How to create a good prezi - World Economic Forum

Matthias Lüfkens is the man behind the social media communication of the World Economic Forum. He and his colleagues have upgraded the Forum's online presence and have made the world's most important summit on economy more transparent than ever before. They now use Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube and Myspace among other channels, involve citizen reporters and share almost every media content instantly on the web. Introducing how the WEF uses social media tools, Matthias is a keynote speaker of many events and conferences worldwide. Telling the story of going 2.0, Matthias uses Prezi, and now explains what he thinks about creating a good one.

As social media architect at the World Economic Forum, you see world leaders talking about the hottest issues of the planet. What do you think is needed for a good speech, what skills a good speaker must have?


The best presentations are those which do not require any text. Too many
 presentations are cluttered with text that the speaker is just reading. I
 believe a picture is worth a thousand words and therefore I like to capture
 the audience's attention with visuals only. The pictures and videos will
 capture the audience attention and help get the message accross.

What were the most attractive features of Prezi when you first tried it?


Prezi is bringing the art of presentation to a new level. Instead of going
 linear from slide to slide like a PowerPoint presentation, Prezis let you
 surf from one subject to the other and allows you to deep-dive into
s pecific issues without losing the full picture.

How do you think Prezi shapes the way people tell their stories?

Prezi helps visualize the stream of consciousness of a speaker. I hope
 Prezi will soon allow multiple paths, so that the speaker can go different
 ways in the presentation depending on the reactions of the audience.

Was it easy or hard to switch to Prezi? What are the benefits you see?

It was amazing to see how easily you can prepare a slideshow using Prezi's 
online tool. It takes some time to get used to it, but once you have 
mastered the control buttons, it is fairly easy and straightforward.

In the Prezi embedded to this interview you show the process of upgrading the Forum's communication extending it to the social media. What was the main message you wanted to deliver?

My aim was to show the richness of social networks out there and then to
 focus on the five key social media sites. The presentation aims to show how 
the Forum has been using the key social media sites.

How do you think Prezi helps the audience understand your points?


Judging from the reactions I received after the presentation it was a
 smashing success.

Group Access Feature Temporarily Removed - Repair in Progress

Dear Prezi Authors,

We had to remove a feature temporarily from our services. Right now you will not find those prezis on your My page that had been shared with you to view or edit as a member of a group. Prezis you have simply shared with others for edit or view remain visible, this unexpected act only affects the group access feature. Our system administrators and developers are working hard on fixing this.

Why we had to do this?

Earlier today we have experienced unexpected server issues. Our system administrators have started to work on solving the problem right away, and Prezi.com got back online within a few minutes. It turned out that there are more database elements to be fixed. Technically we can keep Prezi solid and online by removing the group sharing feature till we finish working on the issue.

We'll get back to you asap with more.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

The Prezi Team

Looking for the best Halloween prezi of the year!

Well, it is that time of the year again. Pumpkin lanterns, scary masks, apple candies at malls and horror movie releases in theaters warn us that Halloween is near. Seeing those signs of the coming holiday season, we found ourselves wondering: is Halloween really just about those things? What is the story of this ancient tradition? What is your Halloween story?

This year we call teachers, students, classrooms, and all individuals to tell their Halloween stories, as we are looking for the best Halloween prezi of the year!

How to participate:

1. Create your Halloween story with Prezi

2. Publish your project on your My page, then send the URL, your name and email address to this forum topic.

3. We accept submissions till the 6th of November.

4. Peter and Adam, CTO and Lead Designer, founders and inventors of Prezi will choose one submission, the one they find the funniest, spookiest, and most playful to be the Halloween Prezi of the 2009!

5. Winner will be announced here on the blog on the 13th of November (which happens to be a Friday just to make things even more spooky).

Awards:

On the top of all that, we provide a 3 months free Pro account for the winner, feature the winning prezi in our showcase, and introduce the author here on the blog.

Even more:

Just to make you even more excited about this, we have published a brand new Halloween style in the prezi editor, the same we used for the embedded prezi above. Feel free to grab it for your submission!

We also have a few graphics in .swf format in our stash: bats, pumpkins, even a scary witch - we will give them away in the forum topic of this event from time to time during the following days.

So keep in touch, sharpen your senses and get ready for the most zooming Halloween experience of your life!

How to create a good prezi - for Wired magazine

Wired commissioned HMDG  to create their Intelligence Briefing using Prezi, about ten trends worth discussing. Being regular readers of Wired it is no surprise that the result is full of interesting data, includes a massive load of information. To continue our series of Q&A about how to create a good presentation, we have asked Jamie to explain his experience with Prezi this time.

How do you see the future of story telling?

People are consuming media in so many different ways. Without a strong narrative, your message will get lost, whether you are a brand trying to reach a customer or  an individual trying to connect with an audience. But there are also all sorts of new ways to tell a story, of which Prezi is one.

What were the most attractive features of Prezi when you first tried it?

It’s both simple and theatrical at the same time. There’s a wow factor that really helps win your audience’s attention. At HMDG, we’re using it in a lot of our new business meetings and it makes a real difference when your potential clients have sat through a day of Powerpoint. Actually, I was just a bit anxious to be able to use Prezi a few times before too many people found out about it.

Was it easy or hard to switch?

Hard, hard, hard. It doesn’t take long to learn how to use Prezi itself. But I think I’m still getting my head round how to make it work best as a format. There’s a dependency between all the elements of the presentation that you don’t have when you’re working with charts.  So you do have to work at it to make sure your thinking is clear.

Your prezi is really well constructed looking at the big picture and in the smallest details as well. What was the main message you wanted to visualize with it?

I was scratching my head for a bigger theme until I realised this particular presentation was a list when it came down to it. So I wanted a visual that intrigued the audience from a distance and acted as a bridge to these robust individual bits of content.

What was your method of building relations and arguments?

I think you need to answer two questions to make a good prezi. Firstly, what does it look like from a distance? If you can start with that image it helps a lot. It gives you a structure.  Secondly, you need to have work out how the ‘pods’ - the individual sections of the presentation – work. I was creating this for a live presentation, so each one had to be really hit and run – a big thought, a key example, a single powerful statistic. I’ve found Q&As like this quite useful. I read the blogpost on Loqloq and saw how something messy like sketches can work really well when you mix it with the slickness of a Prezi. That made me think handwritten headlines might look ok.

Having said all that, there’s something to be said for just getting your content up on the screen and messing about with it. I try not to worry about adding the paths until I’m nearing the end.

How much time did it take to finish the project?

Maybe a day or two for the actual Prezi. But this particular project took place over several months.

How do you think Prezi helps the audience understand your points?

It’s much less familiar, so I think they concentrate more. And it’s inherently playful, which is useful if you want to reach people.

Server maintenance this Sunday

We’ll have to unplug Prezi.com this Sunday morning from 10-13 AM CET (08:00-11:00 UTC), due to software upgrades. The goal of the server upgrade is to remove a certain component from the infrastructure that might - in some cases - can cause malfunction.

During the process, our online services will be unavailable. This means:

1. You won’t be able to reach Prezi.com, the online editor,


2. You can’t login or reach your online Prezis from PreziDesktop (offline editor available for Pro users).


3. You can still edit, and export presentations with PreziDesktop in offline mode (since the software is not necessarily connected to the internet).


4. Of course you can even show your Prezis during downtime, if you have previously downloaded them to your desktop.

We will try to make this process as painless as possible. Our most effective weapon to achieve this goal is transparency and support.

For this reason, you can comment to this post or ask any questions at Prezisupport on Twitter while our data center is offline. Once the upgrade has finished, we will notify you immediately on the blog and on Twitter as well.