Good slides matter, good slides are important. Good slides are a brilliant marketing opportunity. And in fact bad slides are also a marketing opportunity (to make your organisation look bad), whether you like it or not.
There's a thousand and one presentations and articles out there about Death by PowerPoint, so must people now know that lots of text in a small font divided up by bullet points are probably a bad idea. But is there any theory behind this, beyond 'it looks nice to have nice slides'? From a marketing point of view, we want to know: will our message be remembered and understood better if we make an effort with our PowerPoint? The answer is emphatically yes.
This presentation details some research into good communication via digital media, and gives you tips, tricks, links and resources to make a great presentation with which to market.
For public libraries in particular (but for all libraries) putting good presentations up on Slideshare is a must. If Slideshare pick the presentation up and make it a featured presentation, this guarentees a few thousand extra views - if they make it a Presentation of the Day, you'll get tens of thousands. There's few other ways, if any, of getting so much exposure to a message you want to send out. 'But none of those people are our patrons so it won't matter!' you say... Not neccessarily - I've seen a fantastic presentation about a US Public Library featured on Slideshare's homepage, and with all the good online publicity it brought it filtered down to the local people, the kind of people who might not visit a library because they don't know what it does these days, but WILL visit online sources of good information, like Slideshare.
Just as libraries should assume discovery of information happens everywhere and focus on fulfillment, we should market on platforms our users use and assume they'll discover us 'externally' as well as locally. We should be popping up where patrons and potential patrons least expect, as well as where they do expect...
People should totally know how to make powerpoint presentations in order to avoid death by boredom. We can find a lot of pointers on the web, be creative and do some research.
ReplyDeleteThe key here is attention-grabbing. Monotonous slides bore people, so that's something to work on. It's like making a repeat performance for a contest or raffle relating to a brand that has been used countless times, so much that people don't snap up on it anymore.
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