In the unlikely event that you haven’t yet heard of this nefarious noisemaker, here are the facts: it’s loud; it’s indigenous to African sporting events; and it’s droned so loudly at every World Cup match this year that programmers have built custom filters that remove its sound from games, and many fans have called for its abolishment.

So Google put a Vuvuzela button in Youtube.

Not, as you might expect, to filter it out. Instead, the button adds the unmistakeable droning to any video clip for which it’s enabled.

Changing Youtube isn’t something that’s done lightly. For one thing, every time Google changes the Youtube interface, millions of visitors’ browsers need to re-download its components, generating a flood of new traffic that would otherwise be cached in browsers if the interface hadn’t changed. That Flash plug-in is 132.61 KBytes, and Quantcast estimates Youtube receives around 100M unique visitors a month.

Bandwidth consumption aside, as every good web operator knows, changes are bad simply because they break things. There’s also testing to consider. Google probably has clever ways to minimize the impact of new components, but however you slice it, changes to a popular part of the UI cost the company money.

What’s more, this is a feature with no real utility. It’s an annoyance, a trick, a novelty. It doesn’t add anything to the viewing experience — in fact, it outright ruins it.

As a marketer, would you have allowed this?

Imagine that you’re an executive in a multi-billion-dollar public company. One of your employees suggests that she modify the user interface of your site with a feature that makes things worse. What do you say?

If you’re a traditional marketer, you say no. And maybe put a disparaging remark in her employment file, or place a concerned call to HR. There’s no ROI, no business justification. It’s a risk that can easily be avoided.

But if you’re a modern marketer, you might just do it.

Consider: Google is facing criminal charges in three countries for violation of privacy, as part of its misguided attempts to map the world’s information as it drives past unsecured wifi networks. The case is prompting some countries to make unencrypted wifi illegal. At the same time, they’re rumoured to be building a direct competitor to Facebook, armed with far more information about each of us than Zuckerberg’s mad dream ever had.

And yet Google’s fanbase largely overlooks such gaffes because, well, Google comes across as a harmless college roommate, playing the occasional prank.

The importance of rhetoric

Let’s talk for a minute about rhetoric. As an excellent article on teaching kids to argue effectively reminded me, appeals within rhetorical debate come in three forms:

• Logos, or logic. This is the appeal to rationality, using arguments that are consistent and based on facts and reason: “You should drive to the restaurant because it is far, and travelling far by foot is likely to cause blisters.”
• Pathos, or empathy. This is the appeal to the audience, tugging at their heartstrings: “Cool people drive cars; you want to be cool, don’t you?”
• Ethos, or reputation. An authority on the subject, or someone respected, can appeal to that reputation to convince others: “I’m your father and I said so,” is a (possibly ineffective) argument based on reputation.

All rhetorical appeals are based on one or more of these strategies. You employ them in order to convince someone else of your point of view.

Social networks and the “flatness” of the Web have changed two things for public relations. First, PR is increasingly about reputation (ethos) of the organization — BP versus Google, for example — than the logos and pathos. And second, the message isn’t what you put in a press release; it’s what the mob infers from your actions.

Playfulness puts deposits in the Ethos bank

I can’t say whether Google understands this explicitly. It may be that they have the best parts of Rove, Machiavelli and Sun Tzu trapped in a giant computer, some Illuminati Frankenstein plotting dystopian machinations from the shadows. More likely, the company has grasped the humanizing aspects of mischief through its culture, and knows intuitively that a spoonful of hijinks helps the medicine go down.

Others are grasping this, too. The Superbowl ad is fast becoming the Youtube ad (Old Spice, I’m looking at you.)

Some ads don’t even make it to the Superbowl, and still get widespread attention while adjusting your perception of a brand (the Sienna Swagger Wagon is a good example.)

And some aren’t even ads. Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Collegehumor’s Dumbdumb is a great example of this. Just watch their first project.

Go on, watch it. Trust me.

But those are just advertising. What Google, and others like it, are demonstrating is cultural. When Zappos got the price wrong on some products, it lost $1.5M. By honoring that price, despite the loss, the company earned goodwill, free press — and the benefit of the doubt in future; despite this, cynics speculated that it was just a PR stunt.

Traditional marketers want to control the content of the message, and the means of distribution. They like their story told in predictable, contrived soundbites, saltered with hyperbole and peppered with meaningless adjectives, blanded by committee. They love their press releases, their positioning statements, their careful constraint of who talks to whom. But a press release is the worst way to start a conversation. In addition to bringing nothing to the conversation, it distances the author from the audience, rather than building rapport through humor and dialogue.

Fortunately for the rest of us, traditional marketers and the fluff they produce are fast becoming irrelevant.

But what if you have something more complex to say — a business plan, for example? What if you’re giving a colleague a competitive analysis? Or proposing a new product? How long should that document be?

In my experience, you should follow the seatback rule. This is the time between when a pilot asks passengers to put their seatbacks up and tray tables away, and the time when it’s safe to use portable electronic devices.

I like this rule because it suggests several things:

• The document has to get to their seatback. It probably has to go through an admin, or a to-do list that says, “print this for reading on the flight to Boston.” Make that obvious, and be aware not only of the document’s contents, but also how it gets in front of the intended reader.
• The document must be short. You have roughly ten minutes of their attention — less, if they decide to watch the video explaining how to do up their seatbelt.
• What you write must be easy to consume. That means short sentences, a good up-front summary, bulleted lists, tables, and diagrams. Long prose will make them tune out. Lighting won’t be perfect, and it’ll likely be stuffed in a folder with other papers, so use good line spacing and column widths to maximize readability.
• Hide supporting material near the back, or better yet, in a separate document for a follow-up. If you have a summary of revenues, put the detailed work in a separate spreadsheet they can have someone else review. If you’re painting a picture of a market, compare competitors on a few important dimensions, then put the detailed descriptions of them in an appendix.
• Don’t assume access to online materials. While it’s tempting to embed hyperlinks in a PDF, many readers won’t follow them. I’m always astonished at how many early-adopters of technology have their assistants print out documents for them to read.
• Have a clear call to action. The perfect outcome for many documents is a scrawled, “we should do this” or “set up a meeting” on the front page, which will then be handed to an administrator. Make it easy to achieve this.
• Address the reader’s basic questions: What’s this about? Why should I care? What action is required? Why should I take it? Most time-impoverished executives have some form of personal inbox processing (borrowed loosely from Getting Things Done) that encourages them to decide, very quickly, whether something should be Done, Delegated, Deferred, or Discarded. Understanding their mindset and making it easy for them to act appropriately is priceless.

Next time you’re writing a document — whether it’s a white paper for a prospect, a business proposal, a market analysis, or any other message you need to get to a busy, time-poor audience, use the seatback test. For that matter, next time you’re on a flight, print out a few documents (such as competitors’ collateral or analyst reports) and see how fast you tune out. Most written documents are lousy. It’ll make you realize just how much of an advantage clear, concise communications can be.

[Update: Beth Kanter has re-posted this piece over on her blog; she's had some great guest posters keeping things moving over there while she makes the move from Boston to San Francisco. If you're looking for other resources on social networking and nonprofits, there's no place better than Beth's.]

Last week, we helped out our friends at Visible Government with their Beers for Canada campaign. In the end, the campaign raised just over $1,000 in two days; donations will help open government data to citizens and promote transparency in public offices.  We learned a lot about what did and didn’t work, and in the interests of transparency, we thought we’d share some of the lessons we learned along the way (and see if we can collect some ideas for next time.)

How it worked

A week before Canada Day (July 1) we built and tested a simple site that encouraged donors to “buy their country a beer” — basically making a donation. We told a few key bloggers and Twitter personalities about it beforehand; then, on June 30, we started talking about it online. We continued to mention it, and amplified what others were saying, until midday on July 2.

From the outset, this was a short-term campaign built around a single day. We did this to give it urgency and purpose. We chose to start talking on June 30 because so many people were out the office (and away from their computers) on the holiday itself. But it’s important to realize the differences between a short-term campaign (minimal upfront work, strong word of mouth, modest goals, and real-time virality through Twitter) and a longer one. The timeframe also meant that most blog coverage only hit on July 1st (and thanks to all the bloggers who covered us!)

What worked? What didn’t? What would we have changed? Here’s a quick list.

What worked?

While this was our first Twitter campaign, we did manage to get some things right. Here‘s what worked:

• We built analytics into the process. We used bit.ly (to track viral spread), Google Analytics (for goal conversions), Paypal audit accounts (to see donation amounts) and Clicky (for real-time web analytics.) Clicky is essential for short-term campaigns because it provides minute-by-minute visitor information, whereas most analytics tools only show traffic daily.
• We made the action obvious. We had one simple goal for people to accomplish on the donation site: donate. We even broke it into three different tiers (beer, pitcher, and round) to make it straightforward.
• We didn’t build it all ourselves. We used Paypal for donations; while it has its issues, it’s also a well-known and trusted brand, and we seem respectable by association. We also used free services like Google Groups and Clicky. This means we didn’t need to code too much.
• We set up tracking with hashtags and keyword searches. This meant we could watch the activity online and amplify it or respond to questions.
• We had plenty of ways for people to reach us. We had links to the Visible Government website, and generated enquiries there. We also linked to the Google Group discussion, which added new members and triggered conversations.
• We had a great cause. The simple fact is that without a decent motive, you won’t have much success. People felt they were doing their civic duty by mentioning us, which helped spread. If your cause isn’t just, people will feel icky promoting it.
• We tested it a lot. Even though we didn’t find every mistake, the launch was surprisingly smooth because we verified it properly and used real infrastructure (from our friends at Syntenic.)
• We had a simple, catchy message. “Buy your country a beer” was strangely patriotic, and people liked it. Made To Stick is the bible for clear, simple messages. Early on in the design process, we were tempted to overload the message–something like, “Buy your country a beer and promote open interactions between federal government and Canadian citizens.” That wouldn’t have worked because it wasn’t simple. But “buy your country a beer” is intriguing. Remember that the tagline’s purpose is to provoke interest. Once you’ve got someone’s attention you can do things with it.
• Set up Reddit, Digg, and other social news aggregators. We put badges on the Beers For Canada website encouraging people to Digg us and promote us on other social news aggregators. This made it easy for people to support us and spread the word.
• We set the right kinds of goals up front. How do you know you won if you don’t know where the finish line is?  One of the first things we did was set goals for the campaign.  We wanted to see donations, of course, but we also wanted to see unique visits to the Beers for Canada site and how many went further to the Visible Government site. When we started we had no idea how the campaign would do so we focused less on numbers (500$ or 5,000 site visits) and more on what we wanted to achieve (visibility and engagement.)
• We used calendar meetings to remind promoters. This was a neat trick. When we asked people to mention us online, we sent them a calendar invite as a reminder. This way we knew when they’d do it, and since most of the people we asked had an iPhone or a Blackberry, they could do it from wherever they were–particularly important on a holiday (though as you’ll see below, in hindsight we could have spread those out more over a longer period of time.)

What did we learn?

Here are some of the lessons we’ve learned, and the things we’d have done differently.

Beforehand, in the planning phase:

• A short timeframe limits others’ ability to build online context about you. When you’re running a fundraiser, people want context. It’s a catch-22: If you do something quick and spontaneous, you’ll build excitement and mystery, but you won’t have the time to inform bloggers and the press about what you’re doing far enough in advance for them to provide details and perspectives. If you tell bloggers too soon, you lose the excitement.
• Plan out your whole message before you send the first tweet.We carefully crafted website copy but didn’t think enough about who would tweet what, when. In a real-time campaign, your copywriting isn’t done when you publish the site. It’s constant, and it needs to be planned.
• Schedule things, and have a single coordinator for the life of the campaign. At noon on June 30th, one of us put out our first tweet–and forgot to use the bit.ly URL that would track the spread of the campaign.  This would have been avoided by having an initial schedule, and then having a single person adjust that schedule as things progressed and feedback came back from the analytics tools and the campaign. You simply can’t assume that ’someone’ will do it.
• Be transparent and obvious. Make sure the people affiliated with the campaign are clearly identified. I was personally thanking a lot of our supporters but my connection to either the campaign or Visible Government was not clear since it was coming from my personal account. Not only does this keep your campaign transparent it help you build you reputation and social capital making it more likely you will get those people back for a donation. One possibility would have been to temporarily change our avatars to include a visual cue–like the Visible Government maple leaf–for all those officially behind the campaign.
• Have a clear call to action. The website was pretty blunt about donations. We set it up, then told the world. What we quickly realized was that the Tweets themselves–not just the website–needed to be clear what we were asking people to do. Were we asking people just to tell their friends? To donate money? To watch the hashtag? To visit the site and learn more? In Twitter’s 140 characters, there’s only room for one call to action. You need to tell people what to do and make it easy for them to do it.
• Facebook is for slow burn, Twitter is for ADD. Twitter’s like speed dating: you see something, and quickly decide if you want more. By contrast, Facebook favors a groundswell of support: as more and more of your friends like something, you do too. The duration of your campaign affects which social networks you’ll rely on. We shouldn’t have wasted time on Facebook for a campaign of this duration.
• Define analytics goals better. We didn’t take the time to implement goal funnels within the system, which was a shame. What’s more, referral URLs are useless in a world where many Twitter users rely on Tweetdeck, Seesmic Desktop, or the Twitter client on their Blackberry or iPhone. To address this, we should have segmented shortened URLs using Google’s URL builder to inject metadata into the shortened URLs so we’d get a better idea of visitor source.

During the campaign:

• Personal claims of action work best. Megabloggers like Tim O’Reilly, Om Malik, Austin Hill, Michael Geist, Tara Hunt, Mathew Ingram and others generated a ton of traffic and awareness. But the messages that generated the most donations–rather than just visits–were those where the RT testified to an action. Someone who said “I just bought a round – you should too” generated far more actual donations than someone who just said, “check this out”.
• Have an FAQ–and update it. We drafted an initial FAQ that had lots of information in it, as well as links to Visible Government. We were able to direct people here if they had questions. But we were missing certain pieces of information (for example, why donations weren’t tax deductible) and took too long to respond to questions and update the FAQ.
• Vary the message. Tweets about hashtag visualizations showing campaign growth, mentioning who was blogging about us, and retweeting others all kept the dialogue going, but they were done ad hoc and should have been better planned.
• You only get one chance to make an impression. We live in an information-starved world. People will only click on a link once unless they think there’s new news. So if your first message says, “check this out,” they will. If after that you say, “donate to this cause” they’re less likely to: they’ve already seen it. Only when there’s new information–”50 people have bought their country a beer”–will the audience consider revisiting things.
• Make the site interactive. If we’d provided people with somewhere to comment or share their thoughts–or even to suggest how the donations should be used–we’d have had more raw material for the campaign and could play back these comments to the online community that was discussing it. This also gives people a reason to check back and see how the discussion is progressing. Again, with a 36-hour campaign, this may be a lot more effort than you’re willing to expend, but we might have been able to use a Subreddit or some other already-built system.
• Spread your messages over time. Lots of people agreed to help spread the message, but it happened all at once and the initial message quickly lost traction. It would have been far more effective to have one person mention us, then let the second person tell the world all the great things that happened after the first mention, and so on. By firing all of our guns at once, we didn’t let the message “snowball” and build on existing momentum. A campaign like this needs lots of ’seeds’ to get the message out.
• Give donors a way to tell others automatically. We made it possible for people to tweet the site from a link on the site. But we should have had an option, selected by default, that made a tweet saying, “I just bought the country a beer and you can too.” This should have included a different shortened URL or analytics link, so we could differentiate first-visit traffic from viral donor traffic.
• Respond in person. You can’t plan for everything so make sure you are ready to answer any questions both publicly and promptly. Also, thank people for their donations — but respect their privacy; if you can thank them through direct messages, great. If they made a sizeable donation, you can acknowledge it by saying, “someone just donated $100″ (or in our case, “someone just bought the country a round.”) Don’t single out donors publicly as they may not want the attention.
• Keep people updated. If you’re tracking donations, tell people about the progress. Celebrate big donations or interesting blogs. The more you can show people that others are doing things, the more engaged they’ll be. Appeal to their inner lemming. We could have build a dashboard for statistics (donations, reddit ranking, retweet count, page views, etc.) We did discuss the amount of transparency we wanted (which is ironic for a transparent government initiative.) The real dilemma here is that you need to wait until the news is newsworthy. If we’d said, “hey, we have a total of $14 donated!” people would have discounted the success of the campaign.

After the campaign:

• Have a next step. There’s a lot of positive sentiment about Visible Government now. We have some great ideas for how to use the money, including the forthcoming Code for Canada contest and an initiative to get computer science students to develop transparency applications. It’d be great if we had this ready to discuss when the campaign ended, because it would allow us to continue and amplify the engagement that the campaign generated. Plus, it’d let people feel good about what they’ve done. In other words, every campaign is part of a bigger picture of long-term connection with donors, markets, and audiences.

The results

Even though we didn’t focus on the numbers too much this time around, we still set some goals so we’d know what we were measuring.  Not only did this give us a measure of success it helped evaluate the experience as a whole and focus us to come up with these lessons.  We could clearly look at graphs and numbers and say “Yup. Nobody talked about us for over 4 hours,” and then wonder why.

• Viral spread versus megablogger attention. This campaign was promoted almost entirely on Twitter and using our personal and professional networks to spread the word. We were fortunate enough to have some really influential people blog and tweet about it. But we didn’t see the viral growth among others’ networks that we’d have liked.
• Conversion funnels and donations. Though tens of thousands of people read the tweets (these people have over a million followers collectively!), we only saw 1,642total visits, but that translated to about $1,000 in donations. Conversion rates were less than 0.2%, which we attribute in part to the passive message we used at first. In other words, the tone of the campaign emphasized attention (“visit this page”) over conversion (“please donate”).
• Attention generated. Our bounce rate — the number of people who saw one page, then left — was only 51%, which is great: over 25% of visitors wanted to learn more about the campaign. What’s more, Visible Government saw a huge spike in attention.  Compared to the previous week traffic spiked by 300%!  We also have several conversations with the press underway as a result of the campaign.

In the end this was a quick-and-dirty campaign that raised some well-deserved money and got good visibility on a national scale. Along the way, we learned a lot about campaigning in a digital world, particularly one based on real-time word of mouth.

Now we want to hear from you. What’s worked for you before?  What else should we consider for next time? What did we do wrong?

[Disclosure: Rednod's Alistair Croll is on the board of directors of Visible Government]

One of Rednod’s clients, FarmsReach, fits that bill especially well. They launched on Tuesday at the Green:Net conference. After ten months of hard work on a web platform that could actually transform the local, sustainable food industry, the company’s finally taking the covers off.

Best of all, the company won the inaugural People’s Choice award at the Launchpad event with CEO Lana Holmes’ great presentation. The buzz has been huge, and while FarmsReach is taking it slow, focusing on San Francisco farms and restaurants, it’s a model that can work across North America in short order.

Congratulations to the FarmsReach team.

Also worth checking out is Saul Griffith’s awesome presentation on the energy we use, which takes a decidedly engineering-centric view at the daunting challenge humans face in trying to slake our thirst for energy. Green:Net was an excellent — and thought-provoking — event.

Consider Twitter:

I have only a few pixels to identify people. Many of these are surprisingly memorable: GigaOm, Laughingsquid, and others stand out nicely. The personal icon shows up elsewhere, too. Here’s the icon strip from my chat (names removed to protect the innocent.)

And there are “visitor log” tools like Mybloglog.

Unfortunately, I’m breaking my own rule: I have different photos for Mybloglog. It’s time for some brand cleanup. Here’s what I’m going to do:

• Decide if I want a photo or a logo.
  • Folks like Om Malik, or Redmonk, or Laughingsquid are so closely associated with their brands that their logoes stand out well.
  • The other option is a photo. Given that I wind up having headshots in conference programmes (a constant reminder nobody’s paying me for my looks) and several loose associations (Rednod, Bitcurrent, Interop, Unconference, Bitnorth, whatever) rather than one allegiance, it probably makes sense to use a photo.
• Use a close shot that’s visible, rather than a full portrait. Mitch Joel does this very well; it’s just forehead and glasses, but you know it’s Mitch in a second.
• Pick a color scheme. Something that’s consistent with colors of Bitcurrent, Rednod, or whatever I’m most associated with. Hopefully this is also something that’s not taken (a red/green/blue/yellow square might look a little too much like Windows, for example.)
• Reduce the number of colors in the image. This makes it easier to follow a color scheme, and has the added beneft of making resizing clearer.
• Invest some time in sizing the image to target resolutions. Several of the sites out there auto-crop or resize the image you submit, so sending it in the right size results in much better image quality.
• Claim the name. Figure out all of the sites that have an avatar/portrait, and make sure I’ve got the image.

Sean called this a Personal Favicon, and I think he’s right. The little 16×16 icon that appears in the address bar is a brand, reduced to its barest of bones.

I’m betting that a branded personal icon, particularly in microblogging circles, will become something trademarked and defensible that graphic designers add to their list of design deliverables for a startup. There will be a land grab, too: I’m not going to choose black and green, or blue and white, because those are pretty well known.

One of the ways they participate is by delivering Short Bits, 10-minute long presentations on a topic they care about. This year’s general theme is The Other 99 Percent, and we’re looking at how technology has changed non-technologists’ lives.

Getting an idea across cleanly is always hard, and presenting is a challenge for many people. So for those folks presenting (and anyone else who cares abount communicating) I decided to try and summarize the process of creating and delivering a presentation. I’m constantly humbled by great presenters (and there are some links to noteworthy ones at the bottom of this entry.)

It boils down to knowing what your point is, and getting it across memorably.

First: What’s the point?

Many people don’t know what the point is. What are you trying to achieve? What behavior would you like your audience to exhibit? What should they do right after leaving your presentation? Do you want them to tell a friend? Buy a product? Sign a term sheet? Change their lifestyle? Many people will be tempted to choose several answers, but you can only choose one.

In other words…

Have one idea. Really. Just one. Ask yourself, “when someone’s done, what’s the one idea they’ll tell their friend this presentation was about.” And then worry about that one idea and communicating it well.

If you haven’t already devoured Made To Stick, possibly the best book on the subject ever, do so. I spend most of my time working on this with clients. Once you know the point of the presentation, know how your slides help make that point, and know the point of each slide. “If you could say only one sentence per slide, what would it be?” Then go ahead and say only one sentence.

If you remember nothing else about this (lengthy) entry, it’s this: Have one idea.

Then: Put the pieces together

Now you know the point, develop the structure. Most arguments can be split into several statements. Take, for example, “blogging is good for business.” How might we subdivide that idea?

Take a look at the diagram on the right. Each statement can be broken down into subordinate statements, often several times. In this example, we’ve broken the presentation into eight sub-statements. That could be eight slides. The point of each slide is a single statement, and the point of the deck as a whole is that blogging is good for business.

I love this approach because it ensures that you’re starting with the point you want to make and working back. Just don’t feel the need to keep subdividing: When a point can be made on one slide, you’re done. For example, if it’s inherently clear that “engagement makes buyers more attentive,”you probably don’t need to go further.

This can sometimes lead to a lot of slides.

Which brings me to my next point…

Don’t worry about slide count, worry about simplicity. Dick Hardt and Lawrence Lessig (whose eponymous style is now legend) know this well. They have hundreds of slides, but there’s often one word on the slide.

If someone says, “that has to be ten slides or less” it’s because they’re assuming you’ll spend two minutes on each slide.

So …

Don’t spend two minutes on a slide. Guy Kawasaki has a 10/20/30 rule here; he says 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30-point font. Which means 2 minutes per slide. I tend to disagree.

Guy is a VC. And VC meetings tend to have a lot of interaction. If you’ll be discussing a slide with the audience, assume it will take five minutes to do so. This is why VC presentations often run over: Everyone wants to chime in. So for interactive presentations, the 10/20/30 rule works.

But for other situations if you’re going to spend less than two minutes per slide, you can have more slides. It’s all part of your personal style.In this age of short-attention-span, fast and entertaining works well.

Until this point, you’re just working on structure. Plain text on a plain background, until you know what you’re going to say. To make that entertaining, and to support your content, it’s time to add some personality.

Strive to …

Edutain. This is a strange word we use a lot when talking about Interop (where I’ve been chairing and presenting tracks for the past few years.) Edutainment is a recognition that presenting is as much about entertainment as education. If you’re not entertaining people, they’ll tune out. You’ll be forgettable. One way to see who’s paying attention is to plant easter eggs — for example, stuff some Klingon currency in there and out the Trekkies in the audience. It also keeps people engaged.

(I was going to call this piece “presenting like a rockstar” until I started looking and found a blog entry with that title, which makes many of the points about entertainment. “Channel your inner David Lee Roth,” encourages Chris Brogan.)

But don’t use pictures for pictures alone …

Images should add context. If you’re talking about the world’s currencies, shots of money show there are many currencies. You don’t need to name them, or explain what denomination they are. The simple fact that there are many currencies has made your point. The audience understands it in half a second. Then they’re ready to hear what you have to say. Which you will say succinctly and clearly, because your audience is already wondering where their next coffee is coming from.

Which means…

Be surprisingly brief. For Bitnorth, the Short Bits will be ten minutes long. That’s enough time to get up, make a point, and sit down. It means your slides better be ready, your throat better be clear, and you’d better be on.

I once gave a speech that everyone expected to take thirty minutes. It was a university affair, with about three thousand people in attendance, many of them families. They were bored by this point, and it was the closing speech. I started with the words, “I do not wish you good luck.” That got their attention. Then I spoke for three minutes, and got off the stage. I made one point, and it was over. You have no idea how grateful people were.

Cleanup: Sweating the small stuff

Once you’ve got your structure and story done, it’s time to put on an editorial hat. Here are some quick things to look for.

Take out half the words. When you think you’re done, remove half of them. Start with conjunctions: And, the, but, with, and so on. Seriously: Count the words, then tell yourself you’re going to remove half of them.

If you have a list, it’s sub-bullets. In other words, if I have a bullet that says, “Food is tasty, filling, and expensive” then make a slide called “Food” and put three bullets in: “Tasty”, “Filling”, and “Expensive”. Now you have room for some graphics too, if they help make your point.

Use 24 point font, at a minimum. Bigger is better. Keynote, Apple’s presentation software, actually makes it hard to have more than three bullets (whereas Powerpoint automatically shrinks font size to accommodate verbosity.) I’m convinced that this, not the flashy graphics transitions, is what yields better presentations.

Don’t break the flow. In addition to keeping it simple and telling a story, Ron Shelvin makes the point of knowing your transitions, because nothing sucks as much as watching someone try to remember what they were going to say. Awkward transitions take the audience out of the flow. Is everything a logical segue? If you have a presentation tool that supports a speaker’s view, seeing the upcoming slide can be particularly helpful.

Keep it visually simple. Don’t choose fancy fonts, themes, and layouts. More than one font makes a slide look like a ransom note. And unless you’re a graphic designer, too many pictures looks like a terrifying neon Myspace page. Neither are pleasing to look at. Volumes have been written on slide design, but when all else fails, choose a dark or light background and a contrasting light or dark font sans serif font in a strong weight.

Now it’s the big day

Get to the venue early, scope it out. If possible, stand at the podium and imagine the room full of people. If you can, check the mic and slide clicker if there is one. This will help cement things in your head, and should make you more comfortable.

Get them to pay attention. Your first mission is to get them to look up from their PDAs and notebooks. If they don’t, they won’t learn. Say something controversial, or better yet, call them out on it.

Jonathan Zittrain, who I first saw at Web2Summit a couple of years ago, was astonishingly good at this (in fact, his presentation ranks as one of the best I’ve seen.) He started out talking about how he had to “earn the right” for people to pay attention to him, in a slightly self-deprecating tone, that immediately made people pay attention. I wish I could find a recording of it somewhere.The next best thing is his blog.

Early on, set the ground rules. Will you take questions at the end? If so, tell them, so they’re not waiting to ask them.

Don’t read your slides. Everybody warns against this, and everybody does it anyway. The best example of how not to read your slides is Stephen Colbert’s The Word. Seriously, watch a clip: He’s not reading. He’s not even saying the same thing as his slides. They’re disagreeing with him, mocking him. Heck, even Seth Godin thinks the best presentation might be none at all. Besides, if you just read your slides, you may as well sit down and hand them out. Your audience can read just fine.

Respect your audience. They’re giving you their time. Make it worth their while. If you can make it personal, and relate to them well, it will help a great deal. This often means a dialogue (not just a show of hands) that lets them know you care about their opinions.

One of the hardest things to do when presenting is to anticipate the audience. What questions would they want to ask? How does the slide you’re on relate back to your main point? Much of this can be gleaned from subtle cues: Are they engaged, or distracted? Are they looking at you, or the slide?

Finish early. Leave room for questions, let them know how to contact you, and leave them wanting more.

Some more stuff to get you going:

Here are some links to great posts and outstanding presentations that will start your juices flowing.

• The ten best presentations: From Steve Jobs introducing the Mac to Gladwell’s Blink. Some overlaps with stuff mentioned above. Great inspiration.
• Why bad presentations happen to good causes: Recommended by Seth Godin, this is a free downloadable book on presenting.
• Stepcase Lifehack on the best presentations. More from Chris Brogan.
• The best kept secret of great presentations. Surprise, it’s that persuading others isn’t easy. But read this (awesome) collection of tips and samples and you’ll have a head start.
• Everything I know about presentations, I learned in Theatre School: A great piece by Darren Barefoot, a fellow Canadian based in BC.
• 43 folders’ take on making presentations better: With links to Presentation Zen, Beyond Bullet Points, and others. Plus (damn him) he already used the Colbert example. Sigh. Are there no original ideas left?
• Practice: There are lots of high-pressure presentation games out there (Powerpoint Karaoke is a great way to warm up. Slideshare even has a Powerpoint Karaoke Generator!) O’Reilly runs Ignite, an after-hours event where presenters talk while their slides advance every 15 seconds. Talk about forcing you to make your point.

Bitnorth’s going to be an amazing event, and some of the presentations are sure to be memorable. With only 10 minutes to speak, we’re hoping even first-time presenters can make their mark. And if they have one idea, and commnicate it clearly, they’ll rock.

Marketing is increasingly about attention, and less about product.

Most competent people can build a competent product or service. But in today’s world of instant attention, it’s often more about how to succeed in the market than how to get the product right.

I had lunch a couple of weeks ago with Robin Axon, formerly of VenturesWest (and candidate for the coolest cyborg name of a VC ever.) We were chatting, as often happens among Canadian entrepreneurs, about The Canadian Ailment. Despite tremendous competence in product design, we never seem to make it North of the Border in the same way the US does. Even US bookstores, apparently, know this instinctively.  But more on that later; back to Robin.

He had a pretty clear theory about what ails us, which I’ll paraphrase (badly) here:

Canadians try to succeed with a product, but Americans succeed with a market strategy.

Ask a Canadian why they’ll win, and they’ll probably cite a feature or a technical merit. “We have 30% more capacity” or “ours lets you sort by user.” By contrast, an American entrepreneur is as likely to cite an unfair advantage: “I know a guy,” or “there’s a new law coming out next week,” or maybe even, “I have a way to get every college kid using this in three months.” Anything that will make them stand out in the RFI, on the search engine, or at the watercooler.

Think about the recent Twitter exodus. We’ve seen Plurk (Twitter with timelines!) and Identi.ca (Twitter, but open source!) At the same time, you’ve got Friendfeed (“Our word-of-mouth comes from frustrated Twitter users, especially the heavyweights!”)

Which one sounds American? You guessed it: Friendfeed.

To be sure, Plurk and Twitter look great. I’ll probably get a lot of heat for dumping on fellow Canadians, particularly those with visibility and traction. But I think the point is still valid: Standing out is something that isn’t on most Canadians’ radars.

This is especially true for those who haven’t built a company with a global demand. Sadly, most Canadians that think like this have long since moved South, and there are precious few left in Canada.

One way to find your angle is to do the opposite of what people expect.  I was reminded of this in San Francisco a few weeks ago.

California’s recent legalization of gay marriage has created a flurry of weddings. If you wanted to capitalize on this, you might start organizing events, or ordaining ministers, or promoting your hotel as an ideal venue.

I walked past an enterprising bookstore that zigged when others had zagged. Their window display? Divorce and broken marriages.

Intentional or not, they’d taken a very different tack. If everyone’s talking marriage, why not focus on separation?

Whether it’s a renewed interest in pre-nuptial agreements or people trying to leave someone because now they can marry their longtime love interest, it’s a different approach that stands out.

If you’re trying to stand out from the crowd, spend some time thinking about opposites. If people charge a lot, make it free. If people make it free, charge a lot. If everyone worries about proprietary, go open source. If everyone’s seen as high-tech, stake out the low-tech position. It’s an excellent mental game to play, and often leads to new strategies and angles.

It’s a message that’s echoed in books like Blue Ocean Strategy: Don’t compete on the terms of the market — find a new market. The alternative is to race after everyone else, and see if you can beat them at a game whose rules they’ve already defined.

Tim O’Reilly said as much at Foocamp (by way of Jesse Robbins, via Twitter): “Going after the money is the surest way to end up chasing someone’s ass.”

Instead, try going after the different. Take the one less travelled by. You’ll either fail spectacularly or find your groove.

This campaign does three things really well. If you’re trying to put together a marketing effort, you should:

• Know the purpose of your marketing effort. A lot of times I have clients tell me, “we need to do some marketing.” They’re often surprised when I push back. But unless they know what outcome the marketing should have — and how to measure it — it’s a waste of time. The Nova Scotia Liquor Commission clearly wants to sell more wine, and can measure sales of wine that accompany beer purchases.
• Know your target audience. This picture’s taken in the gigantic beer fridge. There’s no wine in this room. It’s where the men go to get cases of beer. Nagging reminders from housewives with facemasks and towels on their heads might be stereotypical, but their target market notices them.
• Repetition, consistency, and simplicity. Every message is a variation on, “while you’re getting beer, bring some wine home for your wife.” There’s no way to mistake it. It’s something even a beer-obsessed weekender can grasp.

When it comes to beer, nothing beats Nova Scotia brewery Alexander Keith’s focus. They even have a bar (the Lower Deck, the “official home” of Keith’s.) Revel in these gems where a mad Scot channels Mike Meyers, some of my favorite ads of all time.

Spilly Talker

Label Peeler

Who’s With Me?

Beer Eulogy

Beautiful. “Often, I’d dreamt of a lake of beer. But not like this. Never like this.”

BTW, the actor who played this Scotsman was arrested on charges of child pornography, and Keiths has since pulled them. Sick bastard, but the ads are no less funny.

There’s always an overview slide up front. According to common wisdom, this is supposed to “tell them what you’re going to tell them.” But I have a slightly different take on it.

Sure, you have to say what industry you’re in, how much you’ll make, how you’ll make it, and why you’re the one to make it happen. And do all that in a couple of sentences. But your first slide has a different, more important purpose.

The purpose of the first slide is to change their mindset from “I have to sit through this” to “I get to sit through this.”

That’s it. The audience, likely VCs, are short on attention and flooded with mails. They have probably already heard your idea, spun several ways, and figured out many reasons why it might not work. They’re already aware of competitors, or legislation, or technical issues, that can kill you fast.

They’re also social creatures. Deal flow is a social thing, the passing of ideas and sound-bites at golf clubs and whiskey bars. Sure, that’s a stereotype, and I know several investors who are quiet, contemplative people with a tremendously open mind. But remember that whether they like it or not, VCs are paraded in front of the firm’s LPs and have to be “in play” to get the juciest deals. So they’re hungry for things they can share and discuss.

When you get in the room, they see your first slide and often wonder how quickly they can pull their blackberry out without being rude. The default assumption is that they “have to” sit through the presentation. At best, they’ll learn more about the industry or the team and it will be useful elsewhere.

If you use your first slide to change that to “I get to hear this,” you’ve won. Because now, they feel like they’re being let in on a secret. They’re going to find out about a new market, a new way of doing things, or something that changes the game. It will probably make them revise their mental model of your market. And give them something to talk about.

How do you do this? The good news is there are two simple ways. The bad news is that they’re hard to find.

• The first way is to tell them you’ve found an unfair advantage. That could be an exclusive partnership, some defensible technology, access to a channel nobody else has, legislation, or something else. Whatever the case, it gives you an unfair advantage in an existing business.
• The second (and often more exciting) way is to have discovered an inefficient market. Investors love inefficiencies, because the market rewards those who make things efficient with a share of the savings. Travelocity and Expedia did this for travel; Zillow and Hotpad are doing it for real estate.

So when you present, that first slide better change their mindset. If they’re on the edge of their seat, thinking, “I get to hear about this market or discovery” then they’re much more engaged, and much more likely to invest the mental energy in understanding your business.

If not, maybe now’s the time for them to check that mail about the cigar bar.

Many of the blog comments that came back concerned scarcity. The whole premise of Notchup was to help recruiters find the hottest candidates–the ones who weren’t looking. They figured that it was worth paying to talk to this talent, and with a decent paycheck at the end of it, even the most tight-mouthed candidate would be willing to part with some personal details.

But with popularity, the cachet of “reach the people who are hard to reach and not looking” goes away.I call this the Krispy Kreme problem. A friend of mine handled operations for the donut maker years ago (sort of the opposite of high tech), and he wondered to me one day whether the fact that you could get their donuts pretty much anywhere was a bad thing. He was right.

Unfortunately, scarcity doesn’t scale.

There was a time when Krispy Kreme was precious. Kids stuck their noses against the glass, watching the oozing, fried carbs scroll slowly by as they were drizzled with still more opaque white carbs.

The company found success, a combination or word-of-mouth cachet and decadent simplicity. Buoyed by investors, Krispy Kreme ventured into new markets.

At first this looked like a great idea. Even their choice of partners made sense. Astonishingly, this is a shot of the elevators at Harrods in England, with Krispy Kreme right next to the Parisian Tea Room. Wilde would have found the enthusiasm terribly earnest.

But then the company set up shop in airports and movie theatre lobbies. What was once 48-donut sports-team purchases became one-offs, and soon people realized it was just fried dough.

I’m convinced that scarcity drives popularity online. I have little evidence of this which I can publicly share. But many of the startups I talk to get better adoption when they have a “beta” screen and a “click here to get on our waiting list.”

In several cases I know of, a company that launches a product with an open beta fails to get the excitement they anticipated. This is because surfers are asking themselves whether they really need the service.But as soon as they have a “closed beta” where you need a password to get in, people flock to them. The decision is no longer about whether they need the service, but about whether they can get access to it before the passes run out. By introducing a false scarcity, the sites get enrollment up.

This is a dangerous, but necessary, game to play. Startups need users in order to learn what works and improve the process; but if those users sign up and never use the application, they won’t get the feedback that’s so essential as part of the beta process.

Then again, it’s always the cool clubs that have a lineup. And the lineup makes them cool.