Effective Presentations, Radio Interview
The lively hosts of LifeTips at Odeon.com, Bryon White and Amanda Smith, interviewed me last week, February 26. As often happens in radio interviews, the conversation ranged over a number of topics. We stuck mostly to the area I’m most familiar with — presentations by leaders and by technical experts.
Bryon raised a question about something that was new to me: word cloud. It is, according to Wikipedia, “a visual depiction of user-generated tags, or simply the word content of a site, used typically to describe the content of web sites.” The words that are used most frequently are represented in larger or more colorful fonts. Byron was interested in how you could use a word cloud to analyze a presentation. You could, say, enter the text for your speech — if it’s written — into a program and create a word cloud. The word cloud would, in turn, show you the words you use most frequently.
How often you use a word is important. (Repetition reinforces your message.) And you might be surprised by the words you use most frequently. But I’m more concerned with the type of words you use — with their clarity, concreteness, and power to evoke a response in people’s imaginations and emotions.
I went to Wordle where in about two minutes flat I created the word cloud you see here. It’s fun. Give it a try.
Have a listen to the interview and let me know what you think. (If it’s taking too long for the interview to begin, you can go directly to the site and listen there.)
Tags: effective presentations, radio interview, Real Leaders Don't Do PowerPoint