At first glance, the only Greek in Guy Kawasaki might be the most recent dinner he had at Evvia, the popular Palo Alto restaurant, but after reading his new book, What the Plus! Google+ for the Rest of Us, I’ve decided that he must be a distant relative of Aristotle. The classic Greek philosopher established the ground rules for rhetoric 2300 years ago, and Guy has brought them roaring into the 21^st Century at a gallop.

Aristotle proposed that, to be persuasive, a writer must provide the holy trinity of Ethos, or credibility, Pathos, or benefits, and Logos, or evidence.

• Ethos. Guy, whose new book positions Google+ in the social media space, posts five to ten times a day himself, and so he knows whereof he writes. If that were not enough, he runs Alltop and HolyKaw, two popular social media sites. And of course, his legacy as the Chief Evangelist at Apple Computer gives him the ultimate in credibility; think of it as Cred+.

• Pathos. The book is loaded with helpful advice for anyone who wants to be current and successful in today’s online—social and business—world.

• Logos. The format is studded with illustrative screen shots, tables, and examples. As a crowning touch, Guy kick starts each chapter with a clever but pertinent epigram.

Taken together, What the Plus! provides a clear comparison with Facebook and Twitter, and forms the basis for a valuable manual in the art and science of social media.

Coincidentally, on the day I read Guy’s book, I also decided to sign up for an online music service. I tried one and found it so complex and daunting that I abandoned the effort after two frustrating hours—especially when I was unable to reach customer support. I tried another service, logged in instantly, and then had some questions. They responded to my email query in less than five minutes with full, clear, and authoritative answers.

The experience was a perfect metaphor for Guy’s new book: swift, helpful, and thorough or, as his undoubtedly long-lost ancestor Aristotle would say, Ethos, Pathos, and Logos.

“Message sent is not the same as message received.” 

“Telephone,” the traditional party or children’s game—in which a phrase or sentence is whispered from one person to another around a dinner table or room—provides a valuable lesson in the lost art of listening. Inevitably, at the end of the cycle, when the last person speaks the message aloud, the phrase has taken on a completely new meaning. The phenomenon has the positive effect of stimulating conversation and interaction in the game, but in other walks of life—particularly business—the outcome can be a failure to succeed, let alone communicate.

Influential venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, whose five-second rule of slide design you read about in an earlier post here and Forbes post, is a keen observer of all aspects of communication. Another of Mr. Khosla’s cardinal rules is “Message sent is not the same as message received,” an eloquent statement of the obligation of all presenters to assure that their target audience has received the intended message. Fulfilling that obligation requires a full court press that can be described, with all due respect to Stephen Covey, as “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Presenters”:

1.  Analyze your audience in advance. Just as sales people qualify their customers, presenters must qualify their audiences. In your preparation, gather as much information as you can about who they are, what they know, and what they want to know; identify their concerns, fears, and hot buttons.

2. Develop focused content. Armed with your thorough analysis, create content that addresses your audience’s interests. An essential part of this process is to eliminate irrelevant information—easier said than done because most presenters operate under the assumption that, for their audience to understand anything, they must tell them everything. Wrong! Tell them only what they need to know.

3.   Offer multiple benefits. Here, too, a basic sales practice provides a lesson. Most sales persons sell features rather than benefits—and so do most presenters. Infuse your pitch with benefits. Find multiple points in your presentation to insert a sentence that begins, “The reason this is important to you…” and then concludes with a benefit to your audience.

4.   Customize, customize, customize. In today’s high pressure, high stakes business world, presenters—who have become road warriors—try to save time by making a one-size-fits-all presentation. Wrong again! Use the information you collected in your preparation and make frequent references to it throughout your presentation to keep it fresh and specific.

5.  Track your progress as you present. The importance of eye contact in presentations is a given, but most presenters merely scan their audiences and see nothing. Read your audience’s reaction to your story. Look for their head nods.

6.   Adjust your content. If instead of head nods, you get frowns or puzzled looks, pause in your narrative and add a brief explanation, or ask your audience if they have questions.

7.   Respond to all questions in full. Whether you get questions during or after your presentation, you—unlike politicians—must respond. This is not to say that you must reveal strategic or confidential information, but that you should address the issue in every question and give a reason when you cannot. Respond you must. Never evade.

Although Mr. Khosla applies his cardinal rule to the presentations of his existing portfolio companies—and those who aspire to become one of his portfolio companies—he represents every member of every audience of every presentation you will ever give. If you aspire to succeed, make sure that every message you send is received—loud and clear— by every audience.

Follow the Action

By Jerry Weissman

oes this large, illuminated letter look familiar? It should. The style has been around ever since medieval times to mark the beginning of a new document. It has continued on into modern publishing where an enlarged first letter marks the beginning of chapters in books and the beginnings of articles in magazines and newspapers. Now it becomes a factor in how we view computer screens.

EyeTrackShop, an eponymous Swedish start-up company, does exactly what its name says: track eye movements to, as their slogan puts it, “identify where people look, for how long and in what order.”  Using webcams to follow and record how viewers perceive images, the company’s technology helps advertisers create effective ads and web designers create effective web pages. By understanding the dynamics of how viewers perceive ads and web pages you can create effective graphics for your presentations.

One of EyeTrackShop’s projects studied how users viewed the homepages of Facebook and Google+. The results, shown in the “Fixation Order” charts below and reported in the Wall Street Journal, found that in both cases, “Users’ eyes head straight for the big status column in the middle of the screen, then over to the list of categories on the left side, then hop across to alerts on the right.”

Those movements are driven by forces more powerful than the images on the Google and Facebook sites, two forces that drive the eyes of every human being:

Nurture: In Western culture, because we have learned to read from left to right, our eyes always start reading at the upper left corner of documents

Nature: The optic reflexes in all human eyes impel them to take in new images, and so, having started at the upper left, readers’ eyes naturally—and involuntarily—move to the right. 

As a result, human eyes do essentially what the eyes of the subjects in the EyeTrackShop study did: after centering on the full image, they move to the upper left to start reading, and then sweep across to the right to continue reading. Therefore, whenever you click to a new slide, your audience’s eyes start reading at the upper left of the screen and sweep across to the right.

If your slide is densely packed with images, numbers, and/or text, your audience’s eyes will not see the entire image on the first rightward move; they will have to come back to the left and go back to the right again. The denser the slide, the more times your audience’s eyes will have to traverse the screen, the more traverses they make, the less they will hear of what you are saying.

Do you see where this is going? Back to the familiar Less is More principle, and this new added corollary: Reduce the number of moves your audience’s eyes must make to understand your slide.  

Apply this basic approach to the two most common slides in presentations today: text and bars.

• Avoid wordwrap in text

• Eliminate left axes in bar charts.  

You saw these principles applied in a prior blog, but they’re worth another look:

Feel how your eyes naturally take in each slide: they start at the left and swing to the right.

Do the same for all your presentations. Design effective slides by reducing the number of eye moves your audiences must make.

Minimize the processing their eyes—and their brains—must do. Let them spend their energy and time focused on you.

This post also appears on Indezine.com 

* Fixation Order Courtesy of EyeTrackShop, All Rights Reserved.