molson canadian

Tonight was my last "real" class for Marketing. It was time to hand in the term paper and do our presentation. I had quite a busy couple of weeks and realistically didn't do the presentation till today. My group buddy wanted many things and she's so lucky that I'm pretty proficient with computers! As I don't think many people can throw stuff together on the fly.

I took the day off intending to get up early and build the PowerPoint presentation. What actually happened was that I was enjoying the aspect of not having to get up at the break of dawn and slept in till noon. After that I had lunch, watched a bit of cartoons (as I thought I still had a few hours to spare) and then fell asleep on the couch. I'm sleep deprived so I fall asleep easily...in front of TVs, at meetings, while driving, etc.

Waking up late, I panicked and slapped together a half-ass presentation. Nothing that I would be proud of. :-) But it was good enough for our purposes. My partner then thought it would be cool to hand everyone a pamphlet - so she told me to build one, I told her to get me content. In an hour we had our tri-fold pamphlet ready to go. We were presenting Molson as our project. I've never drank the beer before and to top it off am not a beer fan at all. So that was the greatest challenge for me - not the public speaking part but the task of trying to sell/promote a product that I have zero interest in. :-) As you can see I didn't pick the topic.

I convinced my team mate that we should go first. She was a bit freaked out about having to speak and gets flushed when people look at her too long. Poor kid. I had tested the equipment prior to class, copied the files over to the Cdrive, ran the presentation a couple of times to make sure the embedded video clips worked and checked the slide transitions/timing. If we lost marks in content, we would at least get full marks for organization! I told Christine that going first for any kind of group presentation has it's advantages:

• if the clas is allowed to evaluate the presentations...going first means that there's no one to compare your presentation against (unless you have a spectacular show that will capivate the audience - you're better off going first)
• it'll be over and done with, so you anxiety levels won't increase as you await your turn
  
• there are 14 groups presenting therefore the interest/attention levels of the class will deplete with each presenter

The teacher asked how we wanted to choose who goes first and last. I shot up my hand right away and roared out that my group is going first. That made it easy for other groups as I saw some of them their eyes away when she said the words "who wants to go first". So I kicked off the presentation in my loud and cheerful manner - I'm pretty sure people didn't have problems hearing me. I blabbed on about beer, Molson, hockey and alcohol in general. I think there was more BS in my speech then facts - thank goodness for slides (which did have facts on them). I don't like reading straight from slides - that's very boring as people can read it themselves. Add spice to your talk by using "fillers"! Over all I felt that we did well. Our presentation wasn't too long and it hit the major points. I was proud of Christine for keeping her cool - though she was bright red by the end of her section.

I think being so actively involved in the Social Club has greatly improved my public speaking skills. I may not have anything interesting to say but I can definately talk loud and for a long time! :-)