The current standard length of a lecture or talk is 60 minutes, sometimes comprised of a straight 60 minutes speaking and other times approximately 45 minutes speaking and a 15-minute question and answer period.

The 60-minute lecture, its format and its purpose are obsolete. No one has 60 minutes to sit silently and listen to anyone but maybe Stephen Hawking chat for an entire hour. A good lecture stimulates reactions, thoughts and ideas that can’t wait an entire hour. And a bad lecture stimulates deep and relaxing sleep, or a desire to visit Starbucks.

While there are some speakers who imagine themselves gurus imparting their sacred ($199) wisdom to the masses, most speakers recognize that everyone gets more out of an interactive talk. With ground rules and moderation, a participative talk can be much more effective than a one-way talk with an expert speaking at (not to or with) a captive audience. On the other hand, some structure should be in place to allow the speaker to express his/her unique knowledge and experience, else why would they have been invited in the first place?

Inside the walls of the corporation, everything is done in 60-minute intervals. Some audioconferencing systems even require 60-minute meetings. Outlook automatically assumes 60-minute meetings which you can then adjust. Business people have become accustomed to 60-minute time slots which are easily filled with the 45/60 formula described in the first paragraph above.

Social media has been a catalyst for changing this outdated, often inefficient formula. Information has been democratized. One hopes an expert speaker has useful knowledge and experience about their topic, but that does not mean participants don’t have something useful to contribute.

The typical live talk today might be “covered” by people live-tweeting on Twitter, or writing on their blogs. While these trends have their detractors, it can’t be denied they are happening, and the lecture is no longer a formal one-way event, nor is it confined to the four walls of the hotel ballroom or auditorium.

There is an outright rebellion against the formal structure of conferences and talks. Some organizations are holding “unconferences” http://coworkingunconference.eve… with “unspeakers” like those sought for this 2009 event: http://www.netimpactaustin.org/b…

Green Business Camp was born out of a desire to reverse the trend of passive consumerism at conferences. Many of us have previously gone to conferences to consume what other have to give to us. Green Business Camp is creating a new event culture of sharing and collaboration - with everyone leaving the event having given AND having received.

Is the conventional lecture irrelevant? Should expert talks be more interactive? Is their a role for social media to extend the usefulness of a talk, or is it a distraction?

This post is from my response to a question on Quora: What is the optimal length of a single lecture?

Last week I had the privilege to be in Lisbon as the main speaker at the APAN 2011 Seminar. (Associação Portuguesa de Anunciantes is a large Portuguese marketing and communications association).

The first speaker, António Gomes, Managing Director of GfKMetris, presented an extensive study on Portuguese media consumption habits, looking at age, income, geographic location and every form of media such as Internet, radio, television, etc. Also of interest was a look at the habits and effects of media multi-taskers, which is less evident in Portugal than in the U.S., but like everything else, on the rise.

I was really happy with the outcome of my presentation, titled brand:redefined. My premise was that a company’s brand now encompasses both customer experience and online conversations.

I define brand as:

Our experiences with a company’s products, services, employees and customers, and the way they shape our perceptions of the company.

If there’s anything “new” here, it’s the addition of customers to the formula. The modern perception of brand is influenced by experience, and partially “owned” by consumers. For example, a visit to an Apple store a Starbucks outlet is not shaped merely by the products offered inside. The decor, the lighting, the attitude of the employees and the overall experience make up our new perception of brand. And more often than not, we make decisions based in large part on the opinions of our friends and associates through Facebook, Twitter and so on. A quick Twitter search on any brand will reveal hundreds of candid first-hand experiences that influence purchasers.

My presentation was greatly enhanced by research provided by Joaquim Cannas, Patrícia Dias, Patrícia Gonçalves, and Patrícia Nabeto Damiao, some of the great students who attended my talks earlier this year at Universidade Católica Portuguesa.

My talk was followed by a moderated panel of a half dozen students ages 16 to 18 discussing their media habits. APAN was kind enough to provide me with spontaneous translation for much of the program, so I did learn quite a bit from this panel. As always, when I hear kids talk about media and the Internet, I’m blown away by their sophistication and with the ease with which they use all of the latest apps and services.

The Portuguese are slightly “behind” the U.S. in adoption of social media at the corporate level, but not much. This does not stem from a lack of creativity or ingenuity in Portugal, but rather from infrastructure issues. Portuguese Internet access has been lower than that of the U.S., and lower than much of the rest of the EU, but it is rising steadily. Mobile Internet access is on the rise as well. Major brands like Portuguese airline TAP, and Banco Espirito de Santo are using Facebook for marketing and communications with great success. TAP, for example, found that its Facebook page became a dynamic and powerful communications hub when the Icelandic volcano closed European airspace.

As if this wasn’t enough, my girlfriend Donna and I met, and sat with, the Deputy Prime Minister of Portugal, who was at the conference to announce the nation’s new public television channel.

The event was held in the auditorium of  Millennium bcp, a Portuguese bank. I did not know this, hence my awkward inclusion of competitive bank Banco Espirito Santo in my presentation. It turns out that in the basement of Millennium’s corporate headquarters there are amazingly preserved ruins from Roman and even pre-Roman times! The bank has preserved these in a subterranean museum, and Miguel Magalhaes Duarte and Pedro Rebelo, communications directors for the bank, arranged a private, guided, after hours tour for Donna and me of this amazing site.

Pedro is a longtime blogger and social media expert in Portugal. Check him out!

Tags: Portuguese, Portugal, APAN, Associação Portuguesa de Anunciantes, Millennium bcp

Yesterday, traveling home from Thanksgiving with family, we stopped at a Ghirardelli Chocolate outlet store on the side of the freeway. I checked in with foursquare, and this “Check-in Special” appeared on the screen:

I ordered ice cream sundaes for the three of us, and as the clerk was ringing up our purchase, I showed her the coupon on my iPhone. She told me, “I’m sorry. That only applies to chocolate. Our fountain drinks are already below regular prices.”

You can see the entire coupon above. The statement “Check in now to receive 15% off your total purchase,” says I can take the discount off everything I buy. Nowhere does this coupon indicate any limitations on which products are eligible.

My first reaction was to add a cautionary “Tip,” a foursquare function that allows a user to add a suggestion to someone else who might visit the location. I did this, and I wrote that the coupon was misleading and Ghirardelli had been deceptive in its use.

I then noticed a “Flag” option at the lower right corner of the screen. I clicked it and again left a note that the offer was deceptive. (By the way, I don’t expect to hear anything back as a result.)

Within a certain range, I don’t really care how much I pay for chocolate or ice cream. That’s not the point. What I do care about is being deceived. I don’t like it when any brand, especially one I know, makes an offer and then back pedals, for whatever the reason. If an offer doesn’t make business sense, don’t make the offer. And if you make an offer, honor the terms and treat consumers with respect.

We are in the early days of hyperlocal marketing and location-based offers. If large, established brands act like shell game hucksters when they use these techniques, what little trust exists today will be gone in an instant.

Tags: Ghirardelli, foursquare, deceptive offer, flag, consumer trust

I was reading an article on Pravda’s web site, and this window popped up:

When I was in journalism school there was still a thing called the Soviet Union. The two Soviet house newspapers were Pravda (The Truth) and Izvestia (The News). The old joke was “There’s no news in The Truth, and no truth in The News.” It took a lot of changes to get where we are today, when the Pravda web site asks visitors “Will be connected on the Social Web?” Never mind the slight grammatical slip. I find this really interesting.

When Pravda suggest you follow its Twitter account and like its Facebook page, it’s hard to say your organization is too conservative and old-fashioned to get into social media.

Tags: Pravda, Izvestia, Twitter, Facebook

In a recent Forbes article, Vinod Khosla’s Five-Second Slide Rule, with contributions by presentation expert Jerry Weissman, venture capitalist and Sun Microsystems co-founder talks about his five-second slide rule. At first I thought he meant one of these:

Apparently, though, Khosla tests presentations slides to ensure they are not dense:

For each of them, he applies his five-second rule: he puts a slide on a screen, removes it after five seconds, and then asks the viewer to describe the slide. A dense slide fails the test—and fails to provide the basic function of any visual: to aid the presentation.

Interesting coming from an alumni of Sun, where PowerPoint was banned for many years (eventually we got StarOffice), and slides were not popular.

I understand and totally support the intent of this exercise, but sometimes I think we develop these kinds of guidelines as a way to assist the presentation designer who lacks common sense and communications skills instead of teaching them to communicate effectively.

I also know that no presentation stands alone, so five seconds with any slide, regardless of density, is unlikely to tell the whole story. If it did, we wouldn’t need the presenter.

Other versions of popular slide guidelines include Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 rule (probably the best of them) and Carmine Gallo’s Present Like Steve Jobs.

These guidelines can be quite useful, but the key is to use them as just that - guidelines.even if you apply them religiously, you may end up with a lousy presentation.

What’s more important is to use such guidelines, and everything else at your disposal, to:

• Create a presentation that visually supports the speaker’s objectives
• Build a story, not a batch of slides
• Don’t create a brochure that can be projected on the wall. Use graphics to illustrate concepts
• In keeping with these guidelines, minimize the amount of information on each slide
• Keep font sizes readable (see above)
• Keep slides simple (See Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen)

These are just a few ideas, but the key is to remember that a presentation is a communications device, not a stack of documents. Your speaker has objectives. Design the presentation to meet them. Your audience is giving you their time. Make it worht their while and move them to do something that benefots everyone.

Tags: Vinod Khosla, Jerry Weissman, Guy Kawasaki, presentations, slides