The smart folks at Zurb have come up with yet another clever app, this time for testing presentations called Reel. Like their other tools, it is free, it is all Web-based, and it involves a quick way to collect up/down votes. Think of it as Prezi with “likes” added.
We wrote about them most recently about Verify, a way to test market design ideas. Reel does this for your PDFs and PowerPoint slides. You upload your presentation (no registration is needed); it then takes a few minutes to parse it and returns a URL that you distribute to your work team or clients. They can vote up or down each slide and you get a report of whether your deck is a dog or dominates. Given the sad state of many presentations, this might have some promise to keep those 58-bullet point slides off the screen forever.
As a professional speaker, I like to test market my presentations with a few trusted colleagues before I take my show out on the road. In the past, that meant using email attachments, which was cumbersome. You can see an example of one of my talks here:
I also have been a big fan of presentation services Prezi and Slideshare.net. They are good for making public copies of your presentations available to your audience and as a reference to your speaking gigs. (As an example, Edelman PR has created an entire network of presentations on Slideshare, announced today.) And while you can’t “like” individual slides, with these two services you can share entire presentations with your Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook friends, as well as embed the URL of your presentations to play inside your Web pages. (Each one has somewhat different feature sets.) Reel has some promise if you really want feedback before you go out in front of an audience.
