Social media in-class presentations – worth 15%

Students will work in pairs to prepare an 8-minute in-class presentation on the benefits and weaknesses of a social media tool/service. The presentation should explain how the platform is being used professionally, together with examples of best use in editorial projects.

You will be required to submit your slides and also a 1-page (max) summary of your key points. The 1-pager posting deadline is 24 hours before your presentation date so that we can post it to the course blog and all students in the class can preview the key points ahead of your presentation. This is intended to allow you to move more quickly on the main points of your presentation. After both presentations have been made, both sets of presenters will come to the front of the room and be expected to facilitate a discussion based on questions from the audience.

There will be two presentations every week, starting from week 4. The purpose of this assignment is to provide you with an opportunity to actively participate in your learning, teach others what you have learned, and practice the art of public speaking in a safe and supportive environment.

Grading criteria

You will be graded on the value of your presentation to your fellow students, which includes:

1. What you say: Focus on adding value to the audience. Don’t simply provide commentary. Be wary of older data. Provide context: users and usage, competition, changes over time and prospects, fit with other social media. (The Conversation Prism, v4, by Brian Solis, provides a good starting context to organize the social media ecosystem by related categories in an overall whole. ) Synthesize, draw from multiple sources and interpret meaning. Be aware that the other pair presenting in the same week as you will be reviewing a tool that is similarly themed.
2. How you say it: An engaging tone and manner is essential is gain and keep the attention of your audience.
3. The quality of your PowerPoint/Keynote that engage the viewer.
4. The overall substance of your presentation and the way you handle the task of presenting the topic to your audience will be evaluated.
5. How you facilitate the discussion and answer questions.

Note, the 8-minute limit is firm – you will be stopped at exactly 8 minutes, regardless is where you are in your presentation. Rehearse and ensure you can cover the material that you intend to in your allotted time.

Presentation Tips

Boring, bad, ugly, pointless PowerPoint presentations – we have all seen them. Here are some tips for a good presentation.

Legible text

• Is the text large enough for everyone in the audience to read it?
• Is there sufficient contrast between the background color and the text colour?
• Is the font a clean, easy-to-read typeface?

Limited text

Each slide should help the audience to digest the information. A big block of text does not achieve that goal. That’s why good slides have only two or three brief bullet points on most of the slides.

Do not read your slides

This is the most boring thing you can do in a presentation. Your mission as a presenter is to be interesting and informative. To do so, you must plan a synergy between your slides and your talk.  What you say and what appears on the slide should complement each other — not repeat each other.  Your goal is to explain it and make the information accessible and meaningful.

Use of images and sound

If you include graphics or photos in your presentation, make sure they have relevance and meaning.  You can find interesting photographs and other illustrations online to emphasize the points you make in a presentation.  Sound effects usually become annoying. If you use sound in your presentation, it should have some clear value. That is, it should add something useful to the presentation.

Presentation schedule

Each of these tools and services can be mapped out on the Conversation Prism developed by Brian Solis. The Conversation Prism is a visual map of the social media landscape. It is an ongoing study in digital ethnography that tracks dominant and promising social networks and organizes them by how they’re used in everyday life.

Categories:

1. Social networks – incl Facebook and Google+
2. Blogs/microblogs – incl. WordPress, blogger, tumblr
3. Crowd Wisdom – incl. Digg, Storify, Reddit, Buzzfeed
4. Q&A –  incl. Quora, Yahoo Answers
5. Comments – incl. Disqus, intenseDebate
6. Social Commerce – incl. Kaboodle, Living Social
7. Social Marketplace – incl. Etsy, AirBnB, Groupon, Kickstarter
8. Social Streams – incl. Twitter, pheed, Echo
9. Location – incl. Foursquare
10. Niche-Working – incl. Miso, Diaspora
11. Enterprise. – incl. Yammer
12. Wiki – Wikipedia
13. Discussions and Forums
14. Business: LinkedIn, Xing
15. Service Networking
16. Reviews and Ratings: Yelp, ePinions
17. Social Curation: Pinterest, Flipboard, paper.li
18. Video: YouTube, Vine, vimeo
19. Content/documents: Scribd, prezi, slideshare
20. Events –
21. Music: SoundCloud
22. Livecasting
23. Pictures: Flickr, Instagram, Picasa, Snapchat
24. Social bookmakrs: Evernote, delicious
25. Influence: Klout
26. Quantified Self: Jawbone, Fitbit