Carmine Gallo had a quick interview with our World’s Best Presentation Contest winner Dan Roam. Dan is amazingly insightful in his answers so we wanted to publish it for the SlideShare community. Enjoy!

Q: What was the purpose of explaining health care with stick figures and napkins?

A: Like many people, I became concerned about the direction the health care debate had taken in this country. The anger, anxiety, and frustration we saw at the town halls told me that we lacked a common understanding of the issues actually on the table; nobody had drawn the health care “big picture” to explain what anyone was talking about. The result is chaos. I decided to draw that picture, and to draw it as simply as possible in order to establish a clear baseline for deeper discussions. I learned long ago that when helping executives clarify their ideas, nothing is more powerful than a simple hand-drawn sketch. The less polished, the better; the more “human”, the better. When introducing a new idea, people react much better to a work-in-progress than a polished presentation.

Q: This is hugely different than the vast majority of business presentations and I’m sure you don’t recommend that everyone copy this template. However, what is the common principle that applies to anyone’s presentation?

A: On the contrary, I DO recommend that everyone copy this approach. If we really want our audience to engage and understand, we must create presentations that invite our audiences in. Simple, hand-drawn pictures draw people in. Preaching to our audience through bullet points or overwhelming them with mounds of undifferentiated data does not. The standard PowerPoint approach actually closes down discussion. If we really want to make our message stand out, we have to make it look human.
What is the key takeaway/learning from Back of the Napkin?

Three quarters of the neurons in our brain that process incoming sensory information are focused on vision. While most people in business think they can’t draw (they can) or that they’re “not visual” (they are), we can all get infinitely better at discovering, developing, and sharing new ideas by taking advantage of our innate “visual thinking” system: our eyes, our minds-eye, and our ability to draw simple shapes.

Q: Dan, your presentation looks like it’s created in PowerPoint. So, PowerPoint is not evil? Your thoughts?

A: For good or for bad, PowerPoint has become the standard tool for communication. Because of its ubiquity and the ease with which PowerPoint makes lazy thinking look “professional”, it’s easy to malign PowerPoint as evil. But PowerPoint is just a tool. It’s a hammer. We don’t blame the hammer if the building falls down; we blame the builder. The same applies here. As a simple framework for telling a linear story, PowerPoint is fine. We get in trouble when we let all the unnecessary polishing tools in the menus do the our thinking for us.

Q: Finally, all the winners are highly visual. Does this represent the new trend in PowerPoint design?

A: Using visuals isn’t just a trend in PowerPoint design; using pictures to think, work, and share is the dominant business communication trend of our time, period. Which makes sense: in a globalized business world where we likely don’t speak the same first language as our colleagues and where we face problems of such complexity that they defy words, pictures are the answer.

The SlideShare Facebook app has lately been getting some love from business bloggers & commentators. Check these out :

BeAWealthyEntrepreneur.com in its write up How I Grew My Client Base with FaceBook says -
“…..slideshare is know as the largest community for sharing presentations. I upload my powerpoint, openoffice, Keynote or PDF files and view presentations shared by others. This is a great way to spread thought leadership and expertise through presentations you may have delivered locally.”

frenchcreekpress.com in its write up Five tips for a successful Facebook fan page says -
“Raid your archives: Content is king – so what to do if you don’t have any content to share? Don’t underestimate yourself. If you’ve got PowerPoint presentations, use slideshare.net and an RSS feed to leverage them on your FB page….” .

Then again, in a subsequent writeup, it says “….Well, this is a no brainer. Instead of using Involver’s Slides for Pages app, just use SlideShare’s own app to share your presentations on your page. Link your Facebook account with your SlideShare account and fans will see your latest presentations as well as those you’ve marked as a favorite. Don’t forget to add both a tab and a box to the page to make it easier for fans to find your presentations.”

Taragana.com in its blogpost Top 10 Facebook Apps for Business writes “…This is world’s largest community for sharing presentations where you can upload your PowerPoint, OpenOffice, PDF files or Keynote. Further you can view presentations by others. It’s provides a great way to share your presentations on your profile.”

Sitewire.net in Top 5 Apps For Your Facebook Profile has this to say “…The Slideshare app is the world’s largest community for sharing digital presentations. You can upload PowerPoint, OpenOffice or PDF files and view presentations shared by others. This is an awesome way to spread thought leadership and expertise through new or existing presentations.”

Big thanks to these folks. In case you haven’t added SlideShare to your Facebook profile, go here to do so.

This is a great visual presentation of the social media landscape. (please watch this is full screen mode) This comes from Banner, a London based agency.

HubSpotTV (from HubSpot- the leading Internet Marketing company) has a podcast interview with Marta Kagan. Marta is a long time SlideShare user and her presentation on Social media is a viral hit. She published the original presentation about a year back (it has a somewhat provocative title “What the … is Social Media?”) and this continues to evoke heated debate/comments besides lots of views, embeds, downloads etc. Two weeks back, Marta published its annual sequel titled “What the … is Social Media? One year later)… this presentation is flying as well.

Here is the video from the HubSpot blog

The discussion also focuses on using SlideShare as a marketing platform. Thanks HubSpot & Marta for this.

The Obama administration has made great strides in using the internet to connect with people. They have videos on YouTube, pictures on Flickr and now, documents & presentations on SlideShare.

Why are documents & presentations important? Because they are used to record and share much of the thinking and ideas in modern life. And they are used by Govt & Public Services as much as they are used by rest of us. Yet, they are locked up in proprietary formats like .doc, pdf, .ppt etc. Sharing is hard as the files are big (and clog up email inboxes). Most presentations & documents live on people’s hard drives. Sometimes people upload them to their websites but that’s still the exception, not the rule.

A lot of documents produced by the various arms of the Gov are meant to be shared with the public. Some of them are for communicating policy. You can read a New York Times article about Whitehouse’s Middle Class Taskforce / Green Jobs initiative, but its different when you can directly view and embed a document about the initiative.

At other times, documents are for getting a message out and making it a part of the conversation on the web. For example, Whitehouse uploaded the President’s speech in Cairo in 15 different languages (Arabic, French, Portugese, Chinese, Dari, Hindi, Hebrew, Persian, Russian, Malay, Turkish, Urdu, Pashto, Punjabi & Indonesian).

Or you can view a presentation about technology policy technology policy from Vivek Kundra, US Chief Information Officer (presentation embedded below).

Please join us in Welcoming President Barack Obama & his White House team to SlideShare.

For presentations lovers everywhere, we have one more contest for you! This time its about storytelling. We are partnering with Fuze Meeting (who have an awesome online meeting product) to bring you this contest.

A lot of you have already been posting stories to SlideShare. This is an opportunity to get that story inside you onto slides. Tell your story in words and pictures. Add audio or video if you want. Just keep it within 30 slides. Your story could be about anything you care about. Yes, we mean anything. Your travels, a story of a friendship. Or the story of your brand or your product. Make us care, make us think.

And what’s the prize for storytelling. The Grand Prize is $5000! Yes, that’s correct. Imagine what you could do with $5000. We have four other prizes for Best Design, Best StoryTelling Ability, Most Popular and Best Use Of Multimedia. Everyone gets to vote for their favorite entries. Judges will choose the winners from the top voted.

Like before we have assembled a star cast of judges: Tony Hseih, Om Malik, Don Tapscott, Pete Cashmore, and Ann Handley.

Rules are similar to previous contests. You have 3 weeks to enter your presentation to the contest (May 26th to June 15th). Voting will go on till June 22nd. And results will be declared on June 29th.

Thanks to Fuze Meeting who we worked with to dream up this contest and who kindly sponsored the prizes! It has been fun working with Brook and Patrick . Go check out Fuze Meeting.

As usual, we have a presentation about the contest (below). Please help us get the word out. Embed the presentation, share it with your friends. Help us reach every corner of the world where people create presentations.

Angela Connor is an online community strategist and she has written an excellent article about how you can build your own community using SlideShare. Here’s a quick summary of her community building tips:

1. Check to see who has “favorited” and/or “embedded” your slides.
2. Visit their profile and view their slides.
3. Send a personal message asking to connect.
4. Search keywords for your topics of interest. Once you do this, repeat steps 2 and 3.
5. Share your slides on LinkedIn and Facebook.
6. Post thoughtful comments and offer feedback on presentations.
7. Share presentations with others and be sure to let the creator of the slide know about it.
8. Embed slides (yours and others) in blogposts and on your website.
9. Consider sharing more than just slides.

Angela, thanks for the endorsement. We couldn’t agree more.

Next Saturday is PresentationCamp. Come by! (its at the SlideShare offices in San Francisco). Some of the sessions we already have going are:

• How to pitch to VCs (Dave McClure)
• Presentations for non-profits (Beth Kanter)
• What makes for popular presentations online (Rashmi Sinha)
• Integrating Twitter into presentations (Stowe Boyd)
• What is an online presentation? (Nat Robinson)
• Slide makeovers (Rick Altman)
• Compare organization/visuals/delivery for several modes (live, remote-synchronous, remote-unattended) (Nancy Frishberg)
• The Creation Myth – Branding Your Self or Your Organization (Terry Gault)
• Distributing presentations as video (Niall Kennedy)
• How To Turn OC Tendencies Into Excellent Presentations (Jim Meyer)

We are still looking for more sessions (especially smaller workshop / small group feedback type sessions). Please add your sessions to the wiki.

We are also looking for two more projectors. And if you are interested in sponsoring coffee / lunch, drop me a note.

We just released our last and final batch of tickets (go here to register)!