Here.

Would love your feedback.  Thx!

Here’s the reality:  they ARE multitasking.  In your webinars and, oh by the way, in your in-person events too.

There are many techniques for being more engaging when you present at a webinar.  But this post is to encourage you to think about another idea:  encouraging the multitasking.

When in a face-to-face environment, any given audience member can chat with the person sitting next to them.  The risk of mass-outcry is small.

In a webinar, you can usually turn off the ‘everybody chat with everybody’ feature, thereby limiting the chance that someone pipes up about your competition or says something that catches you off guard.  This used to control perceived risk.

But no more.

Whether we like it or not, using some form of backchannel chat is not only here (a la Twitter), but it’s going to stay.

So make it part of your gameplan.

Encouraging backchannel chat has a few advantages:

1.  You can keep an eye on it.  If you establish the Twitter hashtag or other locale, it gives you a chance to see an respond.  Arguably this is better than being unaware of the audience whispers.

2.  You’ll present yourself as a thought leader.  Social media’s a hot topic, probably a bit hyped.  You don’t have to be an expert to appear knowledgeable.

3.  You’ll learn from it.  Love it or hate it, people will say things on the web that they’d never say to your face.  Professionals learn from this.  Throw out the kooks, and learn from the rest.

4.  Your audience will be engaged.  Active participants are much more likely to remember your key messages than passive participants.  As the old press adage goes, “there’s no such thing as bad press,” and if you agree with that, encouraging discussion can only help.

What I’m not saying is that this won’t require some new webinar presenting skills.  You’re going to need to learn new ways to keep an eye on your audience while presenting.  And it’s going to require a little courage, but you can do it, I’m sure.

Embrace the changing face of communications.  Embrace the backchannel.

Regards, Allen C.

Hi Allen, thanks for reaching out.

I have a lot of experience with sales demos since I’ve been in the biz for a long time.

Web conferencing is seriously awesome for live sales demos,  both in broader communications (webinars) and smaller sessions  (meetings).

The BIGGEST problem in each tends to be one of  audience-centricity.

In the most frequent sales demo format, the  smaller meeting with a prospect, the risk is always “what I want to say”  versus “what problem does my prospect have that I can show them a solution  for.”  The worst offense (in my very humble opinion!) is the ‘corporate  backgrounder’ slide.

My recommendation: use sharing to put up a working agenda (a Word doc works fine), and get clear with the client as the meeting  gets started about what they’re trying to solve.  I do understand that practically they may not always fully disclose and you’ll have to make  assumptions, but when you’re live, you can zero in on their particular problem  or use-case and show what you need to show – slide, live demo, website, back  to a few slides, back to a live demo, etc.

In a webinar format, the  most frequent problem I see is setting expectations correctly up front.   The risk (in the marketing communications process) is to want to soften  the message that it’s going to be a sales demo.  This may increase  attendance, but ultimately hurts your brand when it turns people off.

My recommendation:  clearly communicate in the invitation  process what folks will see (preferably still in a benefit-to-them voice), but  also make sure you make the webinar very interactive.  It’s a great  opportunity to answer someone’s question or objection in the process of  winning them to your point of view.  I think sometimes folks fear a  question coming in that they can’t answer or that paints them in a negative  light (‘how do you compare to competitor X’), but since your audience is  usually going to hear that stuff anyway, I prefer tackling it head  on.

The slides are available for viewing on SlideShare here.

For those of you who follow my work, you know that I share slides on an extremely rare basis, and this is one of those times (the recording is always available, and you can find it here).

If you’re curious why I never distribute them and/or rarely make them otherwise available, you can find those comments here. The short version:

1.  I pay to license images for presentation, but I don’t pay for distribution rights (a lot more expensive).

2.  I support the vendor who makes this possible for everyone to attend for free (in this case www.citrixonline.co.uk), and they benefit when you watch and share the recording (you can always fast-forward if you just want to review a specific section).

3.  Slides are only part of the communication as they don’t have the audio track and I, like most folks, want to be judged on the sum of my work, not an incomplete part .

I’m also happy to answer any questions you might have if you want to ping me directly:  roger (at sign) 1080group (dot) com.  I sincerely love to assist!

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“What do you think about template formats…each of your slides have been quite different…do you think templates limit audience engagement?”

AWESOME question, Donald!

I do think templates limit audience engagement, but maybe not for the reason you’d think:

Templates limit designers.

A few thoughts, in no particular order:

Templates aren’t necessary for a presentation to be visually cohesive.

Cohesiveness does include being consistent thematically or stylistically, but you don’t need a template to do that.

You can (and should) use a template to speed production of your presentation for common elements.  Using the same font when you create a text box, or quickly creating a shape or shapes that use colors defined by the theme/template are good examples.

Templates do nothing to help make each step of your story as powerful as possible.

Part of the opportunity that a webinar brings over and above a conference call is the visual impact you can create with a slide.  A presentation is a series of points that you make to get your audience from Point A to Point B, and arguably you want to do that as powerfully as you can at each step along the way.  There are no unimportant points (or they shouldn’t be there).  They each need to be as powerful as possible.

One quick note for trainers, engineers, and others who often aren’t thinking they ‘tell a story:’  you should start.  It’s not just about the data – it’s the context of that data that creates meaning and application, right?  This doesn’t mean you abandon the data, it means that you’re presenting it in a more useful and memorable way.

Templates tempt slide creators to work within a box, not view a slide as a canvas.

In the webinar I used a (verbal) illustration of the Spanish painter who created illusory space with the ship’s mast and sail flowing off the edge of the canvas to meet at an obvious-but-unseen point.

Thinking about a slide as a painter’s canvas, the question we should ask is “how can I illustrate the point that I’m making at this point in the story as powerfully as possible?”

Starting with anything other than a blank white background puts you at a disadvantage.

I don’t need to see your logo on every slide.

This is really a parallel thought to the previous point.

I know who you are when I make the effort to attend your event.  A logo on every slide is a waste of space at best, a distraction at worst.

The Bottom Line

Leverage templates to speed creating presentation by repeating common elements such as font or shape color.  Individual slides, however, rarely are repeating ideas, so designs should rarely be repeated.

Optimize your audience engagement by optimizing your storytelling.  Don’t use templated designs.

I attended your webinar hosted by Citrix Online this week and I thought it was excellent. So thanks for sharing your advice, and let’s hope people apply much of it to their slide decks in general, and not only to webinars!

In hindsight, I wish I’d asked your opinion on sending out the slide deck from a webinar to the audience. Would you recommend doing this, and do you have any guidelines on whether to do it before or after the live session?

Craig H., Instructional Designer, Large Global Financial Services Firm

Craig, thanks for reaching out, and thanks for the nice comments.  Much appreciated!

I do have a strong opinion about handing out slides…  First, read this:  http://www.thevirtualpresenter.com/?p=156

I’ll add one caveat for you since you’re in instructional design…   I do think that in a classroom setting you might find times to use slides as handouts, and I always hate saying “it depends,” but, well, you get the idea.  It depends.

I think the place it might make sense is when the slides double as worksheets or note taking accompaniments – with some planning.

I’ve seen this done well when the slides themselves didn’t contain the all the content and learners were forced to take notes (or they’d miss capturing key points)…I think it was a good reinforcement for paying attention and engaging multi-modally.  The thing that I liked (exclamation point here) was that the slides themselves didn’t contain every last detail of information.  The slides were still trainer support, not the training themselves.

Another potential benefit (though I don’t know if this was the motivation of the case I’m thinking of) is that a learner taking handwritten notes means that potentially sensitive information doesn’t so easily fall into competitive hands.

A point I make in the previous blog post that I’ll reiterate here…

Presenting is a multi-modal medium (aural and visual), and I know some who argue that even in synchronous remote training taking notes is a kinesthetic exercise.  Reading is a different communication form. The risk with slides as post-session handouts is that for the slides to be effectively read, presentation-preparers are tempted to put all information that should be learned on the slide…which leads to the short proposition I said during the webinar and at the end of the blog post…

Great slides make lousy handouts, and great handouts make lousy slides.

Roger

I came across your book after attending a webinar a little while back here in Australia and enjoying it. Even though at the moment I don’t do a lot of webinar presentations, well none at all yet, I do quite a bit of face to face ones, and find most of the material in your book just as relevant for those of course.

I particularly liked the whole ‘less is more’ – I’ve always kept to a   minimum the number of ideas/points per slide, but the one point per slide is a revelation for me.

I recently did a presentation at an international conference where I had about 60 slides for a twenty-minute presentation, and in the process of preparation had broken down a number of my slides so that whereas before I might have had one slide with 4 or 5 points, I changed them to having two or three. The presentation was very well received. But one point only – now that’s radical, and well worth a try – though obviously I don’t have a lot of room to maneuver with that particular presentation.

I’m currently preparing a presentation to do next Friday so I’ll be keeping your book handy as I get it ready!

Keep up the good work.

John

John,

I am, of course, tickled both that you found it useful and that you took time to share.

I don’t remember off the top of my head, frankly, if I made the point in the book as clearly as I do now (but will in v2!), but the idea of having one point per slide is a directional principle.  I completely understand that it’s not always entirely possible.

Moving in that direction, however, does make a number of things easier.  One, (as you’ve done successfully!), it helps keep the slides moving, which usually helps keep the visual attention of the audience.  Two, having one idea also makes it easier to think of a visual way to represent the slide, making it easier to come up with a slide design that helps to make the point.

In a webinar audience remember assumption number one:  some part of the audience is multitasking (they are when face-to-face, too).  We’ll never likely command 100% attention, but thinking visually and keeping it moving will help ‘move the needle’ in the right direction.

Here’s to your continued growth and successes!

Roger