You bring up a good point, which I believe deserves to be tip #9: Know your audience. Provide examples that are relevant to your audience. If you don’t have specific examples, demonstrate how your example is relevant to the audience. If you are speaking to an audience of SMB’s and want to reference “when I worked at IBM” it’s fine to do so, however then say “and here’s how this lesson is relevant to you guys as SMB’s.” If you can’t do that, find a different example.

Thanks for bringing up this important tip.

Great post! I’d like to add something to #1, if I may. As a career small company guy, nothing disappoints me more than presentation examples that are only relevant to people who work at companies with 50,000 employees and $15 billion in annual revenue. Marketing conferences are (unfortunately) notorious for this. If a story starts with “I remember once when I was working for IBM,” I just turn my brain off and wait for the applause.

I Retweeted this article as well. Nice job!