If I Tell You to Remember THIS

If the first four slides of your PowerPoint smell like strawberries, then that fifth slide better smell like bacon.Yesterday, during the virtual workshop “How to Make Presentations Memorable”, Carmen Simon of Rexi Media referred to this as the 5th element. Changing the stimulus allows you to control what your audience remembers:

Simon says that the “secret balance to making anything more memorable” is using recognition and surprise. For example, present your audience with something they are familiar with, such as an apple, and force them to reconsider it:

By deviating from what people expect, we wake up the brain, force it to make new connections and think about things in novel ways. Simon spoke of three phases for designing presentations:

1. Change the stimulus: you can make anything noticeable by interrupting consistency.
   Switch from graphics to text, or text to graphics. Every third to fifth slide should be different from the previous ones.
2. Add vanity/ytinav. Most people have desire for social approval. Are you in the know?
3. Build your MQ (metaphor quotient) . Transform and/or add to your audience’s understanding of a concept.
   
   

   

   http://wakefelderman.blogspot.ca/

   
   

Think about this: how much of this blog post will you remember? Which things will you remember? Or, further, which blog posts from On the Same Page do you remember and why?

Finally, Simon suggests doing whatever you can to keep information alive. Choose images and text that have a high arousal factor and produce feelings of awe, excitement, amusement; anger; anxiety, instead of contentment or sadness. How did Simon do this? By having us participate in timed challenges and asking us to share our work; by making us do jumping jacks; by showing us a video of an iPad being smashed to bits and put into a blender.

I end with a challenge: In the comment box below, share your own thoughts on what the camel and martinis could be a metaphor for. No, you can't write "Don't drink and ride a camel." That one is already taken.