Presentation S.O.S.: From Perspiration to Persuasion in 9 Easy Steps by Mark Wiskup
The book is written by a renowned communications expert who speaks nationwide to many Fortune 500 companies. The main subject of the book is how to prepare and deliver powerful presentation that make people buy – speaking either figuratively or literally.What’s interesting is that his central piece of advice is a “Power Sound Bite”, a piece of reiterated information that glues the whole presentation together and represents the core idea you want people to remember and bring out of presentation. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” (FDR), “I have a dream” (Martin Luther King, Jr.), “To be or not to be?” (William Shakespeare), “The tribe have spoken” are just few examples of Power Sound Bites.
If you already read the draft of my book or followed the advice and checked one of the books in memetic bibliography, you already recognize PSBs as something very familiar – a meme. Even better, a meme with an anchor and carrier – a mind virus.
Of course, he does not approach this from the memetic point of view, and hence the book has a few shortcomings. Here is an example of PSB, he believes is good:
When you support these goals for the direction of our marketing effort, you’ll
be assuring a good, profitable year for the company, making your customers
happy, and putting more money in your wallet.
Gees… What a bite of a corporate politically correct B.S. Marketing making customers happy?
Although, I have to admit, it’s a lousy meme, but a good wrapper and delivery mechanism for a really strong meme expressed in the last five words: “more money in your wallet.” The rest of the message simply gets the guards off. People listen to the beginning of this sentence and immediately classify is at “managerese” mumbling leaving it to internal defenses to filter it out. But when it drop there, internal filters see “more money in your wallet”, and, wow! Your inner self gets interested.
Let’s get a bit more formal, here is what this statement is in memetic notation:
(support me, is, extra money)
(support me, is, happy customers)
(support me, is, profitable year)
The long introductory part means simply “Support me”, because it does not carry any information about the “effort” or “goals” or “direction”. These terms are simply a bubble-talk to express simple “support me” directive. “Extra money in your wallet” = “More personal income” is the main anchor of the statement. The second two are auxiliary anchors in a case your audience has corporate profit or customer satisfaction metrics in the performance objectives.