S02E03 - Death by Powerpoint No More! Crafting a Preso with Punch | Presentologist Johnny Quinn

In this episode of Build Momentum, we are joined by Johnny Quinn, a presentologist who currently lives in New Zealand. 

Johnny established Audience Alive, which specializes in using the latest presentation technologies to help presenters, speakers, and organizations communicate their message better and to put an end to “Death by PowerPoint” in public speaking.

Some Questions I Ask:

• I want to learn more about you, your story, and your background. What led you to become a presentologist? And how do you describe presentologists? (3:15)
• What are the main things we’re doing wrong in making presentations? (6:23)
• Do we have to use PowerPoint? Do we have to present with a slide deck at all? (13:51)
• Do you have anything beyond that that you can share with us on insights for TED? (20:48)
• If you had a final piece of advice for our audience, to make better presentations everywhere, what would that be? (26:29)

In This Episode, You Will Learn:

• What a presentologist is (3:25)
• Challenges in creating presentations (6:39)
• Silver bullets within newer versions of PowerPoint (10:35)
• Interactive vs linear structure (14:23)
• More tips in creating a killer PowerPoint presentation (15:58)
• The 10-20-30 Rule of Presenting (18:53)
• Tips for TED presentations (21:27)

Quotes:

“I actually believe that procrastination kills a lot of really great presentations.”

“I'm not afraid of public speaking, I have a fear of not doing it! You know, I enjoy doing it, I enjoy passing on the knowledge.”

“Whatever you use, try to think visually, because that's what humans are much better at doing.”

“The ‘sage on the stage’ is largely dead. We don't want somebody all knowing, all seeing pounding us with information behind the podium. We actually want a ‘guide on the side.’”

“Try to make your presentations more interactive.”

Connect with Johnny Quinn:
Audience Alive
John Quinn's LinkedIn

Stay in touch with Sarah Williamson:
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SWPR GROUP Website
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Stay in touch with Chad Bolser:
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About "The Secret to Transformational Leadership," which Sarah co-authored with Dr. Quintin Shepherd:
Transformational Leadership Secret website
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Transcript

Sarah Williamson: 0:02

Hello and welcome to build momentum where we help education organizations, blow past their competitors with strategies that make an impact. We think beyond traditional press releases and generic communication tactics, and seek out big, bold ideas to create meaningful results for our clients. I'm your host, Sarah Williamson. And I've spent more than 15 years in public relations for the education sector, where our team has learned what works and what doesn't when it comes to PR from launching groundbreaking new industry awards to landing sought after panels at the most prestigious shows. We absolutely love this stuff. But the best part is, we have an opportunity to interview some of the smartest people we know who share their knowledge and strategies or success right here on the show. If you enjoy what you hear, we would so appreciate if you please take a moment to drop us a review on whatever platform you're listening. And if you want to learn more about us, visit swpr-group.com thanks so much for tuning in today. Let's dive into the show. And on today's episode, we're thrilled to have Johnny Quinn on the show. Welcome, Johnny. It's great to have you.

John Quinn: 1:16

Hey Sarah. It's awesome to be with you today. It's great to meet eventually.

Sarah Williamson: 1:20

I know. I have to come over to New Zealand soon. That sounds great. I haven't been in a while since my honeymoon.

John Quinn: 1:26

Oh, you've been there. Good deal. Where? Did you make it to Queenstown which is in the south of the south end where I am?

Sarah Williamson: 1:30

No. So my husband had already been to the South Island, which I've heard is better. But we went to the North Island for a honeymoon because he hadn't been there, which kind of irritates me slightly. But we went to the Bay of Islands. We went to the big city. We went to Auckland,

John Quinn: 1:46

Rotorua and maybe kids born in Napier and places like that. Yeah, around the country. Yeah, we've definitely live in a better Island especially knows since there's no COVID down here. So we're COVID Oh, yeah, so we're delta is kind of ravaging the North Island at the moment and certainly Auckland, so they're in lockdown probably until Christmas, but don't quote me on that. But we're down in the South Island, which there's only a million people down here. And we're very geographically sort of isolated. Anyway. So it's a pleasure to live in the mountains and lakes and stuff. So yeah, I mean, coming to you from the Southern Alps. And it is actually snowing his morning, believe it or not, we're in spring, but we've got snow coming down at 300 meters. So yeah, it's one of those mornings,

Sarah Williamson: 2:27

One of those mornings. Yeah, I really can't wait to go back into the South Island. It sounds like the two of you are not competitive at all the north and the south.

John Quinn: 2:36

Not at all in the same way that you know, the north and south of other states. Is it competitive either?

Sarah Williamson: 2:43

Not at all. No, no.

John Quinn: 2:46

The north and south of Ireland isn't competitive either. We all thought so, Yeah.

Sarah Williamson: 2:51

I love it. Okay, well, yes. soon to come, we'll have to get some tips on where I should go on the South Island when we can travel again. That sounds like a dream. Traveling.

John Quinn: 2:58

You're welcome. It's an open invitation.

Sarah Williamson: 3:00

Well, thank you. Thank you, Johnny. Okay, so first, I want to get to you call yourself a presentologist. And did I say that correctly?

John Quinn: 3:08

You sure. Did, yeah.

Sarah Williamson: 3:09

Awesome.

John Quinn: 3:10

Yeah.

Sarah Williamson: 3:10

And and there's a special reason I asked you to join us today. But what I want to get to that in a minute, but first, I want to learn more about you and your story and your background. What led you to become a presentologist? And how do you describe presentogists? What is that?

John Quinn: 3:25

Yeah, it's a common question. You know, everybody's like, what did you study that? Where did you learn that? You know, so, I'm an Irishman, brought up in Belfast in Northern Ireland, and move over to the UK. But then was ever but 10 years and then decided to head over to the UAE, to Dubai. And I was traveling around Africa and places and I, I thought Dubai is going to be an interesting place. And this is when nobody had heard of Dubai. In fact, the web only new new stupid jokes about Abu Dhabi about Abba, Dabba Doo, you know, that sort of thing. And Fred Flintstone, and we've never really even been to the Middle East. So when I lived in Dubai in '96, I thought, wow, you know, this place is gonna go off, and it's gonna go crazy. And he did you know, over the years, it grew from sort of 400,000 people to 4 million than it is today. So it's an amazing country. And you know, it was great working there. And I spent 20 years there helping people build presentations, essentially. And why did I help people build presentations? Well, I work for Philips electronics and we were asked to run a conference one day and I realized that the content that people created you know, we spent a lot of time on the design of the event and you know, the food and, you know, the audio visual and the hotel, but people left the presentations to the last minute and it was just so awesome. And that's when I first learned the term of, you know, death by PowerPoint, and it was just so terribly put together and people procrastinated, left things to the last minute and then stood up and did a terrible job. So I thought there has to be a business around improving that. So started that around '99-2000. And yeah, over 20 years well, more now we've kind of helped over 700 companies and we're on our 100,000 PowerPoint slide, you know, when we still work away and 2015, I decided to move to New Zealand to just turn the chapter and bring my kids up in a in a sort of, you know, in the mountains and Alps and stuff. And they really enjoyed being in Dubai in the young ages, but they love the kind of outdoor lifestyle here of biking. And you know motorbiking, and that sort of stuff. But, you know, PowerPoint has been a consistent with me all the way along. And you know, I'm kind of always helping people with it. Obviously, different sort of elements have come and gone Prezi Canva, you know, and they're not gone. But their PowerPoint is ubiquitous, and, you know, we need to learn how to use it better. So, I was in with the CEO One morning, and he asked me, you know, you guys are actually called presentologists, you know, you help me with the technology, and also the presentation. And I suppose that there are different elements to presenting all of them than just, you know, the slides and yourself, there is the audience, people forget about them a lot, you know, they forget about creating an interaction. And in fact, you know, claustrophobia, the fear of public speaking, can be eradicated if you connect well with an audience and you learn how to create a conversation rather than monologue. And that's really what we're all about. We're about trying to get people in, hence why we call our business Audience Alive, because we're trying to get the audience to be more engaged, and, you know, asking questions, so we use the different techniques to do that all the time.

Sarah Williamson: 6:23

I love that. I mean, I cringe every time I think I have to create a PowerPoint deck, I really, really do. And you have such a powerful role in helping transform presentations. I love it. What are we all doing to miss the mark? How are we creating these boring? Like, what are the main things we're doing wrong?

John Quinn: 6:39

Yeah, I don't cringe, you know, and I say, oh, goodie, you know, I say, Oh, excellent. I can't wait for it. So the first thing very first thing I do is different. Everybody else, I immediately get excited. You know, the fear that people feel around presenting and making a deck and all that kind of stuff of slide is, you know, in the fear is largely burned out of the fact that they haven't practiced it and they're suddenly being asked to step outside their comfort zone. But what people don't realize is that we learn riemer outside our comfort zone, if we're inside our comfort zone, you know, so if you weren't nervous about pitching to a senior group of people, or pitching for, you know, a job or pitching for, you know, a business for funding, you know, there'd be something wrong. So first and foremost, I replace that fear with excitement. So fear and excitement are very similar emotions, you know, so we reframe the whole fear element as excitement and I'm immediately into it. And I want to, I suppose every presentation is like a mini production, you know, you've got the, you know, it's like, imagine a stage production while each presentation is the same, you know, you've got lights, sound camera action, you've got the presenter is the actor, you've got, you know, this stage manager, managing it director sort of running it, and I'm kind of like the director. So I want to direct people, I'm the person that you see in the background, do you don't see in the background? Who is kind of directing the whole show? So what do we find that most people don't allow for his time. So people, I actually believe that, you know, procrastination kills a lot of really great presentations. And if people would only plan ahead more, you know, we get people coming to us all the time, you know, I have this, you know, 47 slide deck, I need to put together, it needs to be awesome, it needs to have an amazing introduction, you know, I need to have all of this data in the middle, and then I need to really hit them hard at the end. And I'm like, yeah, sure, we can help you with that. Sure. When is it all in about 12 hours, you know, and I'm like, how can you do that? You know, so leaving things to her last minute, is one of the main challenges we see. No, I actually believe that business people have been conditioned almost to process that it's sort of it's a vicious circle, they leave things if they're so under the pump, there's so much information coming at them in so much work to do that the presentation is the last thing they want to do. So they leave it to the last minute. And then they basically throw some slides together from a default template, or they try to sneak something from Prezi or Canva. Or add some stock- crappy stock pictures, and then they you know, they stand up they do normally stand up and apologize is the first thing they'll say look, I'm very sorry, but I haven't had time to put this together is one of your standard intros, or I'm sorry, I'm very nervous. These are one of the first things we hear and then they do a pretty pretty lame job and then sit down and so you know, they don't apply time to really making success. I mean, Nancy Duarte is one of our sort of a kind of influencers around presenting. She talks about 90 hours to create a excellent 30 slide deck, you know, with the first kind of 30 hours being in thinking, sketching, pulling together ideas, then building the slides, and then rehearsing so you know, in terms of dividing it up into three parts. So, yeah, I'm going to get to like just give it more time, practice, plan ahead, you know, and it will become better If you put more effort into it, use advisors and designers such as myself, to help you, you know, pull together a really awesome production. And believe me, once you really get good at this, and once you start enjoying it, it becomes addictive. You know, I have a fear of not public speaking, you know, I'm not afraid of public speaking, I have a fear of not doing it, you know, I enjoy doing it, I enjoy passing on the knowledge.

Sarah Williamson: 12:06

Oh, I love that you're so passionate about it, I was really hoping you were gonna give me a couple silver bullets. But sounds like you're hitting us where it hurts more time. And more practicing. Okay, check. Got it.

John Quinn: 12:19

I mean, don't get me wrong, there are certainly a couple of silver bullets. And people are looking for silver bullets, like, you know, the jump into Canva to try and get a silver bullet or get the work done for them. Because they don't want to learn how to improve, you know, in terms of what you can do with PowerPoint, and office 365 certainly has some amazing tools and eliminate hiding right there in office 365. Now, if you go to file a new to look for a new PowerPoint to build a new PowerPoint presentation, don't choose any of the standard design templates. But in there, you will find a thing called Quick starter if you've got office 365 and quickstarter is a revelation to most people are like oh my god, I can't believe that sitting right there. And I didn't know about what is quickstarter. quickstarter is a research assistant. So you type in, you know, George Bush, or you type in Obama. And it will immediately give you a whole range of different content and build the actual presentation for you. So in terms of research, you know, PowerPoint, and Microsoft have done some amazing work PowerPoint team on building, you know, a presentation tool that actually is really helping us to create impact. And I think a lot of people don't understand that about PowerPoint. PowerPoint is not just the program that you think you have, you know, you need to understand what version you have. Because if you have the latest version, you have so many new silver bullets that can help you for example, there's something in there called presenter coach, so you can rehearse with Coach and you can actually it'll listen for inclusive language, it will look at your voice pitch peers prosper the inclusion rates, it will transcribe it. So you know, there are some awesome new tools in there in terms of what you can do and how you can put pull their slides together and really create a presentation with impact.

Sarah Williamson: 13:59

That is good stuff. Wow, I had no idea. Thank you. I'm gonna definitely include that in the show notes. That's awesome. Have you ever wondered just how much credibility education industry awards really provide your company? We did. We wonder to K 12. decision makers really care about another logo on your website. We are tired of participating in the same awards year after year completing complex submission forms. All knowing that if our clients win, the finalists email will quickly be followed by an opportunity to advertise in their publication, we wanted to see something different. So we created it. We partnered with the Institute for Education innovation to launch a groundbreaking new industry award called Supe's Choice. The Supe's Choice Awards are judged exclusively by the K 12 decision makers we all want to reach. By entering the Supe's Choice Awards, you have an opportunity to get your product or solution in front of up to 10 superintendents across the country. And you're sure to get their feedback on what you submit. And not to mention, you might even win. If you've not yet entered Now is the time because submissions close on October 31. And don't worry, we know how draining and complicated submission form can be. So we kept this one so simple with just five questions. Don't waste another minute, and enter today at supeschoice.com. That's supeschoice.com. supeschoice.com. Enter today. So this is a tricky question. But do we have to use PowerPoint? I mean, do we have to present with a deck? Is that required in your opinion?

John Quinn: 15:41

How many quarters the term slides come from? What Why do we call them slides? You know, I mean, it originally comes from the 35 millimeter slide projector that your grandfather used to bring out and let's have a slideshow of our trip to Florida, you know, and we'd all sit around and no, please No. So this precedent is going on since the 60s you know is going on for a long time. And you know, in a 35 millimeter carousel projector you couldn't jump from slide number one to 24 could you because it wasn't easy. You couldn't help her own so but you know, can you move from slide number one to 24 in PowerPoint? Yes, you can you just when you're presenting, you just hit 24 on the keyboard and it'll jump to 24. But people don't use it that way. They use it linearly and they think they have to start at the start they have to go through a process and they have to end up with an ending but we build interactive decks for people all the time and people are like, this is awesome. I can present five slides and then I can ask them what services you're interested in and we can hop around and jump around and and and again it can become a conversation let's have a dialogue. You know, interaction is a difference between monologuing and dialoguing the people. So, you know, don't try to present linearly, but don't use PowerPoint if you don't need it. But PowerPoint should be used not as something, an invisible blanket to hide behind, because you're afraid that's where people go wrong with it, because they're trying to make it, you know, but everything in my deck, it'll be awesome. And then I can be useless, you know. So it's like, you know, that's not the point people buy from people, people connect with people. So PowerPoint should be working with you. I mean, one of the greatest presentations I saw was, you know, just a series of 12 different images from the far side, Gary Lawson's, foresight, and I love those types of cartoons. But the beautiful thing that presenter did is if he was talking about diversity, he had a really awesome, funny cartoon up there from Gary Lawson, and you kind of laughed at it as a start. And then you got the point of it, that it was talking about diversity, and he allowed you time to view that. And then as he presented his point became clear with the cartoon. And, you know, so we have to remember that humans think visually, and we remember things. And we also, there's a thing called the redundancy effect, which is that we cannot listen and read at the same time yet, we are asked all the time to sit in front of PowerPoint slides full of, you know, dense data, 12 graphs or, you know, 15 bullet points. I mean, where does that term bullet point even come from? I mean, I've researched that. And the guy who invented PowerPoint, Michael Gaskins, I think his name was Robert Gaskins. I think he's Floridian. And you know, he's from Florida. And he was driving along one day, and he saw a bullet hole next to a sign, or somebody that somebody had shot a hole in a sign without as impact. So it really comes from bullets. You know, I'm from Belfast, and Northern Ireland, where there have been enough bullets in the world. So you know, we want to burn the bullet, we're all about banning the bullet, get rid of the actual bullet points. If you're using PowerPoint, please promise me take this ocers me, I will never use a bullet point. Again, I'm talking about the Rome blacktopped or the tick mark. I've got no problem with segmented text on slides. But one of the rules we try to get people to focus in on is, let's use icons, let's add an icon instead of a paragraph and then make the icon really big and make the text less important. So don't write sentences on your slide. People can't read the sentence, you know, just make them simple points, you know, and then maybe don't put all of that information in a linear fashion on the left hand side of your slide has a visual hierarchy of that is it, we've got a white background, we got a picture on the right hand side and bullet points on the left, let's, let's make a shape out of those or do something with it. So it's just about changing up the visual way you present the information, ideally, it's just one big image and you're talking about, you know, here's a mountain and you know, that's the image and now I'm talking about the effort we went through, you know, and so whatever you use, try to, you know, think visually, because that's what humans are much better at doing, you know, and also remember to consider who the audience are. Because if you've got a bunch of boomers, there's absolutely no point in, you know, going into dense detail, or you want to try and keep it simple. I mean, come on, we, you know, they can hardly see properly think about their eyesight, you know, and I mean, we use the formula that find out who the oldest person is in the audience divide his or her reach by two, that is your optimal font size. So you know, 3035 point font for boomers is really where you want to go. Yet, if you're presenting to a classroom full of Gen Z's or alfursan. You know, you really need to think about your language and how you're going to communicate that. So you know, the audience are critical. And understanding and profiling the audience before you get there is really important, as well as the point that people miss all the time. Because once you understand who the audience are, you're going to present more effectively to them.

Sarah Williamson: 20:26

Yeah, that's great. So it sounds like you asked, you shared some basic things we should think about, is there anything else before you're presenting that you think about in a framework or additional questions we should consider

John Quinn: 20:37

People ask me about that all the time. And you know, the probably the best form they are on creating presentations, which is still LIDAR is from our good friend, Guy Kawasaki, who's one of our kind of mentors, and he had this you know, outburst at a conference, it's probably 20 years ago, but he's been working around it. I don't know if you know what it is, you know what it is, it's called the 10 20 30 rule of presenting. And it's awesome. We love it. So 10 is for what 10 is, for the number of slides, the number of points that you're going to make, you know, that's a challenge for most people that like, hang on a minute, I got a slide deck, you know, I got 50 slides here. Yeah, you need 10. You know, investors are not going to invest in a 50 slide deck, you're never going to stand up in Dragon's Den or Shark Tank, and you're never going to impact people with 50 slides, you know, it's just unless you use them interactively, which is what we try to get people to do, will you hop around and you don't go through them linearly, but if you're trying to go linearly 50 slides is Yeah, one hour training maybe. And if you're a trainer and you've got a you could have 300 slides for a two day course. But, you know, again, we asked trainers to think about creating an interaction, you know, sage on the stage is largely dead. You know, we don't want somebody all knowing, all seeing pounding us with information behind the podium, we actually want a guide on the side and educators know this, I mean, teachers are no longer the sage on the stage or no guides on the side. And what we believe is it the real way to present is the wisdom of the crowd, if we can move from the guide on the side, but also getting, you know, people more engaged, you know, then engaging the audiences. But the 10 20 30 rule is replaced at 10 slides delivered in 20 minutes, which would be your optimum time, with no font size less than 30. And that's a real challenge. Yeah. So trying to get your font size up as big as possible. So that's a, that's a structure that I would try to aim for, in terms of putting things together. Yeah,

Sarah Williamson: 22:32

That's perfect. I love that we love structure. That's awesome. Thank you. And I love that you use the guide on the side, because this is education. And that's what we talk about all the time in PR for education. So that's the perfect example for this audience. Okay, so Johnny, I have to be honest with you. One of the primary reasons I wanted you to come on the show is I saw you're an expert supporting TEDx submissions, and getting those accepted. And I know that can be the ultimate challenge for so many people, they just struggle to get those submitted. So I'm sure you just apply these same practices, and they're all phenomenal presentations. But do you have anything beyond that, that you can share with us on insights for Ted?

John Quinn: 23:10

I have lots of them! Lots and lots and lots of them. No TED is its own animal. Absolutely. I've done a couple of them. The gamification of learning was one I did in Dubai a few years ago for TEDx monopile. And yeah, look, the wonderful thing about TED is that it the benchmark is so high, I mean like, we want to watch presentations on TED that will change our soul that are tectonic. Yeah, so we're trying to find the most, you know, engaging point or the most engaging way of getting an audience and really impacting people, if you remember back to your kind of favorite TED Talk, it probably changed your life in some way or other. And you know, they're not the ones with the, you know, 28 million followers or, you know, kind of 100 million views. Very often, the ones that I love are ones that are so simple, yet so effective, and sometimes aren't the best presentation. But the, the actual message in them is so powerful. So the one that changed my life was a TED talk by EMF guy who decided to stop lying to people when they ask them am I about to pass away at the side of the road at RTS. And he tells us that 25 messages from people who will pass away over a month that he watched them pass away, and it was the opposite to what you're thinking right now wasn't a horror, fear and loss and terror was relief. And there was a lot of in a wonderful sort of messages passing messages on. But the most common thing about it was family was that people passed on. And you know, they, when they were in their last moments, they were sort of talking about their family and about how, you know, the fun time. So what a great message to get from 25 people that love your family, you know, enjoy that time with your kids, because that's all it's gonna matter at the end. To me, that was one of the best 20 minutes I ever spent in my life, you know, to sit down and watch a TED talk, to really learn something, and it really impacted on me. So, you know, if you've watched TED, then you see things that I've got a motive that have got emotions in them. So here's our key point here is that, you know, people will always remember how you made them feel there, they will very often not remember a graph and the fact that it went from, you know, 78 and 88. Yeah, they're not, they're not that driven. We're not analytical, we are emotional creatures. And when you release serotonin and dopamine, and people, they remember it for the rest of their days, you know, it's something so try to focus on what is the emotion, or that you're trying to get across in terms of connecting with people and that's one of the key things about TED. But obviously, you've got to know your audience who's out there, what their generations are, what they're, you know, gender, ethnicity, cultural hierarchy, what hierarchy Are they all that kind of stuff, try to you know, keep things simple and not you know, knowledge versus wisdom, you know, if knowledge is knowing that tomato is a fruit in wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad. So don't try and put all those kind of tomatoes into your presentation, keep it wisdom high. And we tried to emphasize connection over content. So we're trying to connect with our audiences. So we're trying to persuade them inform them yeah, we're trying to get information across so I'd be aiming I'm trying to persuade people more and you know, kind of get them excited, rather than to inform them because stories will really get people excited with that. And then you know, trying to be charismatic is also a really key point, you know, in TED, you know, so and we've worked in wrestle for years with what's the formula for charisma, you know, and certainly passions in their vulnerability, Authenticity, words like that. But you know, really trying to you know, son just sound like yourself. Try not to be you know, trying Not to put on a persona but try to certainly work on your presentation style. And don't be afraid to shake things up at TED. You know, people love using something different mix it up, I'm gonna bring out a guitar or a tin whistle or bring a prop, you know what I mean them, I'm showing you a picture now of a plastic tube. And it's a ritual, an auto rickshaw. In 2015, I drove one of those, the length of India, from the south to the north of India on an odyssey with just navigating by Google Maps. And, you know, so I bring a prop if I'm talking about something so for people love props, you know, whenever, especially in, don't let things mess you up. Make sure you know your setup, you know how things are set up, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, and find out the lecture people, you know, try to get people, you know, people really don't have a big attention span, you know, the 20 minute rule is there all the time, I try to, you know, bring in some humor, but you're trying to get people to feel something, the more you can get people to feel something, the more your TED Talk is gonna land with huge kudos. So give it a go,

Sarah Williamson: 27:44

Johnny, that is fabulous insight. I think that we can all apply that, especially like being authentic and the emotive piece, I think we need to remember that and thinking outside the box on what can we apply that's different, unique, should we play an instrument, all very good points. And I want to, I'm going to keep you posted, and we're gonna work on some for our clients and let you know if we're successful, so TBD on that, but that's awesome. If you had a final piece of advice for our audience, to make better presentations everywhere, what would that be?

John Quinn: 28:13

It's so hard to pick one, you know, interaction is the difference between a monologue and dialogue is one of my favorite bits of advice, try to make your presentations more interactive, I have to end with that. Because it's, you know, that's our business, our business is about audience alive, and bringing audiences more alive. I mean, there are wonderful groups turning up, we who are kind of helping people, you know, make things more of a conversation, we've got groups called flip chart, which are, you know, people who help each other that's on Facebook, a group called a flip chart. And I can ask a question on there, you know, I've got a 250 person zoom call tonight, how am I going to engage everybody, you know, and 30, people will come back with ideas. So we've got great groups that are working around helping people, not just be the kind of a meeting, you know, have run a meeting, but architect the meeting, you know, sort of be a meeting architect, and actually really creative and engagement. So, you know, not everybody has, you know, ideas. A classic example would be I was asking, you know, how can we get people to poll I want to pull in my audience, and we love polling technologies. And there's lots out there a Poll Everywhere, you know, sliders, zoom, mentimeter, there are so many of them. But we were just trying to do it in a really simple way with 280 people, I think it was, and they all had their cameras turned on, and somebody came up with the idea to do what was called camera polling, where you put your finger over the camera, then then people ask questions, and you remove, remove your finger, the effect that watching to that nearly people all disappear, and then all appear again, on screen. It was just awesome. People loved it, you know, and I would never have thought of that myself. You know what I mean, in terms of just getting everyone engaged and asking questions. So try to I suppose my last point would be to try and get people to think that around the whole thing of an engagement trying to get an engagement, the more that you can engage the audience. And I think my silver bullet here is that the more people are going to have an emotional reaction to what you're talking about, and the more likely they're going to remember you. So that would be my number one thing is don't have a presentation, have an interaction.

Sarah Williamson: 30:15

That's such great advice. I love that. So where can our listeners learn more about you, Johnny, you are a stud. I want them to find your company and to hire you. This is awesome. Tell us more about you.

John Quinn: 30:25

Thanks, Look, I mean, the simplest thing I suppose is the Google audience alive, you know, so audience alive. If you Google that you would find this where I'd audiencealive.com and we're also the audience.co.nz. And there's a whole wealth of information on their own everything from creating slides to presenting yourself with more impact and you know, audience engagement. So those are the main areas that we get involved. But so just, and yeah, Google audience alive, look out for us and connect with me, Johnny quinny, on LinkedIn, and there's loads of stuff you can get on there. But yeah, we're constantly posting and pushing information and I'd love to connect with anyone anywhere.

Sarah Williamson: 31:02

Awesome. I think I called you Johnny Quinn, your name is Johnny quinny. Oh, dear. Okay. Well,

John Quinn: 31:06

Johnny Quinn is my handle on LinkedIn. Yeah,

Sarah Williamson: 31:08

Oh, got it. Okay, good, good. Well, this has been fantastic. I think we got a ton of good nuggets that we're going to share. And I think people can apply because who can't learn to be a better presenter. I think we all can take insights away. And I know particularly I well, so this is awesome. So thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

John Quinn: 31:26

Thank you, Sarah. It's been a pleasure. And we've wrestled this morning with power outages in New Zealand and kids home from school in the us so well done handling. And that's the real world we're living in. So have great day and thank you for inviting me along. I really appreciate it.

Sarah Williamson: 31:43

Absolutely. talk with you soon.

John Quinn: 31:45

See ya. Bye then.

Sarah Williamson: 31:46

Okay Bye. Thanks so much for tuning in today. If you enjoyed the show, if you wouldn't mind leaving a review, we'd be so grateful. This helps other listeners find and learn about our show. And please reach out if you're interested in learning more about how we can elevate the leaders of your organization with our PR services. If you'd like you can even shoot me a direct email at Sarah sarah@swpr-group.com I look forward to hearing from you and we will see you next time.