Category — Presentation Delivery

What if your presentation was hooked to twitter, and every time you changed slides, all the words on your slide were sent as a tweet?  How cool is that?

Not very, if you ask me.

Don’t get me wrong, when I bumped into this free tool to use with Keynote (shared by Tuaw) that would tweet out your presentation text.

Here are four reasons I wouldn’t recommend it:

You should present more like Steve Jobs.  And Steve’s presentations would make lousy tweets

Steve’s the master of simple, powerful imagery and few words.  How relevant would it be to tweet out one word that had no image?  Strike 1.

Most presentations deserve the moniker “death by bullet.”  Too many words = lousy tweets

Unless you planned the presentation to keep everything under 140 characters, the tweet gets cut off, and the thought is thwarted.  Strike 2.

Presenting is an audio/visual communication format.  Twitter is not

If your presentation can be read and doesn’t need you presenting, you’re wasting your audience’s (and your) time anyway.  Do them a favor – write them a paper and avoid  Strike 3.

The power of Twitter is voice with value

When someone watches your presentation and tweets something out, it’s something they find of value enough to share with their followers who they believe will find it of value.  AND they usually share a complete thought that makes sense unto itself.  Used right, that’ll attract eyeballs.  Use it poorly and you’ll hear a big sucking sound near the unfollow button.

The great news is that Effective Virtual Meetings:  Seven Ways to Boost Your Virtual Meeting IQ is that it was interactive and there were a ton of questions.  The bad news is that when there are 500 people in the audience, you can’t get to them all.

Following is one that came in that I didn’t get to during the presentation:

Chris C. asks, “How do you manage running the meeting with monitoring chats?”

Practice, for starters.  (I’ve been doing this a long time).

Have you ever hopped in an unfamiliar car and tried to turn on the headlights only to have the windshield wipers start flapping?

Repetition breeds familiarity, and in time you know where to look, know where to grab, etc.  Start with one tool and get good at it.  Then in a meeting or three find another that suits your style and start using it.

I’d start with chat, because it directly facilitates dialogue.  And like I mentioned in the webinar, I’d keep it open and glance back and forth between it and your presentation, just like you watch your audience AND glance at your notes when presenting in person.

The great news is that Effective Virtual Meetings:  Seven Ways to Boost Your Virtual Meeting IQ is that it was interactive and there were a ton of questions.  The bad news is that when there are 500 people in the audience, you can’t get to them all.

Following is one that came in that I didn’t get to during the presentation:

Scot R. asked a few questions:

“How would you work OneNote into this?“

When I dropped out of PowerPoint to demonstrate how to use Word as an ‘active agenda,’ I was just sharing my desktop.  Anything you’ve got on your computer desktop can be shown to your audience, so OneNote would work just fine!  (BTW, it’s a great program…love OneNote!).

“Would you recommend using the video in the meeting?”

That’s a longer answer than I’m going to take the space for here.  For a multi-page dissertation about how it works and why I’m very careful with the use of video in a meeting, get the book (please don’t take that as a pitch – I’m just pointing you toward the one resource I know about that addresses this in depth).

The question I’d ask is “what’s the tradeoff?”  Video can be useful, and sometimes it’s even necessary, but there’s a cost technologically.  What’s the value you’ll get versus the potential downside?  Example:  if yours is a marketing presentation and you’re unsure of your audiences’ technical savvy, bandwidth, computer horsepower, etc., is what you’ll gain worth the potential risk? (Also see what I wrote to Mary Ellen and Catherine)

It’s a tool – and all tools have their place.

“I work with lots of developers, if I have them at their desk how do I keep them engaged (instead of working on the code so they can leave)?”

We’re talking about remote audiences here.  If they all piled into a conference room you not only cannot engage them one-on-one, ask them to contribute, ask them to answer a question, etc., you still can’t guarantee their not coding either.

In addition to including each individual in the discussion, keep things moving.  Even someone who glances away or goes to check email will come back so as to not miss something.  It’s part of why I push 70-80 slides in a presentation (~30 seconds each).

Finally, remember the ‘move the needle’ exhortation.  You’ll never get 100% participation in any meeting, save CEO mandate.  Think through what you’d do in ANY meeting to improve its “interestingness” (to coin a word), and remember the goal is to improve the averages.

I met Olivia Mitchell on Twitter (@oliviamitchell), and I’ve subsequently found her blog quite informative.

Of note here, I had the privilege of making a guest post there recently while she was globetrotting about.

Thanks for the honor, Olivia.

-R

The bumper sticker was something like “Spontenaity Happens.”  It’s like a life maxim… it’s part of our human experience.

When we present face-to-face, this is true whether we want it to be or not.  Presenting virtually, however, means that we don’t see that thing that happens in the audience that we comment on.  We don’t see the meek hand that starts to raise but then goes back down.  We don’t see that we’re on a winning streak and decide to run with it.

This doesn’t mean that we can’t be spontaneous when presenting virtually, however.

We respond best on-the-fly when we’re comfortable, and a simple fact is that most online presenters are dealing with something new.  And they’re focused on the task at hand…getting through their slides.

The solution is simple:  plan to be spontaneous.

The experience will come, but in the beginning an easy thing to do is to plan in advance where you’ll ask an “ad hoc” question.  It might be a question that helps you set up the next section of your presentation, it might be one that simply gets your audience engaged in some way.  For example, if you just concluded a story about your trip to Spain, ask a question like, “Hey, have you been to Spain?  Go to the Q&A pane and tell me yes or no, or maybe tell me the name of most interesting place you’ve been.”

All planned.  Not critical to the success of the presentation from a content perspective (it doesn’t make a difference if they’ve been to Spain or New Zealand).  But it IS critical to connecting your virtual to you as a real person.  They participate…and active listeners will hear your message better than passive listeners.

Beat the newbie blahs.  Plan your spontenaity.

How is text-based Q&A superior to opening up phone lines for larger audiences?  Let me count the ways.

You can them ignore them for a while without someone feeling ignored or passing out from holding their arm up for long.

You don’t have to use the phrase “parking lot” for a question that comes in that you’d really rather answer later one-on-one instead of in front of the group.

You can pick/choose the questions you want to want to answer.

You can better manage your time.

You can use planted questions more easily (nobody actually even has to ask the question).

You can tackle managing them as a group.  For a big audience, you can enlist additional people to join the presentation team to answer questions.  Let the event producer or moderator or sales team tackle those FAQs that would otherwise take up your time.

Master the essential tool for interactive presentations.  Master text-based Q&A.

Think about a television or radio broadcast. You get to listen. You don’t have a choice.

Think about a seminar you’ve attended with hundreds of people in the audience. The presenter has a certain amount of content to get through in a specified period of time.

Now put yourself in the presenter’s shoes. You’ve planned how to interact with your audience, and ideally you’ve got a sense for how much time you will be doing that.

If you need to retain maximum control over your presentation, you need to be able to pick and choose what questions you respond to. Ideally you can choose questions that best support your point, best provide value to the broadest part of your audience, best set you up to be the rockstar.

The only way you can do that is to manage questions via text. This means that your best solution for letting the audience listen is having them on “listen only” mode, whether they’re on the telephone or listening over their computers.

Put the audience on “listen only” for optimum control.

Would you kindly take a moment to contribute to a survey about best practices when presenting online?

One lucky winner will get an iPod touch, and everybody wins when they learn from each other… the whitepaper will be available next quarter.

The survey can be found here.

Thanks!

-The Virtual Presenter

When you should NOT use a poll?  For that matter, when should you avoid interactivity of any type?

When it’s fake.  When it’s interactivity or the sake of thinking you should be interactive.

A good place to start is by first considering what you would do if you were in person.  Would you talk to the audience, never answer a question, never ask them to raise their hand, never ask them to comment on what you just said?  That’s a bit extreme except for keynote speeches, but most web seminars/webinars/webcasts in today’s world are to educate or persuade.

And if you want to optimize how well your audience remembers, if not acts upon, your messages, your best course of action is to think about how to engage them.  So…where would you?  Introductions at the beginning?  A raise of hands asking “how many of you are here from the healthcare industry today?”

You get the idea.  Despite some folks telling you to be sure to insert a poll every 4-6 minutes or have the obligatory Q&A session at the end, your best bet is to figure out how you’d naturally communicate with your audience and then adapt that to the online medium.  To be sure, many presenters would do well to get more interactive, but forcing it accomplishes nothing, and likely also wastes everyone’s time.

Don’t use a poll to use a poll.  Be natural, and learn the tools of the virtual presenter so you can be as natural online as off.

Here’s another web seminar I have the privilege of moderating… how to get beyond using LinkedIn as an online resume’ and start using it to find/acquire new customers.

When:  Friday, April 17th, 9AM PDT

Where:  http://www.tinyurl.com/linkedinmastery

What:

• Reduce your dependence on expensive lead generation services and advertising campaigns
• Uncover the informal networks your prospects and clients belong to and find the decision makers
• Gain access to information that will transform you from a supplier to a trusted business advisor

Sponsor:  Accuconference

Speaker:  Ray Taylor, founder of Choice32 (@raymondtaylor)