LOLpresentation - the dream becomes a reality (and it actually works?)

Ever since I did my "1/2/3 Rule" parody of Guy Kawasaki's 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint, I've thought about doing an all-LOLcat PowerPoint presentation. Granted, I wish it were a "Keynote" presentation, but what can you do?

Friends of mine know that I'm not one to speak idly, so it was only a matter of time after I said "one day, I'm going to do an all LOLcat presentation -- a LOLsentation (because it also kinda looks like LOLsensation." That time came earlier today at the Magazine Publishers of America Magazines 24/7 digital conference.

I was given the opportunity to speak on a panel with Tariq Krim (Netvibes) and Chris Cunningham (appssavvy), moderated by Adam Sherk. Our section was called "Letting Go of Your Brand: The Rewards of Untethering Your Content," which prompted me to title my 6-min presentation, "the hardest part is letting go (OH NOES! I HAS LET GO!)"

Plus, the LOLcats were actually relevant to the discussion, in that they're the epitome of user-generated content, wholly organic and the result of a bunch of strangers collaborating over the Internet. No marketer could have ever dreamed up something like this.

It'll hopefully make some more sense when you see the slides, but without my voiceover, you probably will be as confused as those poor conference hosts when I sent them my slides in advance.

Frankly, I wasn't sure how it was going to turn out, but as the laughter faded after the first LOLcat, I knew things were going to be OK.The kind folks at mediabistro seem to have liked the unorthodox presentation medium as well.

from "LOLCats Ease Pain of Pushing Mag Content Online"

Even though most mag execs in the room likely didn't know what they were looking at when the first image of the popular online meme fusing strange pet pics with preposterous POV-cat captions hit the magnum-sized screen at Manhattan's New World Stages, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian's slides of the infectious online felines in his presentation within the "Letting Go of Your Brand" panel hopefully helped some attendees take the bitter pill of unmonetizing and better distributing magazine content online in better humor. His was easily the morning's most engaging presentation, making life a bit more difficult for co-panelists...

To be fair, Tariq and Chris nonetheless gave great presentations (Tariq even brought an adorable < $200 Chinese laptop; his only mistake was not etching a cat riding an invisible bike on the lid). Cats are amazing creature. I cannot stress that enough. If Da Vinci could have painted in cats and if Michelangelo could have sculpted in them, I think they would have. Thus, I strongly encourage you to include just a couple LOLpictures in your next presentation. You won't regret it. Please feel free to gank slides or ideas -- they weren't really mine to begin with anyway. If a video version of the presentation makes its way to me, I'll be sure to post it. Thanks to the venerable Icanhascheezburger for the images and Scribd for their magic paper.

Read this doc on Scribd: the hardest part is letting go (OH NOES! I HAS LET GO!)

losing my ted virginity, easy as 1-2-3

Kinda. It's not like I went to the real TED event, but I did get the chance attend the 2007 TED Salon (that's fancy-talk for smart people parties, which means there's no dancing). If you're a first-timer like I was, just make sure you don't let anyone know -- it's worse than what they make you do at Rocky Horror.

Anyway, I was able to get in thanks to a lot of pleading. I've watched countless talks online and this particular event was to discuss "Hot Science: Radical Ideas to Combat the Climate Crisis." Radical, dude.

The highlights for me were the bookend presentations by Michael Oppenheimer and Juan Enriquez. Oppenheimer's presentation was depressing (as promised) but quite engaging nonetheless. Looking at his slides (and considering how long he's been warning us) I hope Gore sent him a "Thank You" note after An Inconvenient Truth.

On presentation alone, Enriquez was easily the most compelling. I was enthralled. And I think it had a lot to do with his adherence to my 1/2/3 rule (take that, Guy). He prefaced his talk with a warning, that we were the guinea pigs for a new presentation. Aside from a couple minor timing glitches, he rolled through a parade of flickr photos (all attributed, too!). The bits of text that did make it on the screen stood out and there wasn't a dull moment from start to finish. Walking out, all I knew was that we ought to be drawing our energy as efficiently as we grow our crops (what he was talking about during all those pretty pictures). Damn you, 1/2/3 rule, you are an engrossing one.

But the quote of the night came from Russ George, which the TED blog kindly recorded:

We have a bunch of aberrant applications in this planet, jamming a lot of errors against that primary operating system, and it's threatening to reboot and give us that blue screen of death, threatening a reboot back to 16 million years ago.

So is it time to hit CTRL-ALT-DEL?



*Oh, and if you think I remembered the first and last presentations best just because of that primacy and recency effect, you're probably right, but don't ruin this for me.

the 1/2/3 rule of powerpoint

With all this talk about YC presentations, the timing seemed right for me to unveil my new PowerPoint™ rule. Guy Kawasaki evangelized his 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint to great acclaim, I figured the same could work for me and my 1/2/3 Rule.

I've given this style of presentation quite a few times over the last year since I became slightly less insignificant. The trial run was at Startup School Stanford (here's the ppt); afterward, I got some encouraging feedback and a few invitations to do the schtick again. The idea was really just an extension of a BarCamp presentation we -- err, Pierre Francois and Ian Gilbert -- did last year. This was of course a blatant rip-off of Stephen Colbert's The Word, the 2.0 version.

I don't suffer from anything particularly bad (maybe the occasional allergies) and I rarely see pitches -- so I haven't got any form of Kawasaki's "Ménière’s of the VC community" -- but I really like pictures. This is aims to be a model for a more entertaining (I didn't say informative) style of presentation.

It's very simple really. A 1/2/3 presentation should have 1 focal point on each slide, each slide shouldn't take more than 2 seconds to comprehend, and the majority of the slides should be images from one of 3 categories: ironic pictures, funny photos, or cute animals (always a crowd-pleaser).*

This style of PowerPoint presentation requires a fuckload™ of slides, but they should almost all be pictures that you can advance through rather quickly. If it's gotta be text, it should be for an emoticon -- or maybe five words tops.

Our attention spans have evidently gotten even shorter since Kawasaki's decree.

Granted, getting the timing right on this takes some practice, but I think you'll find it to be well worth it. Hint: the "preview next slide" functionality in most presentation modes is a great cheat as long as you can furtively peek at it.

If you're still reading this, I'm sorry. But your curiosity has at least gotten you this far, so let me give you an idea of what I'm talking about. Here's a reenactment:

(Imagine a captivated audience and me standing behind a podium, broad-shouldered and visionary.)

"When Steve and I started reddit, we were just trying to build a site that wasn't annoying -- " (click)



"-- or tacky and trendy --" (click)



"-- Above all, we wanted reddit to be simple." (click) "Dead simple."


(Too easy, I know, but I couldn't help myself.)

Throw in a couple jokes about Java and you're golden. I've pretty much recycled this same presentation about five times now, adding and removing various slides depending on the audience, so please feel free to gank.

Even if you can only squeeze a couple LOLCATs into your next quarterly earnings presentation, I think you'll be quite pleased with the results.





*One of these days, I'm doing an all-LOLCAT presentation.