Is it just me? One of my life pet peeves is setting aside time for and perhaps paying to attend a presentation on a topic of interest to me only to experience one or more of my top 7 presentation pet peeves:

* Oops, oh, sorry. We're having a little trouble with the technology. Bear with us and we'll start in a minute. [since I wrote this post, I have participated in another webinar run through another webinar provider. While this webinar was fraught with--indeed was more disrupted by technical issues--I was okay with it because the presenter and the facilitator were doing several things to ameliorate the glitches--they emailed a file of the presenter's Powerpoint presentation to the participants and they sought feedback from participants about our experiences. They talked about how they had practiced with the technology and what had happened, and they carried on with the content, which was not tied to the content of the slides in the way the presentation that triggered this reflection had been--the presenter had more to say than was printed on the slides.]

* Does everyone see the first slide? Esteemed presenter: "I don't see my first slide. Does everyone else see my first slide?" (as an audience member, I see a slide, but I have no idea whether it is the *first slide*)

* "Sorry my slides are loading a little slow [sic] today." This is especially galling when the bullets on each slide require a new build for each bullet. Couldn't esteemed presenter have minimized the build/new slide problem by having all the bullets on the slide appear when the slide loads--only once for each slide?

* Esteemed presenter rolls out a canned presentation; he or she has apparently made no effort to customize/tailor the presentation to meet the needs and/or expectations of the specific audience at hand.

* The slides are busy--each slide has at least 2 fonts, at least one cartoon (e.g, clip art), the esteemed presenter's visual identity (e.g., corporate logo in the lower-left-hand side of each slide), and/or chunks of text that are more than two lines long.

* Esteemed presenter READS the text on each slide, which is compounded when . . .

* . . . esteemed presenter REPEATS what is on the slide without adding more content (e.g., examples, elaborations, references).

These final two examples are, in my book, violations of presentation 101 principles and have the immediate rhetorical effect of diminishing not only my pleasure in experiencing the presentation but also my perception of the presenter's ethos and the quality of the content.

I find my blood pressure rising and my teeth grating when esteemed presenter has been billed as a particularly skilled presenter (e.g., the presenter presents on how to present), but, in my opinion, doesn't exemplify best practices.

So what do I want to discuss?
1. As a presenter, what do you practice?

2. How do you experience some of my presentation pet peeves (i.e., am I being too harsh an audience member? are my expectations out of line with the expectations of others?)?

3. What are your expectations for presentations such as those we are bringing to our meetings?

Chris

I agree that some of the Webinars I've attended lately have been second-rate. Unfortunately, I can't think of a way to screen the quality of the presentation ahead of time, unless one of the board has heard them before and shares an opinion before we book them.

Dalton Hooper is presenting on presenting at our next meeting, so hopefully we'll get some great tips for our own presentations!