Hello Roger and thank you for an awesome presentation.  I’ve heard you present before and believe you have improved, if I must honestly say so (although I thought you were awesome before). I did submit a question that could not get answered during or after the presentation that I would appreciate if you could offer some suggestions.

I am responsible for the training of our applicant tracking system.  Users are within several locations around the US.  I get frustrated sometimes if there are no questions or comments; however my husband says that means I have thoroughly explained the process.  How would you suggest keeping people engaged during a technical training?

I am showing users how to properly use the system and am not using slides.  There are usually anywhere from 10 to 15 users on a session, so I recommend that they ask questions directly to me when they don’t understand something, and not wait until the end of the presentation.  I do not use Q&A, chat or polling since I am not using slides.   I currently conduct training anywhere from 1.5 hours to 2 hours depending on the audience that I am training.  I will be modifying that to smaller “lunch and learn” type sessions where I present one particular topic of instruction instead of the entire system.

- Alfreda, HR Applicant Tracking System Specialist

Alfreda, I’m happy to address this for you.  Here are a few thoughts, in no particular order.

First, your husband’s answer may be correct, but I’m thinking you could also use a little additional insight from your trainees.  Since I’m not having an ongoing discussion with you where I’d dive in more deeply, let me pose and answer a few questions.

What is their experience with the system you’re training them on?

If the answer is ‘little or none,’ then what you’re doing probably makes perfect sense.  The challenge with someone brand new to something is that they don’t have any questions because they have no context.  They don’t have questions because they don’t know what to ask.

I’d use registration or polling to find out where they’re at.  During registration ask a freeform question (or more than one) like “what do you like best/worst about the system?”  “What would you most like to learn…?”  “Do you have any questions that I can make sure to answer during the session?”  Their answers will give you insight into where they’re at.

Why not go back and forth between live screen demo and a screen where you can use chat/polling?

You don’t mention which web conferencing solution you’re using, but obviously you can’t use chat/polling etc. when doing a live demo, but you could go back and forth.

What happens when you ask a live audio question?

With 10-15 people on the phone conference, managing questions live should be manageable.  And as you evolve to smaller groups, it’s even easier.

What about stories?

Whether a full case study or simply a manufactured scenario, illustrations help even experienced trainees think through a problem as they learn, assess, synthesize, and apply.

And then go beyond stories to application…

Once they’ve got a certain set of “building block” ideas, consider presenting them a situation or problem that asks, in essence, “how would you solve it?”  Just like live classrooms, there will be some eager beavers who always want to answer, some who never want to answer, etc.  Taking this to the next step might involve thinking through how to (appropriately) call on individuals, assign a problem that each.  Depending on your web conferencing platform, you might consider even allowing them to pair up (via private chat or…) to collaborate on the problem and solution.

As you think though these challenges, if you have something to add or clarify, I’ll dial in my assistance more specifically.

Good luck!

I don’t get on an airplane often, and I’m always amused to do so to talk about webinars.  The good news is that the South Bay Organizational Development Network will be a GREAT group to be sharing some time with on 3/1.  And if you’re not in Santa Clara, no problem.

How to Deliver Engaging Webinar Presentations

LIVE:  $20 (advance) from 5:30 PST
http://sbodnrvirtualpresenter.eventbrite.com

VIRTUALLY: $10 at 6pm PST
http://sbodnwebinarvirtualppt.eventbrite.com

And one learning note:

Just in case you’re wondering how I tackle these – I do them as if delivering virtually (and in this case I will be), so learner :: content, learner :: instructor, etc. will be just like the virtual event.  *See* you there one way or another!

Join me for How to Make Online Training as Interactive as In Person Training on 2/18 at 3pm GMT.

Register here.

1080 Group has partnered with my friend Bob Hanson at QLM Marketing to conduct an independent study on the success factors for webinars.

To get a pre-release copy of the report, participate in the survey.  It should take you about 5 minutes.

This webinar focuses on presentation skills for trainers and will share 10 practical tips for improving learner engagement.

See you there tomorrow?

Register here

Imagine you’re an event planner…the traditional, terrestrial kind.

Would you consider hosting a trade show booth, networking luncheon, cocktail reception, or seminar at a hotel somewhere without considering all the details, tangible and intangible, that are part of the experience?  Would you invite people to a “great presentation” but not tell them where to park or how to find the restroom?

Nope.

Don’t do it for a web seminar either.

Design the user experience every click of the way from the first thing they see when they get an invite to the last follow up afterward.

Then test it.

Walk in their shoes.

Effective online webinars require three skills to be firing on all cylinders… production, promotion, and presentation.  A 360-degree perspective on 3 things gives you the 1080 in “1080 Group.”

Of course, almost four years ago what we couldn’t have foreseen were other trends that also use the name… pixels in Hi-Def televisions, and that a catalog number for a poison would bubble up (so to speak) with some controversy for not being so nice to small animals.

Despite the heat associated with this latter topic in ANZ, the good news is that 1) we have nothing to do with that and 2) we are incredibly privileged to be addressing a Sage-specific audience on the subject of effective online meetings.

Care to join?  We’d love to have you, and we can promise the results will be anything but poisonous for your online meetings!

As a quasi-public event, I’m not going to post the link to register here.  Shoot me an email at roger (at) 1080group (dot) com and I’ll make sure you get an invite.

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.

A friend of mine has an automobile that, despite being only a year and half old, has been in the shop an unacceptable number of times.  We just expect things like that to work (it’s not an old clunker, after all), but the reality is that life has a way of dealing a bum card sometimes.

We buy automobile insurance, too, for similar reasons.  But only because we plan for the unplannable.

When presenting virtually, you need to be prepared for the unexpected, too.  Even the most reliable platforms aren’t perfect.  It’s software, and it’s reality.

Don’t let the occasional bump in the road dissuade you from the immense benefit of connecting virtually.  In fact, with even the tiniest prep, you can be ready.

Have a printed copy of your slides

Over a decade I’ve seen presenters lose connectivity from downtown San Francisco because a backhoe cut through the fiber out in the street, had them lose power because of a hurricane, seen them come to a grinding halt because some news thing happened and everybody in the company ran to the web to watch news streams.  It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, you’ll be happy for the old fashioned paper variety.

Plan with your peers

Just because YOU have a problem doesn’t mean that your fellow presenters or event moderator do.  Plan in advance how you’ll work off each others’ verbal clues.  Don’t waste everybody’s time complaining about technology.  Have them push your slides until you’re in the driver’s seat again.  Oh, and did I say have a printed backup?

Mentally switch to audio-only mode

VoIP is great, but it makes everybody’s computer the single point of failure.  Love it or leave it the POTS (plain old telephone system) is one of the most reliable things on the planet.  In a worst-case scenario, mentally switch to delivering your presentation verbally, making sure to describe things as you would in any other instance when you were on the phone with someone.  The picture on the slide might tell the story better than words alone, but that doesn’t mean you have to be dead in the water.

Life happens, including during web seminars.  Don’t get caught with your pants down.

A VFAQ (VERY frequently asked question) I get is “what’s the difference between web conferencing, webinars, and webcasts?”

The short answer, these days, is “not very much and a whole bunch.”

Seriously, the lines have blurred from the days that “webcasting” was akin to broadcasting (using streaming media) with virtually no interactivity, whereas web conferencing was (and remains) live, totally realtime (you don’t want any delay when you’re talking on a phone conference, right? In many use cases, you don’t on the web either).  Webinar is simply a portmanteau of web seminar – arguably a use case rather than a technology.  That is brief, but it’s as deep as I’m going as I introduce IVT and their enterprise video communications.

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Mitch, Hugh, Jim, and Ryan, all at the same time.  In addition to the knowledge and passion and history (Hugh’s a fellow ex-Microsoftie with some common connections), what I’m most enthused by is their clarity of mission.

Hello software

First, IVT’s a software company.  You can host the software, but for reasons I’ll not get into, you want to take advantage of the fact that they host the software for you.  What’s interesting here isn’t a “right or wrong,” it’s a commitment to a business model.  Many (if not most) companies who have solutions for webcasting also provide professional production/event management services.  IVT is committed to their robust partner community who deliver value-added services atop the IVT platform.  Again, this isn’t a right or wrong, but you have to appreciate focus.

Hello production tools

It’s hard to tell you how important the backend of a product is.  It’s what economists call an “experience good” …you have to have been there to get it and appreciate it.  As it just so happens I spent many years running organizations in the production business, let me say the two words that will bring any accountants to their needs and get the producers all excited:  labor and labor.  Labor is expensive.  Technology, especially over time, often gets less expensive.  If you’ve ever produced an event, let alone a bunch of them, you know that the project management time can create a big sucking sound in your budget.  This is where producers get excited… not only will they find the flexibility on the back end of IVT’s platform a joy when meeting numerous and disparate client/stakeholder needs, but it’ll save them time.

Hello customization

Okay, so many different solutions offer degrees of customization, but far fewer have down-to-the-pixel capabilities.  When clients demand that, you’ve got to deliver.  Further, there’s customization of user experiences, such as different tools you might make available to a presenter versus what the marketing department sees when they need to pull down a report.  And then there are web services for the data integration geeks (I say that with love, mind you).

Hello remote presenters – but wait, there’s more

A point of differentiation here is multiple presenters, each with different camera types. One can have a webcam in Sydney, one can be standing in front of a hi-def broadcast camera at a conference in a New York hotel…you get the idea.  Need to switch back and forth like a television newscast?  Can do.

As is my style, my goal isn’t a vendor-by-vendor shootout, to talk about price, or make a recommendation.  I’m excited and privileged to be independent, talk to great people with their own angle on the market, and share with you my own spin on it.  It sounds like IVT has a solution if you need to reasonably reach 100 people and the horsepower to reach 20K if you need.  If you need flexibility and reach and a commitment to knowing their core biz, IVT (or one of their partners) might be someone to add to your must-investigate list.