Murphy's Law states: "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong." This is especially true and especially painful when there is an audience involved.
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Subjective: The Artful Life: If I Turn This Off Now We Will Go Into Darkness — Snarky description of a presentation that went very wrong (in more ways than one). “Enter PSU IT guy (well, enter his speaking role anyway, as he’d been poking about at the podium for a few minutes at this point). Oh higher educated IT guy, explain to us simple art enthusiasts why things have gone so wrong: ‘Well, the old projector had this button you could push that fixed this problem and this new projector doesn’t have the same buttons.'”
 ©iStockphoto.com/hammondovi Life in the Corporate Theater: International Shows — “On Thursday I am headed for Prague, so I started pulling out supplies that I will need for working in Europe.” Great ideas for preparing to work overseas including several items you may never have thought of.
Craig Strachan: A lesson in being prepared — “Last night, I spoke at a function in Cape Town, and I was almost in big trouble.”
If you travel a lot, you might also want to check out One Bag: The Art and Science of Traveling Light.
Signal vs. Noise: Going in Unprepared — “This year I’ve spoken at about a dozen or so conferences and another dozen or so meetings or classes or gatherings. What I’ve started to notice is that I’m better unprepared.”
Blue Room technical forum: Macs, The pick of the current crop is…? — “After a day of trauma with several visiting speakers turning up with presentations prepared on Macs, and them only sort of working on PCs, I’m thinking that the best fix may be to get a Mac myself. Never having used one in anger for this sort of stuff, I thought I’d ask here as well as my friendly Geek forum.”
Great Public Speaking: Keystone Effect — “When a projector is not exactly on a level plain with a projection screen the projected image is not symmetrical.”
The Next Meeting: Making every second count at virtual meetings — “The key to achieving a successful virtual meeting is being prepared for both the expected and the unexpected. That means you must take your personal knowledge of your own virtual team and all the virtual office jobs concerned and use them to anticipate all the things that you might encounter when holding meetings.”
 ©iStockphoto.com/kozmoat98 Life in the Corporate Theater: Does anything work in Miami? –“So, beyond all the jackhammering that we are hearing through the walls during the meeting, the Internet connection that the hotel is providing is very sketchy.” Things get off to a rough start for Steve in Another day in Miami but seem to improve as the day goes on.
EffectiveMeetings.com: Presentation Disaster Preparation — Lots of great advice including “The Key to a Glitch-free Presentation: Arrive Early. I’ll never forget a major address I gave at a convention many years ago. The program was scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. The committee, good hosts that they were, insisted on taking me out for dinner. Naively, I went along. They promised to get me to the auditorium in plenty of time. Needless to say, we arrived just at the stroke of 8 and I was on. Never again! ”
oboeinsight: That’s The Night When The Lights Went Out In Georgia Sydney — “I’ve been at two performances when the lights have gone out. Once, with San Jose Symphony, Richard Stoltzman played —in the dark and by memory!— Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for Clarinet Solo, while my husband, who was stage manager at the time, quickly set up stand lights so we could continue the full concert. (I guess we had a generator that provided enough power for stand lights.)”
 ©iStockphoto.com/LeggNet Recognized Expert: Dealing with a Difficult Participant — “Three minutes into your talk someone takes a cell phone call and carries on a conversation as though they were in the room alone. They’re loud and disturbing. What do you do?”
Stagecraft Journal: ‘Da Rules: Meant for Stagehands and shop crews but there’s a lot here of interest to anyone working at any atge of the presentation process.
Speaking About Presenting: 5 strategies to defuse the audience — “Sometimes your audience needs defusing. You may know ahead of time that the audience is likely to be hostile to your ideas, or there may be a big issue looming over them which distracts them from listening to your presentation. Or they may simply not be that interested in listening to you.”
TJ Walker: What do I do if I make a mistake or forget what I am about to say? — “Let’s say you are in the middle of making a point and suddenly your brain freezes and you can’t remember what to say next. The average presenter will have a look of horror shoot across his face, turn bright red, grimace, apologize to the audience…” and If my allotted time is cut, what should I eliminate from my presentation? — Good advice with this fantastic close — “The foolproof presenter realizes there is never an ideal environment for speaking. There will always be distractions in the form of noise from next door, poor lighting, or noisy people in the back of the room. The foolproof presenter simply sizes up the opportunity given what is available in terms of time and resources and then makes the best of it—every time.”
The Accidental Communicator: 5 Ways To Deliver A Disastrous Presentation — “What me worry? Why bother to practice – you know this stuff inside and out, you’ll just go up there and wing it and the crowd will love you because it will seem more natural and less rehearsed than all the other presenters. Yeah right.”
Control Booth: Risk Assessment Sample — “here is an anonymised version of the latest risk assessment done by the theatre technicians.”
Indezine: PowerPoint Version Hell — “All these issues can be placed under a common umbrella that I’ll call Version Hell – and while it’s no fun being under this umbrella, life can be much more uncomplicated if you are aware of these problems, and ready to look at workarounds and best practices. You might have noticed that I never promised any solutions – that’s because very few of them exist – most of the time, you’ll have to look at workarounds for existing content, and plan with best practices for any new slides you create. As goes the famous saying: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
Fans Of Reality TV: Quick Fixes For Wardrobe Malfunctions.
Maniactive: Top 6 Touchy-Feely Presentation Rehearsal Tips — “2. Wear Your Shoes. Oh, they don’t call it “dress” rehearsal for nothing! Don’t rehearse in your pajamas — unless you intend to give your presentation in your jammies ! Instead, rehearse in the actual clothes you’ll be wearing during your presentation — right down to your shoes. You’ll be amazed at how much better your performance will be just by understanding how your entire body feels in full ‘costume and makeup.'”
 ©iStockphoto.com/DaydreamsGirl Work•Play•Experience: How not to close a presentation… (A true story) — “I experienced this live and in terrifying Stampede-o-rama last week, exactly as described above. As soon as the word “buffet” was out, jackets were being grabbed, chairs were scraping and conversation had started. What followed was not just drowned out, it was ignored by 100 lizard brains who could already smell the steaming flesh.”
Great Public Speaking: Check Local References — “On the international speaking tour I just returned from I could have made a serious flaw had I not checked out material with the locals after I got in the country. Apparently one country hates a certain kind of animal to the point where some natives actually try to run over the animal when driving on the road. A nearby country loves the same animal.”
Speak Schmeak: Another reason to avoid the lectern — “Did you see how high John McCain had to raise his arms for his gestures to be seen over the top of his lectern? He seemed uncomfortable having to use exaggerated arm movements (which were reenacted in the SNL skit the following night).” and Don’t go on a juice fast before a big appearance — “Don’t try anything new right before a presentation. It might throw you off, just a little.”
SpeakerSue Says: How to pick yourself up after you fall — “I was so bad, so awful, that I couldn’t make eye contact with anyone as I left the stage. (This wasn’t that big a deal really because no one was making eye contact with me either.) We all wanted me to exit the room as quickly as possible.”
The Humble Nailbanger: Life in the dark — “Never before, however, have I done what I did the other day, which was make it all the way to work and halfway through the day before realizing that I was wearing a button-down shirt inside out. The collar was up the way it should have been, but the buttons were on the inside, tags hanging out, the whole gigantic embarassing bit.”
The Charleston Gazette: Behind the curtain with stagehand Joey Ansel — “Stagecraft is taught in colleges, but Ansel says he learned his trade on the job. None of what he does, he says, is extremely complicated. ‘It’s a lot of little things.’ It’s important to be organized and able to remain calm. He says it helps to be open to change. Each show has its own set of concerns and issues. He can’t rely on everything working the way it’s always worked or even people behaving the way they did last time.”
Encore Design Group: Podium or Lectern? — “The word ‘podium’ is one of the most misused terms in the public assembly world. It is common to hear this word misused in church, government, auditoria, and schools. The proper use of terms is one way of separating the professionals from the rest.”
Blue Room technical forum: Wifi interfering with Radio mics, Strange goings on — “The strange problem we are having is that at some venues we seem to have a conflict between the radio mics and wifi, whilst at other venues there is none. When there is conflict, the signal stength on the Sure recievers is all over the place (normally rock solid in this size venue) and the signal drop out is very high, this occurs over all frequencies in the group. With all radio mic transmitters off, there is no sign of a signal being picked up from the wifi on the Sure recievers. Looking at the frequencies used by the mics and the wifi there should not be a conflict, but there most definately is at times.”
Speak Schmeak: What not to do at the end of a presentation — “We plan a lot for what to do before and during a presentation, but not much for what to do at the end — or what not to do.”
The Codebelay Blog: How Do You Avoid Presentation Disaster? — “But the code used for my presentation didn’t work because the machine it was working on wasn’t configured correctly. There might have been an issue with someone overwriting my code, too.”
Dave Paradi’s PowerPoint Blog: Presenting when you are not allowed to use a handout — “A participant in one of my workshops recently presented me with a new challenge. In his position as a sales professional, he has now encountered two large organizations who have stated that when he presents to them, he is forbidden from bringing handouts for the audience.”
Lynn Espinoza: When YOU should NOT be the spokesperson! — “You’ve been tapped to be the speaker at an industry event. There is a nagging feeling deep inside your gut that you are being set up for failure. The content for the speech is not your own, and in fact this is not your area of expertise. You feel like you’re over your head. Guess what? You are.”
Mary Hanna: A day for nitpickers — “The room was full of professional speakers, both beginning and accomplished. The presenter, a well-known marketing expert, was talking about achieving credibility as a speaker. A bullet on his PowerPoint slide, which I was following on the handout, said ‘Always site your sources.’ As I always do, I corrected the handout, crossing out ‘site’ and writing ‘cite.’ I turned to my friend and pointed it out. She acknowledged it with a nod. ‘It affects his credibility,’ I whispered.”
TJ Walker: Should I rehearse and for how long? — “Yes, you should rehearse. From a presentation coach’s perspective, the following 25 words are the dumbest phrase in the English language: ‘I don’t want to rehearse because I don’t want to seem canned. I want to seem spontaneous and fresh so I’ll be better winging it.’ Ugh!!!”
CNET News: ‘Google Moderator’ tool takes on lecture-hall chaos — “There was never enough time for all the questions, and it wasn’t clear that the best questions were the ones actually getting asked,” Heath wrote in a blog post. “And since many of these talks were led by offices outside of Mountain View, it became harder for distributed audiences to participate.”
blogcampaigning: Public Speaking Tips — The last one is best.
Brad Montgomery: What to do when your humor fails? — “When I coach others about how to be funny, I teach saver lines. Basically, these are jokes that you tell after a joke goes bad to “save†the situation. Johnny Carson was the king of savers. I just found this video….check out the master.”
KNOWHR: Writer’s Remorse — “Here’s what else I know: Those last-second edits rarely add anything to the quality of the communication.”
Great Speaking Coach: Avoid the Deadly Quotations Trap — “Why not? Because what could be a living, memorable moment when delivered by you with vocal variety and gestures becomes a flat, two-dimensional inert set of words.”
The Power of Reflection: Do You Make This Mistake When Ending Your Presentations? — “Gord’s terrible ending damages his career. He looks weak and indecisive. His presentation fails to generate any enthusiasm for his cause.”
news.com.au: Porn served up to government officials — “A senior civil servant is facing the sack after pornographic images flashed up as he delivered a powerpoint presentation to government officials in the Solomon Islands.”
Make Your Point with Pow’R: Screen Captures — “Never, ever, demo live websites during a presentation. You run the risk of at least the following, and possibly much more going wrong.”
 ©iStockphoto.com/zoomstudio Great Public Speaking: More on CD ROM Backups of your Program — “I did a speaking gig this week in Vegas and had to use my backup presentation on CDROM. Low and behold, when I opened the presentation it was barely readable!”
Fortify Your Oasis: Know Your Audience — “Have you ever been at a wedding where the best man told what he thought were hilarious stories about the groom – stories that fell completely flat with the majority of the audience?”
MostToast: Don’t Put Toastmasters On Your Resume — “They stopped him after thirty-four minutes; thirty-four minutes of false starts and dead ends. They stopped him after spending thirty-four minutes listening to something that wasn’t closely relevant to the position. Sam had blown the presentation.”
Life in the Corporate Theater: Sonoma — “Moral of the story? Don’t completely shut your sliding glass door on a hotel balcony. I can’t imagine what I would have done if I was on the 12th floor. Also, make sure you have clothes on. I never would have lived it down if I had to climb over to Allen’s balcony in my underwear!”
Corporate Presenter: French Farce — “TF1’s Laurence Ferrari runs into a bit of hot bother with Al Pacino & Robert de Niro earlier this week”
The World: 8 Timely Tips for Pre-Presentation Preparation By Patricia Fripp CSP, CPAE — “The big day has come. You are ready to deliver your presentation. To guarantee your success there are still a few final steps to take before you face your audience.”
The Software Pro: Choosing a Presentation Remote — “Rehearsing with your remote should be a built-in part of your presentation rehearsal to avoid distracting your audience and accomplishing the goal of communicating your message.”
The Grammarphobia Blog: Daised by podiumbrage — “God, I’m turning into a grump, but when it comes to politics and language, abuses get me downright dyspeptic. One common mistake has surfaced during the recent heady convention days. It’s the misuse of “podium†for “lectern.†I suppose I’m a lone voice crying in the wilderness on this one, but the podiumbrage has left me daised.” Good news is it’s now acceptable to use “podium” for “lectern.”
ManageSmarter: The Top 12 Presentation Mistakes — “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).”
Lots of really great links this week.
 ©iStockphoto.com/michal_edo Fleeting Glimpse Images: Pulling It Off — Rikk Flohr describes his preparation process. Great ideas for avoiding any number of problems. “I double check my laptop for presentation readiness, arrive at my room early, set up and am ready to start on time. Drink a little water. Have your back up mouse, pointer, presentation on thumb drive and any paper notes where you can find them. Great your guests as they arrive and begin working the room.”
A2J: Migraine — “My presentation on Migraine almost caused me a major headache. Everything fell apart in the last minute and then miraculously came back together in the last second!” Good example of how potentially fatal problems string themselves together.
Nury Vittachi: How not to introduce someone 2 — “People were only given the title ‘Moderator’ or ‘Master of Ceremonies’ if they agreed to have their brains surgically reduced to the size of a sesame seed, I said. Their single remaining brain-call contained only one thought: ‘Make speaker look like jerk.'”
Public Speaking Can Be Fun: Being Prepared for the Public Speaking Unexpected — “Three years ago after a 45 mile bike ride driving home on the Mass Pike, I felt a thump. I looked in my rear view mirror and witnessed my bike flying down the middle lane. The bike flew off my roof rack!”
 ©iStockphoto.com/LeggNet Overnight Sensation: The Disinterested Audience — “Of all the different types of hostile audiences out there, the disinterested or uninterested crowd can be one of the toughest to address. There are a number of reasons that your audience can fall into this category, such us being forced to attend the event, so we’ll look at what causes an audience to be disinterested and what you can do to bring them around.”
MostToast: Technical Presentation Worst Practices — “I am pretty sure that this is staged. I am also sure that these types of problems happen on a routine basis.”
Great Public Speaking: DOUBLE CHECK YOUR BACKUPS.
Presentation Coaching Institute: Presentations Rehearsal… Fact or Fiction? — “First let me define a false sense of preparedness. Glancing over your notes or rummaging through your PowerPoint slides for let’s say five to six minutes before a presentation and thinking to yourself what you will likely say is pretty much a recipe for presentation disaster.”
The PowerPoint® Blog: Open PowerPoint in Safe Mode — “This is one of those – I hope you don’t need to do this – actions. But recently one of the computers here suddenly decided it did not want to have fonts work (line spacing was all messed up).”
Pistachio: While I Talked, People Twittered — “The major downside of this trend that I see is that real-time feedback from a small number of people can force a speaker to unintentionally focus on trying to please that vocal few. This is dangerous if the small but loud group isn’t representative of the majority of listeners. It’s human nature to fixate on criticism, and focusing on the comments of a few audience members can throw a presenter off track.”
confessions of a serial theater lackey: Things I Learned During the REEFER Tech — For our readers on the technical crew. “Climbing a ladder during a strobe test is a bad idea. (In my defense, I was already at the top of the ladder before the test started. However, I should not have climbed down once that strobe kicked in).”
bookofjoe: Why steamship captains studied sailing — Thought provoking quote. For me this relates to when we did 35mm slides.
Business Tech Talk: 10 tips to avoid PowerPoint disasters — “Presentations, however, almost always have tech hiccups, and this one was no exception. One of the earlier presenters, Douglas Wright, had problems with some of his charts, and midway through Chris’s segment the laptop running the PowerPoint presentation decided to go into hibernation. This sort of thing is funny for the audience and good speakers will make a joke and move on, as Chris and Douglas did, but it can throw you off your stride or happen just as you’re about to make a killer point.”
T J Walker: How should I ask to be introduced? — “Don’t just use a generic on-page bio from your web site or the resume you got to land your last job. What looks like a quick read on paper can seem interminably long and boring to an audience listening to someone introduce you.
 The Daily Show: John McCain’s Big Acceptance Speech — There were some AV and stagecraft issues. You think this would have been ironed out in rehearsal. Skip to 1:22 if you don’t want to watch the rest of the political observations (although they are very funny). [Update: Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen fame covered McCain’s background graphics in more depth on his blog.]
[Your blood pressure just went up]: 1337 presentation skillz — Shares and critiques a useful YouTube video about presentation problems.
Valleywag: Google Video reborn as tool for awkward corporate messaging — You need to remember to be careful where you put video of your presentations. “The site makes it easy to “privately and securely” download embarrassing intra-office videos so that you can share them with us here at Valleywag.”
TechCrunch: Jason Calacanis’ How To Demo Your Startup (Part Two) — The entire series is interesting but section 14, “How to handle technical issues,” is especially useful.
YouTube: ABC’s Terry Moran Flub About Obama’s Parents on Nightline — Every public speaker’s nightmare.
ValleyWag: Watch RNC delegates trying to ignore Meg Whitman’s speech — Another public speakering nightmare. maybe this is usual behavior for the conventions whenever the speaker is one of the really major party figures. After all, there’s a lot of politicing that needs to get done.
Grammar Girl: Funny Homophones — “When you pick the wrong word, your readers laugh at your amusing sentence. It’s great to put them at ease with a joke or two, but if they’re smiling at what you wrote in all seriousness, that’s not good. Other readers don’t laugh; they cringe and wince, lament and vent. Some sticklers just stop reading.”
MostToast: Rehearse and Learn — “Make a commitment to practice and rehearsal with the equipment that you will use during your presentation: it will make your presenting life much easier.”
Speak Schmeak: Run out of time? Never again! — “A common presenter mistake is to run out of time. Even when you’ve practiced, you sometimes find yourself rushing the last five or ten minutes of your presentation, wondering where the time went. Well, here’s an easy solution.”
Execupundit.com: Crisis Management Students — “I’ve kept both responses in mind over the years whenever considering a potential crisis and have asked, ‘What if this is one of those occasions when those students are correct?'”
Make Your Point with Pow’R: Applying Project Management Principles to Presentations — “How do you keep track of everything? How do you remember to send your introduction a week before the presentation? Do you even know who to send it to? The easiest way to deliver powerful presentations every time, is by creating a simple project plan of the work to be done, and then working your plan. In this podcast, you can learn ‘How to use Project Management Principles to plan your next presentation’.”
Speak Fearlessly: The Path to Presentation Peace: Mindfulness and Stillness — “Another very handy place to use this technique is in the practice of presentations. It’s all very well to be prepared, but if something goes awry (a cell phone rings, the wrong slide pops up), it’s easy to panic. Anxiety, and stress = sweaty palms, physical tremors, accelerated heart rate and more. When this happens, we begin to focus on the feeling of anxiety and not what’s happened to interrupt the presentation.”
Fortify Your Oasis: Golden Oldies – Thoughts on Presenting — “This poor woman utterly lost her audience. Hers was the one subject of the day that any doctor should have been interested in, but they were now going to remember her presentation for all the wrong reasons.”
vctips: Join Twitter to follow these tips. Good things to keep in mind in order to avoid disaster when presenting to venture capitalists. A lot of these are useful for presenting to other audiences as well.
Control Booth: Storage of lav mics — Take care of your mics and they’ll take care of you (by not failing mid-presentation).
 Geek News Central: Richard Cheese the Ultimate Classless Act — A case study in how to not treat your audience.
The Public Speaking Blog: Book Talk at DP Architects (and What To Do When PPT Fails You) — “The reason why I am asking this question is because it happened to me! Everything was fine till the final minute. My laptop was connected to the projector but no matter what I do, nothing seem to appear on the screen.”
Corporate Presenter: Another TV Presenter Blooper — “A tv presenter must always do his/her research, otherwise you look stupid. And as for the mic handling – rubbish.”
 Speak Schmeak: Where do you put your notes? — “Ideally, you will make these arrangements with the organizer of your talk well before the day of the presentation. This is a critical part of your preparation, making sure that all the equipment you need is available.” And Using a lectern: do or don’t? — “But using a lectern is problematic for several reasons.”
Can You Hear Me Up the Back?: Can You Kick The Lectern Habit? — “Here are five reasons why lecterns are bad for your presentation.”
Great Public Speaking: Audio Failure — “Wouldn’t you know it? I just got my laptop back from getting fixed because it was locking up. That problem was fixed beautifully, but the shop must have done something to mess up the headphone / audio output jack which I never thought to check.”
 The New Yorker: Going for gold in the bimonthly status meeting by John Kenney — “Al, this is an event dominated by the Dutch, the Swiss, and, to a great extent, the North Koreans. These are active participants in bi-monthly status meetings, people who really prepare, whereas Americans- new to the sport-tend to be far more lethargic, taking it more as a pastime than as something to really prepare for.”
The AV Report: How Many Screens and Lumens? — Make sure you don’t undermine your presentations with the wrong projector or room set up. And Before You Play Back Audio or Video from Your Laptop Computer… — “Bottom line – until all computers and projectors get along in the real world (not the product literature world), AV presentations must be checked and double checked through the exact equipment which will be used on the day of a presentation.”
The Power of Reflection: Presentation Skills: How to Handle Cell Phone Interruptions During a Meeting
Advanced Presentation by Design: A new book about the Extreme Presentation method
 GIZMODO: Blue Screen of Death Strikes Bird’s Nest During Opening Ceremonies Torch Lighting.
Perform Marketing Solutions: The audience doesn’t care about you — “At an important presentation, the wireless microphone’s batteries go ‘flat’ & you wait for ages while the technical crew looks for new batteries. The laptop doesn’t open the Powerpoint presentation; the speaker arrives late; a guitar string breaks right in the middle of a solo. What do all of these have in common? Who cares?! The audience doesn’t care what caused the problem, they don’t care that it can’t be helped, they don’t have empathy for you at all, ever.”
USA Today: Chilly rooms anger people at conferences, social events — “If two or three weeks later they’re still thinking about the temperature, then that’s an issue.” He hates cold rooms. It’s so frustrating “to plan a fabulous program, with a speaker you paid $100,000 for, and all you hear from people leaving is ‘Brrr, it was freezing in there!’ ” (via face2face).
Manage Smarter: Conference Call Cacophony: Top Five Mistakes –“Your training teleconference is going great, until you hear the screaming baby in the background, and the static of a bad connection sets in.”
My Toastmasters Blog: Epic Failure: How to Not Connect with the Audience — “Yesterday I sat though an hour long presentation. Today, I cannot recall any of the main points. I can’t remember anything because the speaker did not care enough about the material to connect with the audience and make a point. Epic Failure for a presenter.”
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