Click on the image above to download the sample PowerPoint presentation.

Many people have seen presentations that incorporate animations. But if it has been a while since you explored Microsoft PowerPoint’s animation capabilities — either because you think they are too complicated or because you have experienced a less-than-professional animated presentation — take another look. Professional, well-executed animations can bring a presentation to life and keep viewers’ attention.

Easy as 1, 2, 3

PowerPoint provides built-in animation capabilities. Some visual effects are easy to implement:

• Entrances and exits of graphic elements and bullets
• Changes in size, color or rotation of text or objects
• Movement of elements 

You can hide items to focus viewer attention precisely where and when you need it. In short, animation allows you greater control over your information.

Advanced animations

Suppose you want to explain to your audience what is involved to get a new version of a product launched, including all the various tasks that your company, its suppliers and third parties have to perform. It’s not trivial to explain this succinctly, so that your audience will be able to follow along.

Rather than creating pages of pages of text bullets, an animation might be a much better way to tell the story. Just take a look at the image sequence above. Do you want to see the full animation in PowerPoint? Simply download the presentation from our website.

Of course, quality graphics and text are the basis of a well-animated presentation. Professional content development is the first step and can take the pressure off internal resources.

The Social Media Examiner recently conducted a survey of over 3,800 marketers with the goal of understanding how they are using social media to grow and promote their businesses. The information derived from the survey was summarized in the Examiner’s 2012 Social Media Marketing Report.

Here are two of the report’s primary findings:

• Marketers still place high value on social media: A significant 83% of marketers indicate that social media is important for their business.

• Video marketing holds the top spot for future plans: A significant 76% of marketers plan on increasing their use of Youtube and video marketing, making it the top area marketers will invest in for 2012.

Based on these findings, here are tips to help you effectively include videos in your social marketing campaign and keep up with your marketing peers:

1. Increase your 2012 budget for videos.
2. Add links to videos in your social media communications. These links should lead to an appealing landing page, where the video is embedded.
3. People want to access social media wherever they are. So, make sure your videos can be viewed on any device (desktop, notebook, mobile device) without losing production quality. This also means they should be optimized for small screens.
4. To draw customers from Youtube to your site, embed a link and a call to action in your video.
5. Add a sharing function to your video so that prospects can pass it along to colleagues and other decision makers via social media and other channels.

The experts at Digital Dazzle are very familiar with optimizing video for social media. If you would like help, contact us by email or at 415.937.1791.

Mark Hosbein, a vice president with Nielsen, recently presented a series of video-focused stats and observations in a meeting with marketers from the greater Los Angeles area.

To nobody’s surprise, video viewership has increased over the last years and will certainly continue to do so this year as well. The surprising statistic was the rapid increase in mobile video viewing, by more than 200% in the last 3 years. Corresponding with that number was a decrease in desktop viewership.

This has implications for video marketeers:

• Serve up your video as HTML5 video, not Flash.
• Make sure that your web design allows for viewing of videos on small screens.
• Optimize for small screens - use lightbox overlays that support different sizes for your videos based on the device that a video is viewed on.
• Similarly, ensure that your video content doesn’t break down when the video is viewed at Half Size.
• Embed analytics that differentiate between mobile and desktop/notebook viewing.

If you follow these guidelines, you can be assured that your intended audience will be able to watch your videos, not matter what devices they are on.

As part of its Creative Suite 6 announcement, Adobe also confirmed pricing for its new Creative Cloud service, which allows you to use all Creative Suite applications, plus some other features, for a monthly fee - initially, $29.99 for the first 12 months, then $49.99 thereafter.

Within our digital agency, all of our employees mainly use five different adobe products - Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects and Premiere. The most affordable way to acquire these licenses for these five programs is by purchasing the Creative Suite Master Collection.

As of today, the Creative Suite Master Collection upgrade from CS5 to CS6 cost $1,399 and can be purchased from Amazon for as low as $1,145.  Since Adobe typically upgrades its Creative Suite every 18 months, the Creative Cloud Service will cost us $900 per user for 18 months, or as much as the Educational version of the Master Collection would cost us, if we would qualify (which we don’t).  So to us, it is a no-brainer that we will sign up for the Creative Cloud service.

In the hit film Memento, the protagonist uses an intricate series of tattoos to keep track of his progress in hunting down the criminals who attacked him, robbing him of his short-term memory. You might not be fighting crime, but by understanding how short-term memory functions, you can create killer Microsoft PowerPoint presentations that will stick with viewers.

Forget me not
Short-term memory — also called working memory — actively holds information in our minds so that we can perform verbal and nonverbal tasks such as reasoning and comprehension. Our working memory also makes this information available for further processing.

In general, this short-term working memory has a limited capacity. By breaking information into chunks, we can improve the chances that our message will be remembered. Keep it simple:

• seven digits
• six letters
• five words
• three phrases

Less is more
What does this mean for your presentation? Format your slides with small chunks in mind, and viewers are much more likely to retain the information you present. For best understanding and retention, Digital Dazzle suggests that you limit each PowerPoint slide to these maximums:

• Five bullets of one word each
• Three bullets, each consisting of one phrase or sentence that does not exceed one line

Need to put more bullets on a slide? Use animation to build the list. Just be sure to reveal no more than these recommended maximums at each step.