The Drool-Factor is HUGE!

WOULDN’T YOU LIKE PEOPLE TO SAY THAT, COMING OUT OF YOUR PRESENTATION? (Me, too.) Well, we can’t all be Steve Jobs, and few presenters have such an amazing product to announce as Apple’s new iPhone.

[Note: You’ve got to see this thing, though I guess it will be all over the web and the world in two more seconds. Here’s a link to Ryan Block’s and Engadget’s excellent moment-by-moment description of the event. The pictures will make you drool.]

But we don’t have to give up just because we’re not Steve Jobs announcing the iPhone. Few presenters ever get to announce something so compelling.

Look through the images in the link above and you’ll see a wonderful example of how to let the pictures tell the story. [Here’s a link to the keynote.] In a two-hour presentation, he had only a handful of slides that could be called “bullet” slides, and even those transcended the typical format. Here’s an example:

Steve talked about features, but it was the application of those features that really hit home — and the simple fact that you could actually have all these things in a phone, that looks like that (drool, drool).

NOW...contrast all that with Ryan Block’s commentary when the CEO of Cingular came out to speak.

“Man this guy is a total snoozer.”

“We've immediately dropped back into cuecard keynote mode, stats on Cingular, stores, distribution, yadda.”

“Huzzah, he's off stage!”

Same event, same remarkable product (that should make Cingular/AT&T a few gazillion dollars), and he kills the flow. WHY? Because he talked only about “Me” (in this case, Cingular and AT&T).

Steve came back in to rescue the keynote and send things off with a bang. And the blogosphere will go crazy (along with a billion crazed fans like me :-)).

You know, Steve didn’t talk about how you could run your presentations off the new iPhone, but I bet he’ll have that nailed soon as well. Won’t that be fun!