One of my most effective marketing strategies has always been to offer presentations on conflict resolution to audiences in my target market. In my first year of business over a decade ago, I gave more than 30 such presentations. Almost all of them created valuable connections and interest that helped me make mediation my full-time work in less than two years.
For a long time, I avoided PowerPoint in my presentations. I’d sat through far too many boring, bullet-point packed, read-word-by-word PowerPoint events and didn’t want my own presentations to be associated with a tool that’s been sorely misused. I didn’t want to be someone about whom PowerPoint comedy sketches could be made!
In the past year, thanks to Garr Reynolds’ blog, Presentation Zen, I reconsidered my vow and began reintroducing PowerPoint into my speeches and mini-workshops for prospective clients. And I learned that, used well, PowerPoint substantially improved my speaking gigs and made the material — and thus me — much more memorable.
If you want to — or already do — give presentations as part of your mediation marketing strategy, I highly recommend three Garr Reynolds resources: His blog, his superb book, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery
The video is from Reynolds’ 21 March 2008 presentation to Google employees. Settle in with a cup of coffee, a note pad, and watch a master at work. It’s worth every minute:
Enjoy,
Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MediatorTech.com.
Copyright © 2008 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.
Tammy:
Thanks for the link to the video. I’ll look forward to watching it this weekend. I read Garr Reynold’s book earlier this year and found it very thought-provoking. An extra bonus is that he offers a discount (20%, as I recall) to book owners for istockphoto dot com. (Check this out on the last page of the book.) This offer proved to more than pay for the book for me.
Best,
Nancy
Nancy E. Hudgins’s last blog post..Match the Mediator to the Case
I use Powerpoint in “some” of my speeches, but I try to use it as little as possible. A slide here, a slide there.
The trick is to make sure YOU are the one giving the presentation and using powerpoint to enhance it, as opposed to Powerpoint being the presentation and you are simply reading from it.
Stanley F. Bronstein
MrAchievement
Attorney, CPA, Author & Speaker
Official Guide to Achievement on SelfGrowth.com
MrAchievement.com (Stanley Bronstein)’s last blog post..Holding Your Ground – Persistence
Nancy, thanks for reminding me about the 20% discount for iStockPhoto! I’d totally forgotten that and I even use that service. Readers, iStock is an excellent source of good, inexpensive photos for your marketing materials, website, and of course, your PowerPoint presentations. Garr’s offer is a good one. I wrote about iStock in this post a while back: Finding Stock Photos for Your Website.
Stanley, thanks for stopping by and taking the time to comment. You have a great website — clean, easy to locate things and navigate, chock full of resources. I couldn’t agree more with your comment. Just as we want to do when we’re in the mediator’s chair, when we’re presenting it’s important to bring our full selves to that work.