Back in May, I attended the Ragan Corporate Communicators Conference in Detroit and posted a list of 108 top tweets from the event. @dennajones reviewed the list from her home in London and writes about why final tweet in the listing resonated with her:

Last week Denna posted Part One of her reasons for switching from PowerPoint to Prezi. Here’s the second and final part of her article.

Part Two: Society for the Recovery of Dead Presentations
by Denna Jones

First, the bad news. Poor presentations are like the undead. No software, hardware or programme exists that can resuscitate a rubbish presenter, breathe life into poor ideas or prevent the audience from entering an involuntary state of whole body paralysis brought on by presentation failure. I’ve sat through a much-anticipated keynote speech by a C-suite executive who pulled a ream of paper from his satchel and in sotto voce read his speech word-for-stumbling-word. Did it matter if he was announcing the discovery of a wormhole in his attic, or the warp-speed car he test-drove that morning or his cure for cancer? No it did not. We were asleep, texting and writing to-do lists. If you don’t know how to convey your ideas in an animated and seemingly unrehearsed manner, your point won’t matter. And it won’t matter what delivery method you use, PowerPoint or shadow puppets, because you, my friend, are dead man walking.

But there is good news. If you want to create better presentations or are eager to learn a new and different presentation method, there is a choice beyond PowerPoint – Prezi. Let’s assume your audience hasn’t been press-ganged into their seats. Let’s also assume you’ve got decent content and you are a competent presenter. You just need a bit of “oomph” to propel your presentation from good to great. Prezi provides that “oomph”. Think of it as a dynamic canvas that can move in a multitude of directions, and not (as with PowerPoint) just forwards and backwards.

Prezi recognizes that ideas and concepts are a dialogue, not a linear narrative. What would you do if you had no choice but to draw your concept for your audience? You’d sketch a mind map. A single sheet mind map allows you to move back and forth, up, down, and zoom in and out of detail (i.e. from your main idea to your important but subsidiary ideas or even to humorous asides). Prezi is a dynamic mind map. It’s tempting to think its ingenuity may owe some debt to the 1968 documentary short Powers of Ten by the husband and wife design and architecture team Charles and Ray Eames. Prezi’s style and delivery methodology is not dissimilar to how Charles and Ray famously simplified a complex idea – the relative scale of the Universe – through zooming visual factors of ten.

Can Prezi save your next presentation and make you the toast of TED? With a bit of planning and organisation, I believe it can (although I can’t guarantee an invitation to speak at TED). The Society for the Recovery of Dead Presentations is a tongue in cheek riff on the 18th century Royal Humane Society for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Drowned. Members of this English benevolent society were optimists. You might look dead, but a judiciously applied life-saving device might just jolt you back to life. Prezi is a life-saving tool for optimists and pessimists alike. Learn it, use it, and gain the confidence to believe you will never again be dead man walking.

Denna Jones is a US-born, London-based writer, designer and consultant who grew up in houses ranging from a Shoji-screen suburban in Hawaii to a mid-twentieth century in California. She works on urban design schemes across England. More details at www.dennajones.com.