reconstruct what happened, eventually perceiving the event as a whole.

What neuroscientists have figured out is that, by routing the same information through multiple senses, you have a better chance of making the information “stick.”

In a typical presentation environment, the senses of smell, taste, and touch are largely off the table, so you’re working with two senses. The good news is that sight is far and away the most dominant sense, but, “We learn and remember best through pictures, not written words.” (see Tip No. 3)

Here’s where presenters, even ones who intuitively know they need to be leveraging both sight and sound, often go awry. They approach their presentation with this mindset:

• Sight = “what’s on my slides”
• Hearing = “what I say”

This is a formula for under-utilizing these senses. In addition to the above, there are a number of other ways to play off these senses:

• “Hearing” is not just what you say, but how you say it – changes in volume and tempo are a second layer of  “hearing”; avoid the monotone (and know that, even when you feel like you are dramatically changing your pitch and tone…it’s probably not coming across as nearly that dramatic. This is one of the reasons it makes sense to video some of your rehearsals).
• “Sight” is not just the content on your slides, it’s the sight of you – your facial expressions and movement. Can you think of a presentation you’ve seen where the presenter literally seemed to bounce around the stage and or gesture dramatically with his/her hands? Chances are, you can. Now, can you remember what the presenter was talking about? Again, you probably can. This actually dips into Medina’s Rule #4 (we don’t pay attention to boring things), but my point here is that your audience is looking at you as much as they are looking at your slides. So, you need to be cognizant of that and use “the sight of you” to reinforce  your content and make it more memorable.

Two examples where this tip has been creatively applied to great effect:

• At eMetrics in Washington, D.C., in 2010, Ensighten launched a campaign by starting a “tag revolution” —  a “tagolution” — that included the distribution of colonial wigs to all of the conference attendees. When Josh Manion got on stage to talk about Ensighten for 5 minutes, he delivered the presentation with one such wig on his own head. I don’t remember any other vendor that presented in that session. And, because the wig wasn’t simply a “be goofy” gag — because it actually tied directly to the point Josh was trying to convey — his presentation “stuck.” In essence, Ensighten actually leveraged a third sense — touch — by distributing wigs to the conference attendees. I got to plop a wig on my head (in the privacy of my hotel room!), so the point really, really, really “stuck.”
• As another example, I teach an internal class at Resource Interactive that is focused on how to go about establishing clear objectives and KPIs up front in any engagement. The material was co-developed with Matt Coen, and one of the points he introduced was the classic play on “Ready, Aim, Fire,” and how digital marketers have this ugly tendency to instead go with “Ready (‘I need to do social media!’),” “Fire (‘I’m throwing up a Facebook page!’)”, “Aim (‘Did the Facebook page deliver results?’).” As we worked through the content, I found an image of someone firing a gun, and then introduced a simple build of three words on top of the image: “Ready” then “Fire” then “Aim.” Simple enough. I had imagery, it was a valid analogy to the point we were discussing, and the slide only had 3 big words on it. Then, I had the idea to introduce a sound effect — right as the word “Fire” appeared, a gunshot sound effect went off. Without fail, everyone in the class jumps, then sits up straight, then chuckles. It works.

I’m not saying that you should always include props in your presentations, nor that you should drop gratuitous sound effects throughout your deck. But, if you consciously think, “How can I maximize the impact of the senses of sight and sound,” you have a better shot at making your presentation — and its content – more memorable.

Photo by gabriel amadeus

Similar Posts:

• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 2 — Pay Attention to What Doesn’t Work
• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 3 — NO SLIDEUMENTS (a Picture IS Worth 1,000 Words!)
• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 10 — Respect the Audience
• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 4 — Go with a Flow
• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 6 — Bring the Energy!

© Tim for Gilligan on Data by Tim Wilson, 2012. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 10 Presentation Tips, Brain Rules, Ensighten, John Medina, Josh Manion

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Tip No. 7: Be Memorable By Identifying the Memory

This tip is really about simplicity and clarity. Accept at the outset that only a fraction of what you present is going to be retained by the audience, so it’s much better to have a small handful of key takeaways and then spend your time reinforcing those points.

The earlier in the development of your presentation that you clearly articulate for yourself what it is you want your audience to take away, the better off the presentation will be.

This is such an easy point to skip that, well, most presenters do!

The process that is required in order for information to get from a presenter’s mouth all the way to an audience member’s long-term memory requires multiple steps:

1. The material first gets captured/absorbed by iconic memory, which has a sub-second retention time
2. If the person is “paying attention,” the information will then be transferred into short-term memory, which lasts only a few seconds, but is where it can be consciously considered
3. If the material that is in short-term memory is sufficiently repeated and reinforced by the audience member’s own cognitive processing, it will actually make it into long-term memory so that it can be recalled the next day, next week, or next month

Bringing focus to the presentation and not being overly ambitious about how much information you want to convey enables you to build a presentation that repeats and reinforces the key points sufficiently that they are more likely to make it to the long-term memory banks of your audience.

Over the past few years, almost every formal presentation I have developed has started with me jotting down in my notebook the question, “What do I want the audience to take away from the presentation?” I then take multiple stabs at answering the question clearly and succinctly in writing (often revisiting my answer over several days in brief spurts). It can be surprisingly difficult, but it’s an exercise well worth the effort!

The answer to this question becomes a recurring litmus test for everything that goes into the presentation:

• Does content that is being considered speak directly to the desired takeaways?
• If not, is the content critical supporting information for the takeaways?

I can point to cases where a picture, diagram, or point that was one of the first things I put into a slide for a presentation — and was an idea or concept that actually sparked the whole idea for the presentation — ultimately got dropped when I considered it against these questions. This can be really tough, as it can means dropping content that is clever or insightful…but that is ancillary and nonessential. Dropping this content is the right thing to do — otherwise, you risk having your audience completely miss (or fail to retain) the fundamental purpose of the presentation.

For an hour-long presentation, aiming for 2-3 key takeaways is about right. That may sound like an unduly small number, but it’s reality. Think about the last presentation you sat through and jot down the main points. How long is your list?

The more focused your presentation is, and the more clear you are on the key points that you want your audience to retain, the better your presentation will be.Similar Posts:

• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 2 — Pay Attention to What Doesn’t Work
• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 3 — NO SLIDEUMENTS (a Picture IS Worth 1,000 Words!)
• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 10 — Respect the Audience
• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 4 — Go with a Flow
• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 6 — Bring the Energy!

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Tip No. 6: Bring the Energy of a Dinner or Bar Conversation

We’ve all seen it happen time and time again: someone who we personally know to be energetic, outspoken, and lively in 1-on-1 and small group conversations…speaks in the driest of monotones when delivering formally prepared presentations.

Few things kill a presentation’s impact more quickly than a nuclear blast of impassivity from the presenter

It’s understandable why this happens — it’s a chain reaction:

1. Anxiety about the importance of getting the presentation “right” ups our caution level
2. The natural way that humans react to caution is to be tentative
3. In a public speaking situation, tentativeness manifests itself as a low voice with limited modulation, as well as minimal physical movement

Our brains say, “Tread carefully! You’re walking a tightrope and don’t want to do anything risky! One misstep and you will catastrophically plummet into the Presentation Disaster Chasm!”

Unfortunately, this is one of those cases where our natural instincts as to how to be “safe” actually lead to disaster. Think about when you were a kid and first learning to ride a bike. Because the bike was wobbly, your instinct was to go slow…which made the bike more wobbly, because the gyroscopic action of the wheels needed faster rotation to kick in and provide stability. Presenting is similar — if you force yourself to be “the animated you,” you will quickly reap the benefits:

1. The energy you exhibit on stage will add energy to your audience
2. The audience will make eye contact and “lean forward” to see what you are so energized about
3. That energy from the audience will feed back to you, and you will be off and rolling!

I know this sounds a little hokey, but, if you take Tip No. 2 to heart and analyze presenters who are ineffective, consider them through the lens of this tip. How often is the person who is presenting noticeably less energized than you know that person to be?

The fact is, you are going to come across to your audience as being less energetic than you personally feel you are being. That’s because you are likely operating with a slight shot of adrenalin, so you feel more energy as you speak than you are necessarily showing.

There are several non-exclusive ways to apply this tip:

• Be aware of it — most people don’t realize how passive and monotonal they are being when they are on stage
• Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse! (see Tip No. 5) — as you gain confidence with the flow of your presentation and your content, it becomes infinitely easier to focus on your expressiveness
• While you’re rehearsing, look for opportunities to use a hand gesture, a facial expression change, a change in the volume or tone of your voice, or other ways to alter your physical and audio presence to add emphasis
• Video tape yourself rehearsing (I’ve never actually done that…but, as digital video becomes more and more accessible, I fully expect to start!)

This doesn’t mean go crazy and jump around all over the stage, nor does it mean to step wildly outside of your own natural character. But, a little bit of energy goes a long way, and, chances are, you’re not going to overdo it. Bring the energy!

Photo by Eustaquio Santimano

 Similar Posts:

• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 2 — Pay Attention to What Doesn’t Work
• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 3 — NO SLIDEUMENTS (a Picture IS Worth 1,000 Words!)
• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 10 — Respect the Audience
• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 4 — Go with a Flow
• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 8 — We Have Five Senses. Use TWO!

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Tip No. 5: Rehearse, Rehearse, Rehearse. And then Rehearse Some More!

At the Web Analytics Wednesday in San Francisco the night before #ACCELERATE, June Dershewitz — one of the 20-minute session presenters — commented that her presentation was running right at 17 minutes. I was struck by the comment, because, like June, I knew that my 5-minute presentation was running right around 4:55, give or take 10 seconds.

Not surprisingly, June was relaxed as she spoke, the presentation flowed smoothly, and she ended comfortably on time. I followed up with her afterwards to confirm some of the details of her prep work, and she responded:

My presentation ran 17 minutes when I rehearsed it (which I did quite a few times). My friend and colleague Kuntal Goradia (one of the 5-minute speakers) and I practiced our speeches on each other – and anyone else who would listen – for about 2 weeks leading up to the conference. Our final rehearsal took place at 10:30pm the night before the conference, after we left WAW.

The point of rehearsal is by no means simply to ensure you will stay within any specified time limits. Rehearsal has a wealth of benefits:

• It forces you to verbalize the material — you will be surprised how certain parts of your presentation have great visual support on the slide and are very clear in your head…but then come out of your mouth awkwardly.
• It helps get you so familiar with the slides and the flow that you truly don’t need to glance at the presentation for a reference or reminder as to where you are
• It helps you identify where the flow doesn’t quite work, where the visual material doesn’t quite support the spoken delivery, and where the core of a specific point actually needs to be altered — all of which lead to opportunities to adjust the slides themselves to support a more effective flow
• It builds your confidence; once you know that you will be on time and you know when the key points are coming up and you know the flow…you can focus on engaging the audience rather than focusing on ancillary details
• It enables you to practice “the physical” — where a slowing of the pace of the delivery, a simple (or dramatic hand gesture), a cock of the head, might really work

To be clear, the point of rehearsal is explicitly not to memorize your delivery verbatim. If you do that, then you will actually introduce more anxiety, as you will know that you will be “lost” if you forget a portion of the memorization. And, the delivery will likely come across as somewhat stilted, as the last half-dozen run-throughs will preclude any editing as you focus on rote memorization rather than polishing the content and delivery!

Obviously, rehearsals take time, and the longer the presentation, the longer it takes for a single run-through. For any presentation that is an hour or less, I recommend at least 6-10 “out loud” rehearsals. You don’t necessarily need a live audience for more than 1 or 2 of those (you do need to run through it in front of at least one person at least once — even better if you can get 2 or 3 people, ask them to take notes, and get their feedback), and you don’t necessarily need to be standing in a conference room with projected slides while you do it. I actually try to do run-throughs in a range of different situations — while driving (you can’t look at the slides when you’re looking at the road!), in a couple of different conference rooms, even sitting on a couch with my wife using my laptop as the “projector” (I have an awesome wife). By mixing up the environments, I’m conditioned to know that it’s the content that matters — not the specifics of the stage, projector, and seating configuration of the audience.

Still, a lot of my rehearsal occurs “in the gaps” — it’s almost impossible to carve out time in the middle of a busy work day to step away and rehearse, so I’ll often arrive at work a little early leading up to a big presentation and do a run-through before firing up my email. I’ll often mix that up with run-throughs at the end of the day just before I head home. It’s not that hard to find rehearsal time, in my experience, and it quickly becomes a habit — where you want to do another run-through because you’ve had a thought as to how you can clean up a bumpy spot or two.

Above all, though, rehearsal is about respect for the audience. No Broadway show — no high school play, for that matter — opens the doors for an audience on the first day the troupe gathers. There’s a reason for that, and that reason applies just as much to formal presentations as it does to plays — practice makes the delivery better.

For more tips on rehearsing for presentations, check out this post by Nancy Duarte.Similar Posts:

• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 2 — Pay Attention to What Doesn’t Work
• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 3 — NO SLIDEUMENTS (a Picture IS Worth 1,000 Words!)
• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 10 — Respect the Audience
• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 4 — Go with a Flow
• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 6 — Bring the Energy!

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Tip No. 4: Go with A Flow

Avoid the temptation to make a big list of things you want to cover and then simply laying them out in a somewhat logical sequence. You will wind up with partial non-sequiturs, and each abrupt shift in topic will give your audience a golden opportunity to tune you out.

Be leery of a narrative that looks like this, though:

1. We had this problem
2. I set out to solve the problem by exploring a whole lot of things (that I’ll now list for you)
3. I got to an answer
4. Here is the answer

While, yes, that is a logical narrative, in that it uses the sequential flow of your personal history, and it seems somewhat cinematic, in that it builds to a climax (“Ta-DA!!! The. ANSWER!”)…it’s often a narrative flow that is disconnected from the interests of your audience.

This, I realize, is one of the tougher tips to put into practice, because it is so situational. But, I’ve had success with a few different approaches here:

• Use a personal anecdote or experience as a unifying theme (more on this in Tip No. 9) — the key here is to make sure that the link between that experience and the topic at hand is real; typically, this will be through an analogy of some sort, so make sure the analogy holds to a reasonable extent
• Different aspects of a single core point — in some cases, there is truly one core idea that you are trying to convey, and the presentation is simply exploring different aspects of the idea; in these situations, you can think of your presentation as a diagram with a single idea in a circle in the center with each aspect listed in a spoke coming out of the circle; you may even want to sketch  it out this way to think through what the logical sequence of those different aspects is
• Along the same lines as the above, spending some time diagramming out your material in a non-outline format makes sense. Does it fit in a 2×2 matrix? A pyramid? A circular process? You may find that the diagram winds up as supporting imagery for the presentation, but that is by no means the goal — you’re simply looking to identify an optimal structure for the content so that, when you convert it to a linear model (because presentations happen in real time, and real time is linear), you have the best chance of doing that in a way that flows smoothly

Don’t be afraid to adjust the flow over time — you will find out as you rehearse (Tip No. 5) that there are hiccups in the flow, and adjusting the sequence of content and how you bridge from one point to another will very likely necessitate changing the order in which the material gets presented. That’s okay! The more a presentation flows, the easier it will be for the audience to focus, as they will not need to spend brain cycles simply adjusting from a jarring transition from one point to the next.

Photo by me

Similar Posts:

• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 2 — Pay Attention to What Doesn’t Work
• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 3 — NO SLIDEUMENTS (a Picture IS Worth 1,000 Words!)
• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 10 — Respect the Audience
• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 6 — Bring the Energy!
• 10 Presentation Tips: Tip No. 8 — We Have Five Senses. Use TWO!

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Post tags: 10 Presentation Tips

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