PresenterNet just published a wonderful concise guide for home-based businesses wanting to use recorded web presentations to help gather new leads. I was very impressed with the step by step practical suggestions and detailed guidelines for people who are not design professionals. They go right down to the number of words per slide to plan for when writing your script!
The guide is available as a PDF download from the web page, and amazingly you don’t even have to register to receive it! Pure altruism and a resource that anyone can benefit from. If your feed reader doesn’t support the interactive link in the first sentence, here is an explicit link you can copy and paste into your web browser:
https://www.presenternet.com/app/home-based-business/
The web page and the guide also refer you to a short sample presentation illustrating the concepts and showing how it all ties together. Note that although the document tells you to plan for five or six slides in your short presentation, the online sample seems more interesting than that. They use simple fade-in builds in PowerPoint to add visual movement and change, so you are never sitting back and looking at a static slide for 60 seconds. That is important.
Also important is that they use text sparingly and in short fragments to highlight and emphasize key items. You usually don’t want to animate your text with fly-ins and other fancy effects. They do a few subtle text effects that go about as far as you will want to take it. One of my favorites is to start with your text in the center of the slide by itself, then “slide” the text up to a title position to make room for the graphics you will introduce. Very natural, and very cinematic.
Rather astonishingly, there isn’t a drop of product promotion in the guidelines document. Kudos for putting out something that is purely educational and business beneficial, letting the provider stand out as a trusted resource and nothing more. I noted that the sample online presentation made use of some powerful and unique features in PresenterNet, and they didn’t even call attention to them! So I’ll do it here (I like helping to spread the word about unique web conferencing features, especially when the company doesn’t even know I’m going to do it).
Watch the presentation and notice how at various points they stop to let you interact with the screen. You can click checkboxes to indicate interests, move a slider bar to show relative interest in a subject, type contact information into fields… All without leaving the presentation or being presented with another window. They are embedded into the slides themselves using something that PresenterNet calls “InterActors” – embeddable controls that let the audience make inputs right in your presentation. The responses are captured and are available for reporting purposes. This goes beyond the standard polling facilities offered by most other web conferencing vendors, and works in live meetings as well as recordings. Very fancy indeed!
These are great resources and well worth your time to study. Thanks, PresenterNet!
