To me this was like the CEO of Ford Motor Company traveling to the Detroit Auto show on a motor scooter rather than their latest super looking, power dripping, hot Mustang.

On top of that the choice of interviewer was wrong. Now, I like Ryan Seacrest on American Idol. My 12 year old daughter loves the show. He is clearly the number one TV show master of ceremonies, but he did not fit the part for an interview show at CES. They should have used Walt Mossberg, or David Pogue. It would have come off much less rehearsed and stiff.

Steve Ballmer had the opportunity to do what Al Gore did for the cause of climate change, and Steve Jobs did for Apple at every keynote presentation with powerful, exciting visual supporting slides – got the audience engaged, excited, buzzing and motivated to take action with the peek into the future. In Gore’s case it motivated more people to be involved in the climate change issues, and in Steve’s case it motivated people to RUN out to buy Apple products.

What better opportunity to promote a key Microsoft product by not just making a slide of bullet listed features (which might be all they know how to do), but use it in a way to show off how it can be an incredibly powerful communication tool!

The type of meeting is an important factor which helps determine the content, number and type of slides that will help you get the results you need. I thought I’d try and come up with a comprehensive list of types of meetings. Please comment or email me if you can suggest additional types meetings. Here’s my list:

So I’m thinking of starting a Pro-PowerPoint group. If some stupid law was passed to ban PowerPoint in Switzerland, the Pro-PowerPoint movement would ban the use of all Swiss made products for fear of a major quality drop – a direct result of companies in Switzerland not being allowed to use one of the key business communication tools in use by millions of people – PowerPoint.

No more Swiss chocolates, Swiss watches, Swiss cheese, or Swiss knives.  Banning PowerPoint is like banning email – it’s just a modern communication tool. It’s like banning the use of pliers in the production of Swiss watches. If used correctly it’s a great tool. If used incorrectly it can cause problems.

The founder of this new Anti-PowerPoint party is promoting a new book called something like “The PowerPoint Fallacy” but many news articles and channels left out that bit of information.

The only fallacy I see is how he’s able to get so much news attention to drive book sales when only a few hundred people have joined his Anti-PowerPoint political party – probably all people that have been bored to death by his own poor PowerPoint skills.

He claims use of presentation software costs the Swiss economy 2.1 billion Swiss francs (US $2.5 billion) annually. How ridiculous. I’d bet PowerPoint presentations have contributed to millions of dollars of closed deals, maybe even a few billion dollar deals.

I’m looking into starting a PAC (Political Action Committee) here in the States that supports candidates and politicians that use PowerPoint. I’d like to see a law that forces all Senate and Congressmen to use PowerPoint slides with all important speeches they make so they can more clearly layout the issues and solutions rather than the usual double talk. It may also force them to be more accountable for what they say in a speech. It’s worked for the business community for decades now.

For now, I’m hoping Swiss companies known for their quality precision do not turn into Swiss PowerPoint-less panderers.

If you are presenting important information, the information should look important. Would you go to an important business meeting dressed in shorts and a T-shirt rather than your best suit?

Personally, I almost feel offended when I go to a meeting and the person presenting has slides that look like they threw them together the night before. I really get offended when I go to a conference I paid hard-earned money for and the presenter uses slides that look like my dog could have designed them better.

The presenter could be a great speaker, but ugly slides, to me, say the presenter did not think the audience (and I) was important enough to take the time and effort to develop PowerPoint slides that would have enhanced communication and made the sharing of the message faster and more memorable.

For example, I just watched a presentation where the speaker was not using slides and mentioned a few URL’s to check out. It was impossible to write down the URL’s as fast as he spoke about them, but if they were up on the screen, it would have been easy to copy them while he continued to talk.

Don’t kill your meeting communication with slides that say “I really don’t care about you, my audience – I just love to hear my own voice.”  Good slides do take time to plan, design, and produce. Throwing words and data into PowerPoint is easy. Producing PowerPoint visuals with high communication value is rarely easy – and sometimes hard work.  But do the work and show your audience that you care.

Are these people in the room paying attention to him or checking their latest post on their Facebook page?

Is this the future of meetings – where the speaker talks to the back of everyone’s heads while they multitask, reading, sending emails, and chatting on Facebook?

Mark is talking about “Next Generation Messaging” and how Facebook is coming out with a messaging tool that may replace email.

I hope he and his team are not working on a new presentation platform that will replace PowerPoint, especially if this meeting shown above is his idea of a successful presentation.

“Russ, We’ll call you in a few minutes to discuss the edits here.

FYI – I may or may not be heading to the hospital with my wife who is expecting our 2^nd child any day now. Please send all of the updates requested going forward to me and Andrew when they are done so that if I’m not here, he’ll get them.”

Then at 11:51pm in response to sending him his requested edits:

“Thanks Russ.  At hospital so I’ll touch be tomorrow.”

We have yet to hear from him this morning if the baby was born or if he has more edits. This is not the first time we’ve received an email from a client in the hospital and probably will not be the last. It is an example of the intensity of some of our clients and how seriously they take their work.

This person is an analyst for the executive team of a major healthcare company. He and his team are preparing presentations for their upcoming yearly analyst meeting. They do not take this opportunity to present to an important group of analysts lightly.

We have been working with their executive team for years and we know they fully take advantage of the power of excellent PowerPoint visuals to connect with their audience, tell their story effectively, and insure the meeting does not just tell of their success but contributes to their future success with excellent communication.

The pressure of an important PowerPoint production sometimes feels like we’re helping  a client give birth to a baby. I’ve always said all the late night productions for me were great practice for the sleepless “baby feeding and diaper changing days”.  Now that my kids are way beyond that stage,

Virtual meetings have become a staple of business life, but personal conduct during a phone or video conference can be different than in face-to-face meetings.

Eilene Zimmerman hits on some important points about staying professional in Virtual Meetings from the perspective of being a participant.  I totally agree that virtual meetings are now a staple of the business world. One key point she left out about virtual meetings . . . you need to pay even more attention to your PowerPoint visuals – that’s if you are using them.  As Eilene points out the visual component of your virtual meeting is important.

A video component can add to the success of your meeting by keeping people more engaged than just an audio phone call.  Personally, I hate long boring “audio only” conference calls.

But what about PowerPoint? It is so easy to add these to an online meeting – why would anyone not choose to take advantage of this visual tool?  It becomes even more important to have PowerPoint visuals that add to your meeting communication and do not distract and force your participant’s eyes to race to their Blackberry or iPhone screens.

When you have a global, multi-lingual audience it’s just as important to have more visuals to support your message that will assist in the difficult task of sharing information in a language that is not native to all.

Virtual meetings can make sharing important information among a group easier than ever before. I love a good virtual meeting, although I do miss some of those wonderful catered, delicious lunches served in the conference room.

I believe that one of the reasons for eSlide’s success is that we take meetings very seriously. We’re a small company but rarely, if ever have a meeting without a plan or objective. There have been very few meetings in our 10 year history that did not include a written agenda. If there are complex challenges to be discussed and decided on, I attempt to include detailed notes.

One of our management challenges has always been that we are so busy assisting clients prepare PowerPoint slides for their critical meetings (the focus of our business), that finding time to meet with my three partners is nearly impossible some weeks. Client meeting deadlines always seem to get in the way of our own meeting plans.

We attempt to have weekly meetings but schedule a monthly 4-6 hour management meeting. During the first few years of our start-up phase, we met from 2pm until whenever. These meetings often lasted 10+ hours. They were sometimes intense, often exhausting, but we had an agenda of items to discuss that ranged from reviewing our budget to discussing new marketing materials, to personnel issues. Certain items were just for discussion to get everyone’s input and other items were to get a group consensus and make critical decisions.

Individually, each partner (and staff member) has strengths that contribute to eSlide’s success. We communicate all day with phone calls, emails, and an online chat application but there is nothing that beats the group brain power of a well planned, focused meeting.

Maybe we learned the importance of the power of a good meeting from years of assisting executives in some of the largest, most successful companies in the world in developing their PowerPoint slides that have acted as visual information guides to their critical meetings – whether it be a board meeting of twenty or a company wide meeting of 1000′s, or the launch of a new product to millions. They often have staff preparing for weeks, sometimes months in advance for these meetings, planning every detail that can be planned, because so much of a live meeting is dynamic and unpredictable, but is also where some brilliant ideas can arise or be launched into action.

Although it seems they often forget to plan the time it takes to develop, design and produce the important PowerPoint visuals – which goes back to the reason it is hard for us keep our own meeting schedule, but since we see every day the powerful results of a good meeting, we remain totally committed to making the most of our own limited, but very valuable meeting time whether it’s 10 minutes or 10 hours.

They should hire one of the terrific PowerPoint MVP’s to assist them with some slide design. Or call eSlide.  Do you think Steve Ballmer did these slides himself? Maybe, I’m being too hard on Steve and Co. What do you think of the design of these two slides?

Click here to see Steve’s entire slide deck and others presented at the their investor conference July 29th, 2010.