jaunted: Nothing Cheery About LaGuardia This Morning — “What were we thinking? Some crazy fantasy of Christmas at home drove us to attempt to fly standby this morning, in order to duck both the forthcoming East Coast storm and the just-passing Midwest storm. While there’s still the remotest chance we might be able to get out before our 2 pm flight, it doesn’t look likely–meaning we’ll be spending 8 hours in the airport today.”
Corporate Presenter: How To Be Professional On TV — “Just found this clip on You Tube. The American tv presenter inadvertently uses a profanity but gets away with it. No apologies, no red-faced embarrassment, she was just being professional.”
The Webinar Blog: Turn Off Your Blackberry! — “Everything seems fine during the call. Then I go to edit the audio recording and balance volumes and I find that there is a faint beeping noise being picked up on the phone line. This is a remnant of the wireless signal being received and transmitted by the device. It can get picked up by electrical cables, transmitters, headsets, and other hardware involved in the audio circuitry of your call. It comes across like Morse Code bloops and bleeps.”
TradeshowStartup: Even $137,500 Can’t Guarantee Conference Internet — “Le Web, the annual Internet trade show and conference in Paris spent $137,500 (100,000 Euros) trying to get a stable connection for their speakers, attendees and press room without luck.”
360Conferences: Conference wireless DOES suck — “At the Red Lion in Seattle, we made it clear, “Whatever you think, you’re wrong. We’ll abuse your wifi.” As such, for what we paid, they really did their best. They brought in a tech from the vendor and had him stay the week to be on call. Guess what? Yup, he was called. In fact, he came down in the morning in his PJs to put more access points around the place.”
Globsyn Business School: The Top 12 Presentation Mistakes — Lots of great things to watch out for in this article. “Mistake #1: Overlooking ‘Murphy’ / If it can go wrong, it will go wrong. This mistake basically means that you walk into the room where you’re going to present and something is wrong. LeRoux tells a story about a multimillion-dollar sales presentation to which “Murphy” paid a visit—in the form of missing curtains and a boardroom window overlooking a huge pool surrounded by bikini-clad swimmers (you can guess what the attendees looked at instead of the presenter). / Remedy: Visit important presentation rooms at least a day in advance. If that’s not possible, have someone take pictures from different angles and email them to you.”
BizBash Florida: Quick Poll: What do you have to have with you during your event and why?
Bunker Complex: “This is what happens when I’m slated to present my paper last. I sit and stew over my 3 page summary handout for 2.5 hours until it’s time to bumble and mumble my way through another botched public speaking task. I’m making changes and scratching out sections for a quick and dirty drastic edit as everyone else’s topic seems so much more interesting than mine.”
Execupundit.com: The Unpersuasive — “Your first job is to avoid being unpersuasive. A major mistake is to let a passionate commitment to a particular point of view create an image of stridency.”
Jay Raskolnikov: Lessons from a Two Year Old — “I don’t care what you call it. If you want to communicate with me you better figure out what I call it.”
My Toastmasters Blog: Public Speaking Trap – Losing the Audience after your Killer Opening — “Losing the audience after giving a killer opening is something I see many speakers doing on a regular basis. Whether the speech is given at a convention, a business meeting or a Toastmasters club, it is very common for speakers to deliver a fabulous opening, and then get very, very boring extremely fast.”
managesmarter.com: Debilitating Demo Diseases — “Here is a compendium of debilitating demo diseases that commonly afflict sales, presales and marketing teams when preparing for and presenting demos.”
A few scanning tips: Say No to 72 dpi — “We still frequently hear the very bad advice: ‘Computer video screens show images at 72 dpi, so scan all your images for the screen at 72 dpi’. This is incredibly wrong; it simply doesn’t work that way.”