Despite the carefully cultivated “Mr Grumpy” image, I’m actually an easily pleased kind of guy. And that’s worth knowing, because it can mean great things for your business.
I’ll prove it. Those of you with memories slightly better than a goldfish may recall that, in the July edition of this wonderful magazine, I was talking about the issues of keeping presenters to time. As a result, our esteemed editor had an e-mail from Philip Gibbs at IMS Communications. Introducing their Presenter Clock software.
It’s a nifty solution; as someone who has to stand on stages a lot for a living, I can confirm that the Laws of time do seem to become corrupted the moment a speaker’s foot touches the boards. The uncertainty of an audience’s reaction, the need to speed up or slow down a presentation, an anecdote taking slightly longer; all these factors can suddenly leave you feeling adrift from the space-time continuum.
And as IMS point out “Most presenters are given a time-slot and their audience tends to get quite angry if they over-run their time. In situations where people are bidding for a contract the time slot is often rigorously enforced”.
I’ll give you their sales pitch: “PresenterClock enables speakers to see exactly where they are in their presentation, how long they have left and what the next slide will be. Because the software is an Add-in for PowerPoint, any notes for slides can also be displayed alongside the countdown clock, giving extra support and peace of mind. Once inserted, all PresenterClock settings are saved within the PowerPoint presentation file. All PresenterClock information is displayed on one screen, which is only visible to the speaker. Clocks can be pre-set for multiple speakers to provide a seamless sequence of presentations all running perfectly to time.”
And here’s my favourite bit: “as the presenter nears the end of their allotted time the countdown timer can be set to change colour. And, if a presenter overruns, the timer will change colour and count up.” Fantastic. No no-one has any excuse for being on too long.
For the more complex presentations, or when a production crew is involved, there are a few other neat tricks. PresenterClock gives the producer control over sessions by allowing precise timing for each presenter, and giving them the ability to send brief messages to the presenter, such as “don’t forget the video clip”, or “get off now, the sniper has you in their sights”.
So, two valuable lessons this month. Firstly, if you have a good product, and bother to get in touch with leading industry magazines, you can almost do away with advertising. Secondly, write nice things about me, and then just bask in all the free publicity, just as Philip has done (although a bottle of fine malt will also help). What a smart and intelligent chap. Shame I now own the deeds of his house and souls of his children as payment, but what price PR, eh?