Ten Easy Steps to Presenting

Putting together a powerpoint presentation for the purpose of promoting an idea or campaign can be quite daunting if you don’t know what your doing.  With little time, you have to sell yourself in the best way possible, making sure that you get everthing you want communicated to the audience without losing their interest.  This in itself can be a near impossible task.  Thus, when I stumbled upon a blog that simplifed the process of creating a successful powerpoint presentation into ten easy steps, I could not help but take notice.  The ten steps outlined in the blog make a clear and easy process out of making a presentation a memorable one.  By covering all of the bases mentioned in the steps, you can be sure that you will have created an informational,educational and interesting presentation that will do its job to sell the audience.  I know the next time I am making a presentation I will be sure to have these steps beside me.  If I had known these ten steps earlier, I would have saved myself a lot of stress!

Becoming Familiar With Various Media Outlets

I found a blog written by a PR student at the University of Oregon and I thought it brought up a valuable point, one that I am often guilty of.  That article is called Naming Your Media and it points out the fact, that as PR professionals it is our job to thoroughly familiarize ourselves with various media outlets.  The article pokes fun at Sarah Palin and her interview with Katie Couric, when she was not able to name the media that she follows.  I think that we can learn from Palin and not make the mistake of embarrassing ourselves in our professional jobs.  The article also makes an important point, that in order to make our pitches effective, we must know media inside and out.  This means doing the research and most importantly building relationships!

Clearly, media relations is a very important part of our professional skills.  If we are not consumers of media, then how do we expect our target stakeholders to be.  I know that it is hard with our busy schedules, but it is very important that we are familiar with newspapers, magazines and television and radio shows both on the national and local level.