iOS AND ANDROID
Topics:
Choose a tag
You’ll quickly learn that if you use background images in powerpoint, when you go to print to PDF, the background image gets a white border around it. It took me a while to figure out how to get the PPTX to properly display the background, so I thought I’d share it.
Step 1: Your preview will look like this:
Step 2: Go into the PDF printer properties and set the “Adobe PDF Page Size” to “Slide 7.5 x 10″ as shown here:
Step 3: Your preview will now look correct as such:
New tool / toy Prezi for presentations..enjoy…Put it on autoplay and sit back…
SMI provides social media intelligence, insight and news for business executives. Case studies, opinion and best practice research. This is a great little presentation on social media blunders in the past few years.
It’s been a few years now that Apple Keynote has taken over as my presentation software of choice. Now the bar is being raised where it might also be my wireframing tool of choice.
Enter Keynotopia a place where you can buy very affordable Keynote templates (or stencils in OmniGraffle) for wireframing an array of apps and devices.
Since Keynote is a presentation tool you can create links to other pages of the document.
This will be tested the next time we do wireframes!
Also check out this post by Amir Khella the founder, where he talks about how he launched Keynotopia.
I just read this funny, but relevant article on PresentationZen where presentation tips are learned from Star Wars IV.
It got me thinking of my 3 step process to draft presentations.
#1 Start by understanding your objective. What single thought do you want your audience to walk away with? What action do you want them to take?
#2 What are the key messages. What are the key points you have to make in order to make your objective?
#3 What facts support your key messages? Why should people believe your key messages?
#4 (Bonus) Do NOT open PowerPoint. Start with the best drafting tools ever made: pencil and paper. Sketch your slides and use the many tips of presentation zen.
James Chudley of Smashing Magazine posted a great article on How to Use Photos to Sell More Online. Its a lengthy article with great photo examples. The article was written for products, but I believe these can be put to use no matter what you are doing online. Most importantly, we don’t want to put up a photo just to put up a photo… make it do something for you like:
|
|
We curate quite a few websites where we manage the use of photography. We work hard not to “slap on a photo”, but make it have some meaning and usefulness in the grand scheme of the website. Read the full article.
Ben Fullerton-Designing for Solitude from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.
BTW – We agree
Peter Shankman, the founder of Help a Reporter Out (HARO) and The Geek Factory, gave the people at the NJ Business Marketing Association a great talk on how he thinks about and uses social media to make his businesses successful. Thank you Peter, thank you BMA and thank you fellow Lwer Derrick, Christine, and David for attending with me.
Here’s what I took away from the talk
Grow your personal brand
Peter was big on the individual. Businesses don’t do business with people. People do business with people. Your business is a reflection of the people that run it. He wants everyone to develop their personal brand through social concepts like texting (twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc.), phone calling, and (yes) snail mailing notes. A quick side note on snail mailing notes. Last month we were hiring for project managers the people who are standing out in my head are the ones to followed up with a personal hand written note. Its all about doing something different to capture the minds of people. So go forth and start building your personal brand, its going to define you in the future.
Plan for backup??!!?
Peter made a great point stating that he was always told to “have a backup plan”. Why? Why not concentrate on a the plan for success? It’s better than concentrating on the plan for failure. My take is that when you have to plan for failure, what you are planning is costly thus increasing its risk. In Peter’s world (and ours) big things evolve from small things. Start small, start fast, and start now.
Information is free
The world as we knew it was broadcasted to us from only a few sources. Print, radio, and television were all broadcasted from a few to many. The internet is making information free and creating a many to many relationship. Breaking news doesn’t come from CNN anymore, it comes from twitter. In this world we are creating views of the world at the exact moment it happens and sharing that view with people all over the world.
Ask your customers, how they want to get information
There is so much information out there and so many ways to take it in. We listen to podcasts on the commute into work, we read blogs with the morning coffee, we check facebook status when we come home and sit down. We have developed routines of digesting information. So how do you get your information to your customers? Ask them. Talk to your customers often and ask them how they would like to get your information.
Peter says the Social Media is having other people do public relations for you. Here are is 4 fours of social media:
Again thank you Peter for the great talk.
Google Chrome OS is an open source operating system for people who spend most of their time on the web. The concept of thin clients are really starting to take shape in this operating system. In the video below they describe how all data will be stored in a cloud.
The experience of Chrome is built around the core tenets of speed, simplicity and security. This is a demo video to give you a feel for the Google Chrome OS user experience.
Here’s is a more high-level and entertaining overview and introduction to the Chrome OS.
Yesterday, I attended an event by the New Jersey Communications Advertising and Marketing Association (NJCAMA). Met some good people and heard some great things. The guest speaker for the evening was Geno Church from Brains on Fire. Geno gave a great presentation on word of mouth marketing (WOMM) and movement building where he took us through a few case studies with Best Buy and Fiskar (yes, the orange handle scissor people).
Here are a few notable quotables that stuck with me and my notes.
Everything is crap… Unless you have a strategy behind it
Social media is not WOMM
People trust people
Tactics bog us down
“No! If you build it we won’t come”
90% of WOMM occurs offline
Why should people be motivated to participate and share? Why people tell stories
Geno captured everything quite eloquently when he says that we should create movements not campaigns. Then he went on to explain lessons learned about movements
