17/03/2012 by admin.

I recently saw a presentation about marketing.

And I was disappointed. Why?

Because nowhere did it mention the importance of getting inside the heads of your target customers to understand them.  Lots of discusssion about channels and media strategy.  Measurement and analysis too.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s all useful and neccessary stuff.  But it’s where you end up, not where you start.

To be able to communicate effectively it’s vital that you can see the world, as best you can, from the other person’s point of view.  That helps create empathy and, eventually, rapport.  You are both “on the same page” so to speak.

After the presentation, I spend a while thinking about what I had just seen.

It was all about the presenter and what they wanted to tell the audience.

It should have been all about the audience and what they wanted to hear.

And there were no pictures………..just words.

Small text in a big, empty space.

Elegant design, no doubt, but not good for getting across the right message.

It was a very useful experience though!

Made me think even more about my own presentations and how I can improve them.

And it provided material for my new Presentation Skills workshop!

Which I really must finish…..

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17/03/2012 by admin.

My excuse for not updating this blog is that I’ve been busy.  The real reason is that it’s a new thing for me and I keep forgetting……

Anyhow, all the fuss about the new iPad has set me thinking.

It looks like a stunning piece of technology.  I even caught myself thinking about whether I could afford one!  Then I stopped for a moment.  What on earth would I do with it?  Apart from show off the amazing screen, that is?

It’s a very expensive way to watch video, but we already have several tv’s, pc’s, laptops, an i-mac and a Windows tablet.  Do I really need another device?

e-books will look fabulous on it, but they look great on our kindle (yes, got one of those too…) and on my Acer tablet, which has a very nice screen, thank you very much!

I really don’t get the hysteria that seems to accompany each new Apple launch.  Maybe I’m getting old….

Don’t get me wrong, Apple produces some amazing stuff.  Just not amazing enough to make me want to queue for days to buy somethng that I know they will make obsolete within a year……even if it does look as cool as a cool thing!

And don’t get me started on the rants that have been appearing all over the internet.  The Android supporters are getting as excited as the Apple die-hards!

Get over yourselves people!

Just buy what you like and what works for you.  Accept that somebody else will like a different product.  And that none of them is actually perfect.

Personally, I’m looking forward to seeing what happens when Windows 8 appears.  Should be interesting!

I like Windows 7.  I like OS-X.  Tried Linux - not for me.  Android?  Only tried on a smartphone.  Not especially impressed.  It works, but that’s it.

Now I really must get back to finishing off all the things I really should be working on…..

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07/11/2011 by admin.

Next installment in my website upgrade saga…..

Just completed the website www.peopleskills.eu to the point where it’s now live.  It still needs a few tweaks and the odd bit of content, but it’s close enough for a bit of live testing.

I’ve started a bit of a project to have fune error pages on my websites.  I discovered that you don’t have to be stuck with whatever your ISP displays when somebody mis-types the address of a page on your site.  (Don;t worry, I’m not going into the technicalities here! - if you’re really interested, just look up HTACCESS…..!)

Anyhow, the error page for Better Presentations is here: www.betterpresentations.co.uk/error_page.html and the one for PeopleSkills is here:  www.peopleskills.eu/error_page.html

Not a big thing in the scheme of things, but I hope they will make some people smile!

Now back to work on the main website…..

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21/10/2011 by admin.

For a while now, I’ve been working to seprate out the various things we do as a company.  Mixing together programmes for education, businesses and individuals seemed like a good idea at the time……

Telling people what we do was, however, becoming quite complicated as we added more and more programmes and workshops.

It eventually dawned on me that we needed to separate all the things we do into more ogical groups and to give each its own identity.

I started with Presentation Skills.  Mainly because I was reworking the programmes anyway, and I had a load of re-writing to do.  It seemed sensible to do teh job once.

Today I uploaded the new website for the first of our new brands - Better Presentations.  Pretty obvious title!

The website is here:  www.betterpresentations.co.uk

It’s complete enough to go live, although there’s some more content to add later.

Now I need to get on with the rest!

If anyone has any thoughts or comments about teh new website, I would love to hear from you.

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23/09/2011 by admin.

I mentioned in my last post that I was on a Common Purpose course.  Well we finally finished, so now I’m officially a Common Purpose graduate.  And what a great bunch of people I met.  As I hoped, we’ve become friends now and we’re already starting to see ways we can help each other’s businesses.  I learned a lot from the course and, more importantly, from the other delegates.

I’m still working on the new ideas for presentations - these things always seem to take longer than planned!  The end results should be worth it though.

Image is an importent element in communicating values.  People can;t help but make assumptions based on whatever they may already know about you or your business.  It’s the same for places too.  Mention a place and you’ll have some sort of mental picture of it.  We were looking at this very subject on Common Purpose a couple of weeks ago.  We went to Bradford to see how they’re working to change the image of the city.  It was my first visit and I found a place that has a lot to recommend it.

People kept referring to the strong brand image that Liverpool has.  There’s no denying that!  The Beatles, football - all the usual stuff.

But there’s more to the place than that, just like there’s more to us all than people imagine.  We just need to find the right way to get that across.

Here’s Liverpool’s excellent effort: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ6Pkx80Fio

Enjoy!

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18/08/2011 by admin.

Well, here we are in August.  Ages since my last post.  My only excuse is work.  And learning.  I decided it was about time I did some personal development as it’s been a while since I did any formal training.  So I’m now in the midst of a programme run by Common Purpose. (www.commonpurpose.org.uk  So far I reckon it’s been one of the best decisions I’ve made in ages.  The programme constantly challenges us to rethink how we go about running our businesses and especially how we operate as leaders.  As an added bonus, I’ve met a group of really great people.  I’m sure some lasting friendships will come out of it.

One result of being on this course has been a rethink of some of the work I do around presentations.  On the one hand I’ve found that much of what I was doing was just fine, but I’ve learned a few things that have lead me to start on a complete redesign of my workshops.  Should get it done by the end of the summer.

I’m still enjoying working with my Acer tablet too.  I’ve used it several time to deliver workshops and it’s so much more convenient than a full sized laptop.  The only minor niggle is that it doesn;t have a standard VGA monitor connection - only HDMI - so I can’t just turn up anywhere and expect to plug in to a projector.

Won’t be a problem once I get around to buying a wireless projector though!

I’m still happy that I went for a Windows tablet rather than an i-pad.  It’s so nice to be able to do work on existing files when I’m out and about, which would have been difficult on an i-pad as all our main computers are PC’s.

Now I really must get on with some paying work!

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10/05/2011 by admin.

Picking up the thread from recent posts, I now have my Windows 7 tablet pc.After much deliberation I bought an Acer Iconia W500, but without the optional keyboard.  What an amazing little machine it is too!  Having read all the reviews I could find, most of which say that Windows 7 just doesn’t work on a tablet, I wonder what they were reviewing!  It’s not an iPad, but it works really well as a business machine.All the complaints about small icons and text can be addressed by setting up Windows to suit your own preferences.  OK, an iPad doesn’t need setting up, but I rather like making up my own mind about how my system looks and feels.All the Touch stuff works well and the handwriting recognition is little short of amazing.  Quick and accurate straight out of the box.  I’m going to get a touch stylus so I can use the tablet for making notes.  It’s that good.My tablet now runs Office, so I can work on client projects wherever I am, and I can tether it to my ‘phone for internet access if I need it.  It’s already proving useful around our home-based business too.  It’s just so handy being able to access stuff without having to go into the office or get out a full-sized laptop!  Battery life has been excellent too.  Using it at meetings and to do odd bits of work in between, the battery lasts all day.  I reckon it would run for at least 4 hours solid, which is way below the 10 hours of an iPad, but plenty for me to use it all day and charge it in the evening.I just don’t need to be able to watch videos or listen to music all day.  If I did, I would buy an iPad or an Android tablet.The screen, which is really, really good, has a resolution of 1280 x 800, so HD content looks excellent.  I connected it to a 32 inch HD TV and it’s just as good.  So my presentations will look stunning! (on a decent projector…….)I can already see how I can change the way I work now I’ve had a chance to use a tablet in anger.  It’s much easier to carry about than a normal laptop, runs for hours and means I can work pretty much anywhere.It’s so handy being able to load stuff onto it to show customers - much better than using a laptop because it’s just so convenient.  It fits nicely into my A4 document case. along with a paper notepad and some business cards - it’s all I need for meetings.  The tablet and my smartphone give me an amazing amount of flexibility to work anywhere, how ever did I manage before!So there you have it, a Windows 7 tablet really does work, for me at least.I haven’t attempted the usual tablet vs iPad stuff as I believe they have different audiences.I’ve tried an iPad and it’s an amazing thing to use, but it’s not aimed at me.

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11/04/2011 by admin.

OK, this is nothing much to do directly with communicating, but I felt I should share this!

A few weeks ago I updated my main PC to Windows 7.  It was either that or a complete re-install of XP.

The thing had become really slow to start and was generally sluggish.  Sound familiar to anyone?  Hence the thoughts of a re-install.

Then I decided that if I was going to spend time re-installing everything, I might as well bite the bullet and upgrade as it wouldn’t take any longer!

So off I went, bought my DVD of Windows 7 professional and less than half an hour later I had a brand new operating system!  And what a difference it made!  Talk about fast, absolutely amazing.

Last week I started having problems………  Slow startup, constant freezing up and a general lack of performance.

Was I an unhappy bunny….  Then I got logical and thought back over what I’d done over the last couple of weeks.  The main thing was to re-arrange the hard drives in the PC and add a big (1 Terabyte) drive as a local backup.  The plan, by the way, is to sign up for an internet-based backup service once all my data is nice and tidy.

After a bit of head-scratching, plus a few hours trying all the fixes I found on Google, I wondered if I might be having problems with power.  After all, I have 4 hard drives, a fairly powerful graphics card and an additional sound card.

Now, at this point I have to confess to being a closet technical person.  So I added an extra power supply for the hard drives.

And all my problems have gone!  Every one of them.  Next step is to upgrade the power suply in the PC so I don’t have extra wires everywhere!

Now I can get back to doing all the stuff I should have been doing instead of messing about with a computer!

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20/03/2011 by admin.

In my last post I talked about how I decided on a Windows tablet instead of an iPad.

Part of the decision was based on our long term use of Powerpoint to create presentations.

I decided to take a more detailed look at the Mac presentation software, Keynote, so I’m currently learning how to use the handy 30 day free trial.  Did I mention we have a Mac as well as various PC’s?

So far, I’m finding the experience rather strange, as the whole way of working in Keynote feels very different from Powerpoint - hardly surprising really!

Visually, it is absolutely stunning and has a real quality feel to it that my current version of Powerpoint simply can’t match unless I create content with a dedicated graphics package, which I do quite a lot.  (I’m wiriting this instaed of working on the content for a presentation I’m delivering next week….. )

So far I’ve just been getting the feel of things.  The slide transitions are very pretty!

My first attempt at importing a Powerpoint was a mixed experience.  All the slides and graphics were imported just fine.  But the fonts I had used weren’t, even though they were embedded in the Powerpoint.   Probably something to do with licensing,  so I’ll have to install the same font set on the Mac.  Not a major issue, but an annoyance that wouldn’t happen if I opened the file on a PC.  Some fairly simple animations didn’t make it either.  Again, not a huge issue to re-do then, but another irritation.

Today I tried importing a different presentation.  Same font issue (haven’t installed then yet…..) and more animations not working.

Now I have to be fair here.  Keynote is able to import Powerpoint files, but even the latest version of Powerpoint cannot open Keynote files.

That said, it would probably be quicker to start from scratch than attempt to repair the non-functional animations.

I’m coming to the conclusion that it’s not really a competition between these two programmes - they appeal to different people and both are good in different ways.

I really need to evaluate Powerpoint 2010, as that’s probably the way we’ll go, at least for now.  I have a feeling that we’ll be adding Keynote presentations to our portfolio, if for no other reason than it opening up a new market for us.  And it’s not expensive, £70 for the whole iWorks package!  I was going to say that Office is very expensive, but I just remembered that for about £190 you get a license that allows installation on a desktop and a portable machine, so that works out at not much more per machine than iWorks.

Now I really must finish off the stuff for next week!

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16/03/2011 by admin.

This has been bugging me for a while.  Ever since I saw a colleague at a breakfast meeting using an iPad to show off his business.

I had an “I need one of those” moments….. I mean, it just looked so amazing and easy to use.

So I started looking at how I would use it.  We deliver a lot of presentations, so I thought an iPad would be perfect.  Especially when I found out it runs Keynote which, for the odd person who may not know is Apple’s presentation software.  I could see myself delivering stunning presentations, wandering about holding my nice, shiny i-Pad.

Then I really looked into it.

Almost all of our work is done using PC software, although we do have a Mac that gets used for  the occasional bit of work.

OK, not a big deal because Keynote can import Powerpoint presentations.  Mostly.  Probably enough for most of our work.

But the version of Keynote that runs on the i-Pad doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of the full desktop version.

So some of our best stuff wouldn’t work.  Bummer!

The i-Pad isn’t cheap either, although it is a wonderful piece of equipment, we would have to spend nearly £500 to get something we would only use to deliver stuff.

Android tablets are cheaper.  But no way could they be used to deliver presentations.  There just aren’t the apps to do it yet.

So I’ve arrived at the conclusion that a Windows 7 tablet is what we need.  Yes, really!

That would replace one of our delivery laptops with something smaller and lighter (not as small as an i-Pad, but still smaller than a laptop).

And it would run all of our main software anywhere. Even though battery life is less than an i-Pad (5 hours or so vs 10), that’s not really an issue for us.

We don’t do 10-hour presentations…….

A windows 7 tablet has USB ports and a card slot, as well as wireless and Bluetooth, so getting stuff onto it is so much more flexible.

So there you have it, a practical solution!

I still want an i-Pad though…….

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