All the best B2B tech marketers are mini-publishing houses — they never stop cranking out thought-provoking content on the issues their target market cares most about.  White papers, blog posts, webinars, videos, eBooks…

But even the best thought leaders often follow a simplistic content promotion strategy that completely ignores the idea of a sales cycle.  Basically, they pump out some new content, promote it, and repeat.

The results is an over-emphasis on the recent instead of the relevant.

Most companies have a few pieces of core content that were usually produced early on — the ones that summarise the whole story in one place.  Or the ideal introduction to the market/app/technology/issue.

These powerful pieces often get buried under layers of new content — but the new material may not be the best starting point for every prospect.  Over time, a company’s content tends to get more and more specific.  You cover the broad landscape, then zoom in on issues.  But new prospects that know nothing about you would be much better off starting with the earlier ‘landscape’ pieces.

We like to get our clients thinking about the sales cycle and what content is right for each stage in it.  A first-time web visitor should be led to the big-picture pieces. Subsequent web visits or emails  could help them progress further, ideally based on insight into who they are (job title, industry) and what they’re doing — what pages they visit, what papers they read, what links they click on in an email.

We’re starting to work with a powerful tool that does automated lead nurturing based on demographic and behavioural scoring.  This makes it easy to target the right content at the right prospects as they progress through the sales pipeline.

As a result, clients can serve up  the most relevant content to each prospect, instead of just the most recent.

We know we ‘big up’ Pär Almqvist, the Marketing Dude at VNL, quite a bit. But we thought you’d like to see what we consider a really, really good eNewsletter that Pär briefed in and designed (we wrote it for him).

The newsletter does a lot right:

• It’s clear, colourful and inviting – three colour-coded sections; design in the service of content
• It’s about the reader’s concerns not just the company’s –only one short bit is about VNL at all — and they’ve earned the right to smuggle that in
• It’s packed with content – incuding recent industry news items (pre-digested) and links to two videos and two white papers.
• It starts with a nice, personal note from the CEO – giving it a human face
• It’s as long as your arm – nothing wrong with scrolling if there’s a lot to say — and it’s better than reducing the content to a series of cryptic lines.
• It’s a link-fest – driving people to the VNL website; with proper analytics to track the click-throughs

We even like the way the housekeeping is handled at the bottom:

Newsletters are an important string to the B2B marketing bow.  We could all do worse than following this one.

Apple got a lot of attention with its “PC vs Mac” commericals.  They were simple, funny, well-scripted and seemed to capture the essence of what Mac people love about their Macs.

Clearly, they got under Microsoft’s skin, because the crack Seattle Rapid Response team has leapt into action (what, three years later?) with an expensive riposte: the “I’m a PC” campaign.

The result is wrong in so many ways, I can’t summarise them all in a blog post.  Hitting the lowlights:

• It’s needlessly defensive – Microsoft owns the PC market.  Why the hell are they stooping down to swat at a niche player? Real leaders should never look back, down or to the side.  They only look ahead.

• It’s over-produced – This one spot cost more than fifteen of the Mac commercials. Which kind of proves Apple’s point. Guerrilla marketing will always be cooler than Madison Avenue marketing (or wherever Big Agency lives these days).

• It backfires – Microsoft is not content with market share, mega-profits and virtual ubiquity.  It desperately craves the one thing it can’t have: coolness.  So instead of letting go of cool (the only cool thing to do), they concoct this shrill howl. It isn’t just not cool.  It’s watching your Dad dance.

• It proves the opposition’s case – They want to say, “We’re creative and interesting too!”.  But by assembling this cast of PC-people (in both senses), Microsoft sends the message, ‘We are everyperson.’ And everyone is no one. Bland. Boring. Even though some have beards and some scuba dive and some don’t even comb their hair.

The whole exercise reminds me of an embarrassing bit of greenwashing that Ford did a few years ago.  The CEO barked, “Make us look green!” and the hapless marketing department was caught without a plan.  They cranked out a glossy insert packed with every mini-credential they could muster. One was, “The roof on this factory is covered in grass!” (neglecting to mention that the factory belched out 200,000 F150 trucks at about 18 miles per gallon each).  Another said, “our design team has four vegetarians.” (I’m not joking).

I’m sure Microsofties are enjoying their foray into “I know you are but what am I?” marketing.  Turning the other cheek can be excruciating when you know you could kill your enemy with one blow.  But internal morale-boosting and good marketing are two very different things.  And Microsoft now looks like the kid who discovered bell-bottoms about three parties after they went out of fashion.  Blush.

A friend of ours who also happens to be a God of Branding just sent us an article he wrote ten years ago but could have been written yesterday.  He’s Axel Chaldecott, co-founder of HHCL, now the top creative on the global HSBC account at JWT.

The article is called Corporate Branding is Dead and its central metaphor is… well I’ll let Axel say it:

 ”Most CEOs don’t recognise that the way their company is visually represented is in fact the company’s body language.”

Any presentation coach will tell you that your body language speaks louder than your words.  But for most B2B companies, the visual side of their communications is the last thing they think about (if they think about it at all).

As a result, the typical B2B brand slumps into the room, mumbles under its breath, looks down at the floor, picks its nose and scratches its genitalia.

No self-respecting company would hire a salesperson who gave this kind of impression, but thousands are happy to have logos, websites, brochures, data sheets and business cards that do.

Design and visual communication is moving up the agenda at Velocity as we see the value it brings to our clients — especially in an increasingly digital landscape.  As we help our clients present themselves to the world, it would be remiss not to work on the body language, too.

Marketing is communication.

B2B marketing is bad communication.

That’s how your audience thinks about everything you put out.

Their expectations couldn’t be lower.

They’ve waded through thousands of case studies and brochures and web pages from people just like you and IT’S NOT FUN.

Wouldn’t it be nice to surprise them once in a while?

To actually have fun in producing something so people will enjoy reading it?

To take a deep breath (or a deep draught), let your B2B inhibitions slide away and just talk?

Your prospects are begging you: “Do anything you like but please stop BORING me.”

Re-think that email. Pulp that brochure. Reject that ad idea. Aim higher.

Despite living in a ‘creative’ world, most agencies are pretty linear.  They take the brief, then they do the creative.

Velocity is a bit different.  When we do consulting engagements – helping companies clarify and communicate their positioning and key messages – we do creative as part of the engagement, before any specific brief is on the table.  Lots and lots of rough concepts — headlines, images, copy, straplines…

What we’re doing is exploring a wide range of attitudes (statesman-like, aggressive, cheeky, outrageous) and many different ‘ways in’ to the story.  There are thousands of ways to start any given story and the creative shows us which ones make the reader want to know more.  These tend to end up somewhere near the home page of the eventual website build.

The rough concepts often look like badly-designed ads, not because we’re recommending print advertising (it’s amazing how little we do these days) but because the one-page ad is the ‘elevator pitch’ of the marketing discipline.  If we can get a compelling story down in a few paragraphs, a headline and a photo, we know we’re on to something.  They’re badly designed because they’re not designed at all — they’re simply thrown together in Adobe InDesign (the marker pad de nos jours).

At first, we did this because  it’s fun and we knew it would make an impact, taking the abstract ideas from our recommendations and making them come to life.  Covering a conference table with short, sharp, confident ideas invariably gets people all fired up (we love that).

To justify this part of the engagement, we started saying that it ‘informed the strategy’; that the proto-creative work gave us a valuable steer about the positioning and messages we were recommending.

Then, after a few of these engagements, we realised that our cover story was actually 100% true.  The creative work ALWAYS changes the strategy and the recommendations.  It really is a great way to road test our ideas.  If a positioning idea that we’re recommending just doesn’t have an edge on the page, there’s usually a good reason.  Maybe it’s just not very credible or it isn’t as distinctive and differentiated as we’d thought.

Sometimes the perfect way of crystallizing a complex story just pops out of an unpromising stab in the dark. Which sends us scurrying back to the presentation decks for some intense post-rationalisation.

We know of no other agency that does this creative play so early in the consulting process. Most don’t do it at all.  But it’s become an invaluable part of our process that we forego only under supernatural duress (pretty much never).

A few of our clients have given us permission to share these ‘idea harvests’ with other (non-competitive) companies. So if you’d like to take a look, feel free to give us a call.

It’s funny, but oftentimes we marketers are our own worst enemy when it comes to marketing ‘ideas’.  In my time I’ve had the pleasure of conceiving some truly dreadful press briefings and writing some deadly dull ‘opinion’ pieces in the name of trying to grab people’s attention.

The fault usually lies in believing our own hype:  in assuming that the things that get us all lathered up are the same things that get customers, web searchers and reporters excited too.  More often than not this is simply not the case.  The fact that your widget has successfully passed a beta test phase for version 11.5.2 is probably of interest to only five people in this world - and four of them are likely to be sat in the same cubicle as you.

And even if you do know you’re on to a hot thing, how often are we wise enough to factor market forces into the planning process?  We might be selling very hot cakes indeed, but if everyone else is too then it’ll be extremely hard to make ourselves seen and heard.

In practice, it takes a great mind to fathom this stuff.  The skills for getting it right aren’t really marketing skills per se, they’re more about being a good salesperson.

The trick is to get inside the heads of the people you’re trying to reach, and to understand the competition for their mindshare… and only then to figure out what it is that you’re going to write or produce and how you’re going to distribute it.

Good salespeople do this all the time.  They have a keen appreciation of things like ‘pitch angles’, ‘buying cycles’, ‘competitors’ and ‘budgets’ (or someone’s ability to cough up cash)…. all of which requires a great handle on the pulse of the marketplace.  Conversely in marketing, when it comes to generating new ideas for content, we’re more likely to organise a 30 minute brainstorm meeting, then neck a Diet Coke (or three) and start hammering away at the keyboard.

This approach is not good.  It can result in a bunch of boring, irrelevant deliverables or things that are destined never to be heard amongst a sea of white noise (and sometimes both!).  Worst of all, doing things this way nearly always represents a gamble in terms of time, money and resources - since we have no idea if there will ever be a realistic market out there for our new-fangled stuff.

The salesperson’s trick is to know the pitch thoroughly and to have researched the market well enough to know whether she will be wasting her time - before setting off.   Now whilst it isn’t always possible for us marketers to do an in-depth analysis of our customers - reporters, web site visitors, etc - there are some great new tools that we can use to make our work more scientific.

Over the summer months Google released a stack  of (FREE!) new search marketing research tools to help us understand what the web is interested in.  Their Keyword Suggest tool is primarily designed to help people make better decisions about keywords for Google Adwords (Pay Per Click / PPC) campaigns, but it’s also an very valuable app for researching the popularity of our content offers and the language that we use to describe them, as well as understanding our competition.

For example, I’m thinking of creating a new white paper on ‘mobile marketing’ to help me go and sell to mobile marketing-type people.  What Google Suggest tells me is that there’s a healthy number of people searching for this term - approximately 31,000 per month right now.  But if I run a normal Google search on the phrase I also find that I’m up against approximately 33 million other web pages who are also interested in marketing ideas, products or services in the same area.

Alternatively, a bit of research on the phrase ‘mobile promotions’ gives me 1,600 searchers per month and just over 1 million competing web pages; and ‘mcommerce’ gives me an audience of around 900 per month and only a million or so competing pages.

Now assuming that my budget is limited, I have some valuable new information to play with.  I know that it’s going to be far more cost-effective to create content offers around ideas and phrases such as ‘mcommerce’ than ‘mobile marketing’: and, whilst the general thread of my piece may not be radically different from what I’d originally planned, if I optimise the content around these new ideas I stand a far higher chance of engaging with people through search (because my corresponding web page will be fighting it out for the top spots on Google with only one million other pages, as opposed to 33 million.)

In addition, I might just find I have a bunch of new angles to play with.  Let’s say I decide that ‘mcommerce’ is a different kettle of fish to plain old ‘mobile marketing’ - as mcommerce speaks to buying and selling over a phone, whilst ‘marketing’ may be more about finding and influencing people.  Hey presto!  Another rich - and marketable - seam of content ideas is opened up.  Further, this angle might just ring a few new and meaningful bells for the piece, as it’s the importance of the transactional capabilities of the mobile web that my sales guys have been banging on about for the past six months……

With Google to play with there’s really no excuse for inventing our content plays in a vacuum.  Pulling useful research data from the interweb has never been easier, and it ought to make our work more effective.  So buff your pitch up.  A 30 second stint of research might make your content efforts go a whole lot further than you thought….

A great website. Lots of white papers and thought leadership content. Case studies and customer testimonials. Great campaigns and creative. Awards, editorial coverage and analyst attention. They’re all important to every B2B marketer.

But there’s a factor that cuts across all of these and is probably more important than any of them: confidence.

Confidence is the attitude of leaders and winners. Great marketing always has plenty of it and the vast majority of mediocre marketing has little or none.

Used recklessly, confidence turns to arrogance and alienates your audience. But used well, confidence works wonders for any piece of marketing communications you apply it to:

• It gets noticed – jumping out from the background noise.

• It demonstrates your leadership instead of just claiming it.

• It differentiates you from your lacklustre competitors.

• It exposes your passion and your belief in what you do.

• It says you’re having fun – people like that.

• It is fun – turning marketing from a chore into a sport.

• It motivates the company – making people proud to work there.

Confidence really is the secret weapon of B2B marketing (for B2C, it’s not a secret). Even companies locked in commodity markets can leap out of the pack with a little attitude and energy.

As an agency, our best work is our most confident work. It happens when we dare to present something to a client that we know is likely to be rejected. It happens when a client recognises that the option that makes them sweat is probably the one to choose.

Confidence has to come from something real or it transmits false bravado. It has to be rooted in conviction. When we do our consulting process for new clients, we’re always looking for the pockets of passion inside the company. The people having the most fun. The people who believe in what they’re doing and aren’t afraid to tell people why it’s great.

We call these the ‘crown jewels’ of any company and our work is all about discovering them and pushing them to the front of the story… with oodles of confidence.

Don’t know about you, but it’s Friday evening and we’re offski. Peroni awaits. We’re celebrating the launch of a brand new web site for Kennet.

This is our latest and greatest project on Wordpress. Those super smart investment guys at Kennet - whose funds assist great tech firms such as Clearswift (also a Velocity client), Kapow and Daptiv - asked us earlier this year to help them revamp their corporate positioning and give their web site a lick of paint.

Well, here she is: a totally new web presence for a totally different technology Venture Capital fund. We like to think we nailed this one - in fact we’re super proud. Although it’s a small site, it’s deeply layered with some luscious design and content touches that set it apart from the competition as a thinking man’s investment firm.

In fact, we can vouch for this first hand. We’ve worked real close with Kennet’s senior team over the past few months to get it off the ground. So, big thanks to Max Bleyleben (check his blog on the European VC scene here) and the crew for being so clued up and game for trying something a little different.

Credits:

Strategy, words, direction and project management: Velocity
Design: Tourist
Development and implementation: Two Thirty

Warm glows all round.

…check out mobiThinking.com, which was launched today to help the world’s marketing community to better understand the opportunities and challenges presented by mobile marketing. (Note: it’s web marketing Jim, but not as you know it.)

We’re so proud about this one that we’ve issued a hard-hitting press release that explains what it’s all about in full.

The short story: it’s the first part of a new Velocity campaign for dotMobi, which is designed to help make “.mobi” the domain of choice for all mobile web sites.

It’s a great brief, working with a really great organisation. Watch this space…

Project credits: design and content - Velocity; development and implementation - dotMobi.

The latest edition of our semi-regular newsletter update is now available. It’s packed with goodness inside, including our star new white pager, Marketing, Meet Sales, which offers eleven ways to make your marketing activity really drive new sales.

Other highlights include new papers on how to make your web site ultra-usable and how to make your PPC campaigns sing. Plus a roundup of our latest blogs and information on a hot new web marketing service we’re offering called ‘web motion.’

Go get it now!

We’ve been working on a number of ‘web engagement’ programs lately, where we’ve been helping clients to increase their web ‘footprint’ in order to improve their general SEO and awareness levels.

Now I’ve blogged and blabbed about this before, so I won’t go into the thinking - but if you’d like to get a sense of why social media and web engagement is so important then check out some recent posts such as ‘Your First (Free) Baby Steps in B2B Web Marketing,’ ‘Pico Branding‘ and our ‘web marketing trends for 2008‘.

This post, however, is all about the mechanics and how to do it.

In truth, it’s not hard. All you need is the following:

1. A dedication to publishing a regular stream of gold top content to your site (note: it needs to be good and valuable to the folks you’ll reach out to in #2)
2. A variety of web outlets in which to cost-effectively publish this stuff (note: per above, the idea here is not to abuse these places but to selectively publish your best stuff on them ….think sensibly about this as many of them are happy to ban content ’spammers’)

For help with #1, call us.

For #2, the mind map below gives you everything you need to do web / social media engagement by yourself. It’s easy. Just pin it on your wall and - once you’ve published a great piece of content to your site - follow the map clockwise and post it to the relevant destinations.

Let us know your thoughts (and results).

Note: your key to success here is to BE SOCIAL. Don’t just use these ‘outlets’ as a window for your own content. When you see other pages that you like, Stumbleupon/Digg/Reddit them - because this is their inherent value ….they exist to raise awareness of good, valuable web content. So, consider it your duty to promote everything that you really like, and not just the stuff you grow at home.

Here’s an experment for you to try.

Open your web stats app and check out which pieces of content are your top performers over the past month. (By top performers, I mean on key ‘attention measurements’ such as time on page - these are the things that tell you if people are really interested and engaged.)

What comes out top?

If you have a blog, or if you’re in the habit of publishing white papers or opinion pieces then my money’s on them. Am I right?

Here’s my hypothesis: for B2B web sites, the content that really matters in terms of positioning and prospecting isn’t your ‘markitecture’ pages - your product and services descriptions, corporate histories and such…. it’s your ‘thought leadership’ pages - the places where you express opinions and ideas rather than features and benefits.

More to the point, having done detailed analyses of a mass of B2B technology web sites, I can tell you that this rule holds firm for our entire industry, without exception (and, I’d hazard a guess, it does so in any information-hungry B2B market).

To give you a feel for it, here’s our top content stats for the year to date… (Note: we measure our content performance by establishing an ‘Attention Index’ - average time on page x number of page views…. and we only include those pages that have held people’s attention for more than two minutes.)

(Click to open!)

You’ll see that the most engaging pages are a bunch of white papers and blog posts.

Putting the blog aside for a moment, this is interesting because unlike most of the B2B technology industry, we make a point of giving our most interesting content away for free. Most firms take a strategic decision to lock prime content such as white papers away below a subscription line, and often within secure ‘walled gardens’ that render it almost completely inaccessible to all but the most motivated of site visitors.

The consequences are obvious. If you lock your most valuable, compelling content away beneath a subscription line, then you’re missing a proven opportunity to help your prospects select you.

The rationale for ‘content locking’ is straight forward. You hold out the promise of access to an interesting piece of content in exchange for a visitor’s personal information - usually a name and an email address. This is the concept on which ‘web-to-lead’ forms are built to support the growth of CRM ‘lead’ databases.

I think this approach is fundamentally flawed, and also detrimental to driving quality sales leads.

Why? Because if you lock your content below a subscription line, it’s not just sales prospects that you’re hiding from: you’re also hiding from Google.

Put simply, if your content is sat behind a firewall, then Google’s spiders can’t reach it. This means a big loss of SEO traction, since your ‘thought leader’ content is likely to be your most valuable in SEO terms - it’s going to be stuffed with all the key phrases and concepts that you want search engines to associate your site with. Also, if it’s sat beneath the subscription line then you’re discouraging other sites from linking to it - which is illogical from an SEO point of view (good SEO practice means helping sites to link to you).

Furthermore, what of the people that you lose along the way? To me, a commitment to form-filling is no great measurement of the quality of a sales lead. A far better tactic is to set your thought leadership content free and give people more ‘opportunities to engage‘ with who you are and what you stand for. In this way (and this is the flip side of ‘web-to-lead’ thinking) you give yourself more opportunities to convince the skeptics - the people who until this point believe in your competitors not you, or those who have chanced upon your site during some desk research. Let’s face it, most of us are commitment-phobes when it comes to the web anyway. Why not just accept this fact and move on?

Instead, we ought to be finding better, more intelligent and subtle ways of establishing leads. There are better deals to offer our prospects than ‘give me your names and I’ll give you some content’…. deals that don’t carry an SEO penalty. We can divide our content in different ways, and base a ‘lead generating’ offer on a really big ticket content item, after we’ve provided people with the opportunity to see all our other great stuff. For example, an offer for a piece of industry research can be embedded in a free white paper. Isn’t this a better place to pop the question? Wouldn’t the quality of resulting leads be better?

Whatever - my point is that a bog standard web-to-lead form slapped on as a firewall to the content that people (and Google) really care about is clumsy and negligent.

Here’s some questions to ask yourself:

• What’s your most valuable and engaging content?
• Do you make you accessible enough?
• What’s the upside of providing more opportunities to engage with it?
• What’s the downside of removing a subscription line?
• How scientific is your answer to the previous question? (Gut feeling, conventional wisdom, or based on small side-show experiment and validated by stats?)

I’d encourage you to play around with these thoughts and, if you’re not a fully paid up member of the free content brigade, to tweak the presentation of some of your content and see what it gives you…

Intrepid Velocipedes Doug Kessler and Stuart Rothwell attended the first ever D&AD Pecha-Kucha night last night.  Nine creative supremos (mostly digital marketers), each delivering their first Pecha-Kucha presentation to a packed house of 400-ish trendy digirati.

For those who haven’t had the pleasure of a Pecha-Kucha night yet:

• It’s a fast, fun, freaky new medium from Tokyo
• Speakers get just 20 powerpoint slides, each on screen for 20-seconds
• So the whole thing lasts six minutes and 40 seconds
• It’s pronounced kind of like p’CHOK-cha and it means ‘chit-chat’ in Japanese

We went because we were curious about PKs (we call them 20/20s in-house) and have done one of our own to introduce Velocity to new prospects.  We’re also experimenting with doing some of these for clients, so they can boil their stories down to under 7 minutes (we do a lot of boiling down  at Velocity — hence the industrial extractor fan).

The potted review?  An entertaining and thought-provoking evening, though the thoughts provoked were mainly about the appropriateness, artificiality and advantages of Pecha-Kucha for the world of B2B.  It is certainly an artificial constraint, but a lot of good can come from constraints.

The evening wasn’t as diverse as expected, but given that it was essentially a parade of like-minded, hip, creative narcissists, we probably shouldn’t have expected diversity.

Watch this space… we’ll publish our next Pecha-Kucha soon.

Most B2B technology copywriting is so boring because its so neutral. The best copywriting looks the prospect squarely in the eye and says, “I’m going to sell to you and you’re going to enjoy it.”

Boring copy is all the same:

It uses the passive voice
“The interaction is further enabled by automated screen-scrape optimization technology…”

It’s jargon-soaked
“…utilizing a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) that combines traditional Business Process Management (BPM) with Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) into a seamless, scalable Blah-De-Blah (BDB).

It’s abstract instead of concrete
“…enabling better processes through systematic automation of yadda-yadda-yadda.”

It’s all in the 3rd person
“The software helps financial services companies better manage their customer-facing…”

This last point is rarely talked about but is especially crippling. Pick up your last data sheet. Now go through it and change the third person phrasing into second person singular: the subject is “You” (the reader).

You’ll have to rewrite the copy to make it sound right. And once you do, you will have made it better. More engaging. More down to earth. More personal.

I’m not suggesting you only use the 2nd person. That would be weird. But try using it and see if it doesn’t help you focus on a specific reader or listener — and help them focus on your message.

Case in point: you’ve probably noticed that the first half of this post is written in the third person. The second half is written in the second person singular. And it’s just that extra notch more engaging. Don’t you think?

In literature, there are novels, short stories, poems and — the ultimate distillation of thought and emotion — haiku. Three lines. Seventeen syllables. In marketing, there are white papers, brochures, data sheets and… the pay-per-click ad. (more…)

What’s the point of Powerpoint?

A crutch to help you through an uncomfortable challenge (public speaking)?

A useful visual aid to convey stories?

A pain in the butt, killed to death, hackneyed, eyesore, head-f**k for boring people to death?

…Most votes are probably in the last camp, which is why we at Velocity are fascinated by attempts to cure the ills of Powerpoint….like Pecha Kucha - an approach to ppts that, as described by Wired, combines business meeting and poetry to transform corporate cliché into surprisingly compelling beat-the-clock performance art.

Powerpoint as performance art?  What’s the point?

Well, something needs to be done.  Too many 30 minute stand up sessions are drivel, fuelled by bullets and dodgy clip art.  Doug’s already writtern about PK here.  It’s a worthy pursuit.  Think about it.  You’re presenting at a conference / meeting / social thang.  You have a few minutes to take people on your journey - get buy in, that sort of thing.

Now, how you gonna do it?  More bullets!?

No way!!

Perhaps ppt is a necessary evil.  After all, ranting in front of an audience isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.

The key to being good at it is, however, in doing it differently.  So, if nothing else, make sure they remember just a bit of you.  Say or do something different - focus on the message that REALLY matters and do a great job of delivering it….. and just forget all the other conventional crap.

The other thought is how you put it all together.  Here’s a great post from the folks at 37signals (one of our fave development firms, the guys behind Basecamp).  Check it out - their advice is to ‘talk first, write second.’  It’s simple, but powerful.  Rather than focusing on the tool (the app, the bullets, the clip art), why not first think about what needs to be said…. then say it and write it all down later?  Bet your slide content would look a little different if you took this path.

Anyways, the best advice we can offer on the subject is a good old cliche:  less is more.  20 seconds a slide and a spot of Pecha Kucha is a good discipline.

We’re actively doing this for our clients now.  So talk to us if you’d like some help with that troublesome Corporate or Sales presentation.

To celebrate the launch of a whole new Velocity, Doug (our Creative Director) has put pen to paper to get a bunch of important stuff off his chest… (more…)

We just got an email shot from Savvion, a company that does a good job in its marketing…
(more…)