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5. Perform, don't present.

It's comforting to think that if you master the substance of a presentation by developing a compelling argument, marshaling great evidence, and creating simple overheads, you'll be guaranteed to wow your audience. It's also wrong. According to Cecilia Macdonald, the impact of a typical presentation is 55% visual (how you look), 38% vocal (how you talk), and only 7% verbal (what you say). In other words, you don't deliver presentations, you perform them.

More and more companies are taking this idea literally. Belle Linda Halpern, cofounder of the fast-growing Ariel Group in Cambridge, Massachusetts, offers three-day workshops to executives from Mobil, Deloitte & Touche, CSC Index, and other blue-chip clients. Unlike most presentation consultants, Halpern doesn't have a background in human resources or corporate communications. She's a cabaret singer who performs in nightclubs and spends most of her summers on tour.

Why would companies seek out such an unlikely source of advice? "Singing is about making a connection with people," Halpern says. "It's also about telling a story. That's what people do when they're presenting."

Don't get the wrong idea. You don't have to join the cast of Rent to make effective presentations. The most important attribute of a good performance is avoiding the pitfalls of a bad performance. These pitfalls are so common that the gurus have labeled them. For example, don't start your presentation by pacing around like a caged animal or dancing with happy feet. Instead, imagine you're stuck in cement. To avoid the dreaded figleaf pose, imagine there's water dripping down your arms.

Being stationary, almost rigid, at the outset "shows people that you're in command," says Brian Carlsen, who teaches a presentations at Anderson Worldwide. "Plus as you begin to speak, it brings energy directly into your voice." And don't try to make eye-contact by becoming a sprinkler system that scans the audience from left to right and back again. Instead bowl down the pins by making such strong eye contact with the people up front that the people behind them also feel connected. "Presenters should look one person square in the eye and hold that contact for at least five seconds, or one complete thought," Carlsen says. "It's almost like having mini-conversations with specific members of the audience."

6. The show must go on.

The "performance factor" is a big reason so many presentations have become multimedia extravaganzas. Computer-generated graphics, high-quality sound, real-time visits to the Internet all provide the makings of a great show. "Most presentations are execrable," complains Richard Katz, a software evangelist who travels the country making presentations for Intuit. "Even if they transmit information, they do it in a way that's close to water torture. It's my job to engage people at an emotional level. People have been trained by television. They need multiple sources of information. There's no excuse for not using multimedia technology."

Katz, who presents to more than 20,000 people a year, leaves few weapons out of his techno-arsenal. "My typical presentation is an hour long," he says. "I run around the audience. I wear a wireless microphone. I use a Sony TR500 video camera to show home movies. I use an InFocus 220 projector, hooked up to either a Windows or Macintosh computer."

It's a great show -- until the show stops. So many multimedia presentations have run into so many problems that a new industry is sprouting up: rapid-response teams that rush to the scene of crashed presentations. In Minneapolis, a 12-person company called the Geek Squad has built a booming business on the misery of high-tech presenters. "If you're giving a computer presentation be prepared for problems," warns founder Robert Stephens. "Ask yourself, 'What would I do if my computer didn't work? Or if I couldn't get an Internet connection? Or if the Web was bogged down?'"

Most people only ask those questions after they've experienced a personal disaster. Two years ago, for example, Katz was scheduled to make a presentation to an audience of about 100 people. He felt self-assured enough that he waited until he was on the airplane to install the presentation onto his computer. He landed, drove to the auditorium, and couldn't get the presentation to work. "I hadn't backed up my hard drive," he says, "so it was a total disaster. I canceled the meeting and came back a month later. It was not fun."

That experience changed Katz's routine forever. "You won't find me at a presentation today without a second hard drive," he declares. He also carries an extension cord, spare bulbs for his projector, and lots of other backup equipment.

Advertising executive Darryl Gordon, the multimedia guru whose presentation crashed, is also a changed man since that dark day in Philadelphia. His "emergency kit" includes Norton Utilities, CD-ROM versions of popular graphics applications such as Persuasion and Macromedia Director, and backup copies of the presentation itself on a Zip drive and a CD-ROM. "If all hell broke loose, I could still give my presentation," he says confidently.