The Perversity of PowerPoint

Fresh from a holiday to Barcelona and Italy, I have been busy attacking my "to read" pile, when I came across this story, which illustrates the perversity of PowerPoint. And while it has nothing to do with digital publishing per se -- it has everything to do with effective communication.

This image was shown to General Stanley A. McChrystal, leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, to convey the complexity of the war.

And while the image certainly succeeded it also lead Gen. McChrystal to quip: “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war” -- which was followed by uproarious laughter -- probably not the creator's intention.

Finally. It may have taken a four-star general to opine what many of us have felt for years: that PowerPoint is not the medium for all things -- and certainly not for something as complex as war strategy. But think about something else: How many wo/man-hours went into creating this? You don't just slap this together (despite the fact that it looks like it was). Hours and hours were spent trying to pull something together that fell flat with its audience. And how many hours of productivity were lost by the members of the audience who had to sit through a mind-numbing presentation.

Effective communicators hate slide decks. They know that to connect with their audience -- they need to "read" the non-verbal cues and have listened to the conversations going on just before -- and tack accordingly. An effective communicator interacts with his or her audience -- hard to do when one is supposed to follow a scripted slide show. Personally I find decks to be cumbersome and counter-productive, and would prefer to go low tech -- or at most to use slides that illustrate a point.

A deck is a crutch -- usually, and I am on a limb here, for people who don't know what is going on -- or, more charitably, for those who do but who are nervous in front of crowds, or finally, for those who have a message to get out -- and don't care about the audience. PowerPoint is an anthama to the Hallmark slogan "When You Care to Send the Very Best." Stick a Don't in there.

While we talk about cost of time to produce these beasts of boredom -- how about what it costs to actually sit through them?? Dave Paridi, co-author of "Guide to PowerPoint," calculates the losses  from poor PowerPoints -- looking merely at the work to it takes to clarify a poor presentation. Frankly I think he way understates the losses.  Nowhere does he address the amount of lost productivity from the people who had to sit through the poor presentation to begin with -- and could they have received that information in some other format that would have been faster and more effective.

The reality is, we don't create a video for every instance of communication, and PowerPoint should not be the de facto messenger either. Think of slides as exclamation points -- and use sparingly.

Getting Man & Machine to Communicate

"Semantics is hot," declares Seth Grimes, "but only in a geeky sort of way." And then Grimes offers 11 different ways semantics is impacting -- search. In fact Semantic Search takes two geeky subjects and, when conjoined, attempts to become a precision tool for finding what the user really wants.

But what does the user really want? And here is the crux of the problem. The machine needs to discern the true question the user is asking when searching -- but the challenge is the machine and man do not share the same language. Man wants to ask a question -- well, naturally -- meaning highly unstructure. And machines need people to be structured. NLP, Natural Language Processing, is where the machine finally understands human-speak. (We're a long way off still -- but heading in the right direction.)

It helps if we know Boolean -- but few do. Really smart people I know may know that putting a + sign between words means AND, but few know that the - (minus) sign means NOT. Nor do they think to put phrases in "". Really smart people I know forget that really smart people don't know Boolean -- which leaves many really smart -- and not so smart people --having a dismal time when they are searching for things. (To prove my point -- this article on 10 Google Search Tricks has been in the top 10 in popularity for the last 10 days.)

Which circles back to why semantics is hot. Generating semantic metadata means machines can locate content about this -- when a person asks for that. It presents content to us by clustering content under categories -- so we may browse through and find what are looking for. Semantic Metadata is a great first step to getting man and machine to communicate.

Having Fun With Semantic Metadata

Last week, I hosted a webinar on Semantic Metadata for the company previously known as Nstein (now Open Text) -- along with two of my colleagues, Sheila Woo and Matt Mullen. Despite putting it together in just under 10 days we still had over 250 registrants, which proves my point that interest in Semantic Metadata has created a "hockey stick" graph; slight incline for 10 years -- and soaring upward now.

Matt and Sheila are uniquely well-versed in how semantic metadata can assist the largest of information providers, so it was an engaging webcast. We looked at how Semantic Metadata can boost Audience Engagement, how it can increase traffic and stickiness, how we could improve productivity and contain costs -- and how it can provide a unique search tool on both the back end and the front. When we polled the audience, more than 40% said they could imagine using Semantic Metadata to improve audience engagement. This tracks with Gilbane's analysis that Audience Engagement is the number one focus of enterprise Marketers.

When we turned it loose for questions we must have piqued the imaginations of many -- because over 25 questions flew in. The range was from how long does it take to implement (the obvious answer is the ever-annoying "it depends) to how do I create a taxonomy (this is Sheila's forté - so she riffed on that) you can go generic with an IPTC taxonomy or do an analysis of all your assets to create a custom taxonomy.

People were particularly intrigued with the idea of putting a "linguistic fingerprint" on assets --using a combination of linguistic and computational analysis -- so you can find content that highly similar to another. Or, as we say, "relevant content."

We had someone ask how you could use Semantic Metadata to improve information security, that was my baby: consider adding it into an email process to determine if sensitive information is being sent out through the firewall.

The truth is, Semantic Metadata, which is the data that describes in rich detail the "aboutness" of something, can be incorporated into virtually any application that incorporates "unstructured" data. If you are a content freak like I am -- it's time to consider becoming a semantic metadata geek.