The Webinar Blog

Webinar Advice And Practicality

Last week I listened to a webinar covering tips for presenters. The speaker told the audience that you must rehearse your presentation out loud 7 or 8 times in order to be able to give a good live presentation. I shook my head in wonderment at this rule of his. Part of me idly wondered what studies he used to come up with 7 or 8 as the magic number rather than finding that 6 or 9 runthroughs were the required minimum. But mostly I was sad. The sheer impracticality of his rule meant that most of his audience would ignore the underlying valuable point of the advice.

I don’t for a moment dispute the truthfulness of saying that if you practice 7 or 8 times you will end up well prepared for your live speech, knowing what you want to say, when you want to say it, and how you want to express it. But come on! Unless you are a CEO or presidential candidate preparing for a career-impacting speech to be heard by tens or hundreds of thousands, you and I both know that you aren’t going to do 7 full practice recitations. I’m guessing you may have another responsibility or two in your job.

You could say that expressing the advice this way is an implicit bargaining position… “I’ll say 7 or 8 in the hopes that they might settle for 1 or 2 rehearsals.” But I think it more likely that your audience will purse their lips, blow out a disgusted puff of air, and laugh at you. If your doctor tells you that you need to lose weight and get a little more fit, he doesn’t finish the sentence with “… and so I want you to run the Boston Marathon next weekend.”

I do lots of guest speaking about how to be more effective at preparing and delivering webinars. I constantly struggle with how much to throw at my audience. For example, I always talk about the importance of having a fail-over strategy as a presenter or moderator. What can you do to minimize the impact of a computer or audio failure? Because webinars are my full-time job and I support many clients on many webinars, I go to extremes that are impractical for casual webinar presenters. Should I tell you that you are required to have battery backup power sources on your computer, monitor, and headset? That you must have two computers on your desk plugged into separate outlets and power supplies? That you must dial in on two separate telephone networks? That you must have accounts with multiple audioconferencing providers so you can switch to a backup phone conference if necessary?

No. I try to explain the concept, give you suggestions for ways to minimize potential problems, offer examples of solution approaches and tell you to do what you can with what you have. Some people will order extra equipment. Most will not. Some won’t even print their presentation slides. But everyone will be more aware of the need for greater planning and preparation and when they hit a mission-critical webinar they will be ready to take the extra steps necessary to safeguard it.

There are countless ways to improve the quality, reliability, and value of our webinars. If you are coordinating a webinar for your company, help your presenters by giving them practical, incremental suggestions that they can actually incorporate. Starting from a position of intransigent irrationality is not going to change anybody’s existing work habits.

PS: Please practice your entire presentation, out loud, at LEAST once before giving it live! You will feel more comfortable, you will come across as professional and confident in your subject, and you will know your timing. The more times you give your presentation before the audience hears it, the better you will sound on event day.

 

Technorati Tags: presentation tips,speaking tips,webinar,web seminar,online seminar,web conference,web conferencing,webcast,webcasting

Why Should You Print Your Presentation Slides?

I work with many guest speakers on client webinars. I always tell them to print out a hardcopy of their slide presentation as a backup. They usually don’t. Why do I make this unreasonable request? After all, printing is inconvenient, wastes paper and toner, and makes it harder to incorporate last minute changes.

Having a backup of your slides handy is an insurance policy against the slim but finite probability of something going technically wrong during your webinar presentation. Your computer could freeze or crash, your office could lose power, your internet provider could go down, or you could accidentally click the little X in the top right corner of your browser window, booting you out of your webinar session. In any of these scenarios where the problem is local to you as the presenter, your goal is to avoid having to cancel the webinar in progress. Why should your audience suffer just because you’re having a bad day?

If your webinar software uploads the slides to the meeting room, carrying on is easy. You just tell your designated backup person (a moderator or co-presenter) to move the slides forward for the audience while you continue your talk. [Side tip: You don’t have to keep saying “Next Slide.” There are more subtle ways to cue your helper that it’s time to advance. “Moving on, we can see…” or “Let’s continue this idea with my next graphic…”]

If your webinar software uses screen sharing and you are showing PowerPoint on your desktop, your backup preparations need an extra step. Your helper must have the final slide deck on his or her computer, fired up and ready to take over the presentation chores if necessary.

In either case, we come back to the initial question. Why not just keep the PowerPoint file open on your computer so you can look at it in an emergency?

1) If your computer crashes or you lose power, your backup is useless. Why would you want a failsafe that can fail from the same dependencies as your primary solution?

2) It is harder to maintain correspondence between your webinar progress and your position in the PowerPoint file than it is to move through papers. With the former, you have to keep switching back and forth between computer applications (even if they are on two separate machines) and eventually you will get mixed up and move the wrong one forward. It’s trivial to turn a piece of paper on your desk when you click a mouse button. So there is no time wasted in an emergency, trying to find where you were. [Side tip: Don’t turn pages onto your desk. Lift them and drop them onto the floor beside you. Each page floats silently down, causing no paper shuffling noise distraction.]

3) Printouts are fantastic for glancing at your presenter notes as you move through your speech. You might scrawl down some highlights to talk about on each slide, or you might type them out in the Notes section of your PowerPoint and print the Notes pages. Either way, your backup now serves double duty during your presentation.

So print those slides. The webinar you save might be your own! [Side tip: Change your View in PowerPoint to Grayscale before printing. Some things don’t look right when colors are converted to black and white. The Grayscale view lets you catch this and make adjustments so you don’t end up printing solid black slides.]

 

Technorati Tags: PowerPoint,presentation tips,webinar,web seminar,online seminar,web meeting,online meeting,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing

ReadyTalk Introduces New Package Pricing

ReadyTalk put out a press release yesterday announcing new package pricing on their web and audio conferencing. Their website has been updated to show a clear summarization of all pricing options.

I applaud this clarity and transparency in pricing. Too many web conferencing vendors make licensing their software a similar experience to buying a car. “Let me go talk to our sales manager and see what we can do for you… How’s this price? No? Tell you what, if you also take these optional components I think I can cut you a better deal on the package.” It makes comparison shopping awfully difficult.

A quick skim through the new packages shows that ReadyTalk has obviously used the Citrix GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar pricing model as their touchstone. Capacities are roughly similar at room sizes of 25, 150, 500, 1000, and 3000. Monthly and annual prices also match closely.

The differences are in the details, however. I spoke to Scott King, executive vice president (and co-founder) at ReadyTalk about the new price levels. He pointed out that ReadyTalk does not place a hard limit on phone or web meeting attendance. If you exceed your package size, you get charged an additional rate for each person-minute used. The per-minute pricing is also listed on the summary page, so there are no surprises there. This is nice, as it means you don’t have to overpay for a large capacity on the off chance that one of your events might turn out to be a little more popular than you had expected.

If you hold infrequent webinars, you can also choose to bypass the monthly unlimited use pricing and simply pay a per-person-minute fee based on actual usage. Citrix does not offer that option. ReadyTalk also offers bundled technology and services packages on a per-webinar basis that includes a producer, operator assistance, and other assistance.

I told Scott I was surprised at the number of included audio minutes in the smaller capacity “Web Meeting Pro” packages. In a 25-person plan, you get 1000 person-minutes per month. In the 150-person plan you get 2500 person-minutes per month. Those seem like big numbers until you do the math. A 60 minute event would only cover participation for 16 or 41 people under each plan! Looked at another way, if you used your entire meeting capacity under each plan, it would give you 6 minutes of meeting time on the 25-person plan and 16 minutes on the 150-person plan. So this isn’t going to cover your monthly costs very well. You still have to plan on some significant pay-as-you-go phone charges. In their defense, Scott does point out that the dial-in numbers include toll-free access for US and Canadian callers. I think that is unique in the industry… Typically included audio conferencing relies on long distance toll access.

The larger 500-3000 person “Webinar” packages give you streaming broadcast audio out to all your attendees, but they include no phone minutes for your presentation team. So you still end up with additional pay-as-you-go phone charges. Scott says that phone audio for their larger webinars typically uses operator assistance, which they have to charge for to cover costs. Scott also highlighted their commitment to providing the highest possible call quality on the phone lines, using a “Tier 1 audio infrastructure” that includes global international access, redundancy across many data centers, and well trained operators.

I hope more major vendors follow this example of posting their rates unambiguously on their websites. Having the option of using a monthly/annual package, a one-time flat rate, or a pay-per-use model is also convenient for different types of customers. Just be careful to calculate out your projected costs as you estimate your use of telephone and web person-minutes.

Technorati Tags: ReadyTalk,Scott King,webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,webcast,webcasting,online meeting,online seminar,web meeting

ViVu Disappears Into Polycom

Well, I can’t prove it to you, but I had made a bet with myself that ViVu would be the next to get gobbled up. Their video technology was too good for the consumer-grade platform they were selling. And today Polycom announced that they closed an (undisclosed amount) all-cash deal for ViVu.

Although Polycom is saying all the right things about existing customers continuing to be supported, you can bet that ViVu’s existing products will cease to exist in short order. As a matter of fact, I went to the website address for ViVu and got redirected to a Polycom page with a two-sentence note “To prospective customers: Thank you for your interest in ViVu, now part of the Polycom family. Please contact us for more information.”

In other words, “We are not particularly interested in selling small-potatoes licenses to Skype users. We plan to make this an integrated part of big-ticket enterprise video conferencing packages. Call us if you have some serious money to throw around.”

Congratulations to the ViVu gang, who always amused me by holding their video briefings from an old couch. Truly a Silicon Valley garage development success story.

Who’s next? I’d say the videoconferencing craze is probably going to put Vidyo on the short list for the M&A due diligence squads.

 

Technorati Tags: ViVu,Polycom,Vidyo,videoconference,video conferencing,web conferencing,web conference,webcast,webcasting

Presentation Advice For Those Who Need It

“How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?”

“Only one… But the light bulb has to WANT to change.”

That joke came to mind after I received a plaintive email from a past client of mine. She was working with a guest speaker for her organization. A professional in the medical field, he had submitted a presentation for his upcoming speaking slot that consisted of text-filled slides broken up by occasional charts and tables listing statistics and drug names. It was certainly informative. Certainly factual. Certainly useful as a handout reference work. And certainly a classic case of Death By PowerPoint, designed for an audience to squirm through impatiently so that they could receive their continuing education credits.

His entire speech was there on the slides, doing all the work of the presentation. It was very hard to imagine what the speaker was going to add, other than reading the slides out loud for those with vision difficulties.

My correspondent asked me what “easily digestible and forceful” document or article she could send this speaker to make him see that he needed to get his script off the slides and make his presentation visuals different from his handout reference documents. Especially when he honestly believed that every piece of factual supporting evidence had to be presented on his slides in conjunction with his speaking points in order to be taken seriously by his professional audience.

There are great books out there include the value proposition along with the tips. But we can’t tell a doctor to go read “slide:ology” or “Presentation Zen” or “Advanced Presentations by Design” or “Beyond Bullet Points” and get back to us later. They aren’t going to buy and read such a book. They have no interest in learning how to design better presentations.

So I put it to you… How do we reach the people WITHOUT a preexisting interest in making their materials work better during the live presentation? It has to be short. It has to be strongly compelling. It has to convince them that taking the extra time and effort to do things differently than they are used to has tangible value for them. It can’t be just a “Don’t do that” list of design no-nos.

I have taken a shot at writing a short article addressed directly to the casual guest speaker with no knowledge of or interest in presentation design. I’m also going to reach out to the acknowledged experts in the field of presentation design and see if they are willing to create their versions of a “Pitch for the disinterested.” If any of them decide to contribute, I will update this post and put links to their articles.

Together, maybe we can find a way to make more light bulbs want to change!

Here then, are links to articles targeted at presenters who need help but don’t know it and don’t care:

• Andrew Abela: Presenting To Physicians, Scientists, Engineers... And Marketers
• Cliff Atkinson: Rare, Medium, or Well Done
• Angela Garber: Death By PowerPoint
• Seth Godin: The Atomic Method of Creating a PowerPoint Presentation
• Ken Molay: The One-Step Approach To Better Presentations
• Garr Reynolds: "Slideuments" And The Catch-22 For Conference Speakers

 And here is a potpourri of presentation pointers from Presentation Advisors' Jon Thomas: 

• 15 Best PowerPoint Presentation Design Posts for 2011

Technorati Tags: presenter tips,presentation tips,presentation training,speaker training,speaking tips,presentation design,PowerPoint

The One-Step Approach To Better Presentations

I would like to try to sell you something. But don’t worry, it won’t cost you a dime. I’m not going to try to sell you a book, or consulting services, or a training class, or a product of any kind.

I want to sell you on a concept. One that directly contradicts your current beliefs and challenges your current comfort zone. I would like to sell you on a different way of thinking about the PowerPoint slide decks you create for your presentations.

I want you to know that even though you are saying all the right things, and are carefully placing facts, evidence, and valuable education on your slides, they could be a lot more effective. They could help you get your points across with greater emphasis. They could keep your audience more engaged and interested in your topic. They could spur greater retention of key facts. And they could make you stand out as a better presenter, someone people look forward to hearing from. Someone who gets great post-lecture evaluations.

This isn’t a matter of using a different PowerPoint template or following a rigid methodology for slide design. All I want you to do is to think about slides for a live presentation as being different from handouts. Right now, you create your slides based on your training and experiences with professional writing. Your slides are designed so that you can hand them out, just like any other document, to attendees and to people who missed your presentation. People need to be able to read through your presentation and get the valuable information you worked so hard to gather and organize.

That is a commendable goal, and it’s a valuable resource you are making available. Definitely create that handout. But here’s the critical new perspective I want to push… If the slides are good enough to convey the information on their own, why do you need to be there? You don’t add much value if your job is to read the slides out loud to the audience and occasionally tell them that although a table or chart is too dense or complex to see on the screen, they can study it in more detail later.

So what’s the alternative?

Take the responsibility for your live presentation on yourself, rather than placing it on your slides. Turn all those bullet points and densely-packed text into your speaker notes. Just copy them down into the notes section of your slides. Up in the presentation space, challenge yourself to consolidate and synthesize each point into the shortest possible set of keywords that you can. Find a graphic that supports your point and acts as a visual stimulus and memory aid for your audience while they listen to you verbally fill in the blanks and add the details.

Instead of one slide titled “Benefits of The Solution” and eight bullet points listing benefits, create eight slides, with each bullet point now being used as the slide title. You’ll spend the same amount of time in your talk, but instead of sitting on one text slide for eight minutes, you get to introduce a slide change and a new visual cue every minute! Your audience can take in each point you make as a separate, important piece of information that can be mentally processed and filed away.

The great thing about reinventing your slides this way is that it automatically makes you look good. Audiences dismiss a presenter who reads text off the slides. Even though you were the one who put them together and it represents your knowledge, the psychological perception is that you don’t really know the subject and all you can do is read the slides out loud. But if you show a slide and give the audience more information about the topic, they are impressed with your subject mastery and knowledge.

Take the opportunity to make your next presentation better for you and for your audience by thinking about your slides as visual support for your talk, rather than the primary conveyor of your information. I promise you it will be worth the effort.

 

Technorati Tags: presenter tips,presentation tips,PowerPoint,speaking tips,presentation training,speaker training,slide design,presentation skills

Alternate Access For Webinar Wire

If you enjoy reading or contributing articles to Webinar Wire (a blog owned by Aperio Networks, for which I act as contributing editor), you may have noticed problems accessing it lately. There is a problem with the convenience domain name for the site. All the articles are still available… All you need to do is use an alternative access URL:

http://webinarwire.eventspan.com

Sorry for the confusion!

 

Technorati Tags: Webinar Wire,webinarwire.com,Aperio Networks

South Pacific: Your First Webinar

This is a special for my readers in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Malaysia who never get a chance to join in on my educational webinars and interact directly with me. Citrix Online in Australia has asked me to present an introductory overview of what you can expect as you organise and present your very first webinar. I will give you a 10,000-meter view of the various things you need to keep track of and manage as you put together a public-facing webinar.

This is definitely not the place for experienced webinar pros… I will be speaking directly to the people who are worried that “they don’t know what they don’t know.” We won’t dive into specific procedural details, but you will come out with an understanding of the overall process, terminology, and responsibilities for different members of your webinar team. It’s a great place to ask basic questions without worrying that you will be laughed at by smug old hands at the webinar game.

The webinar is scheduled for 1pm Australia Eastern (Sydney) time. That is 3pm for Auckland, New Zealand. And it’s 10pm for me on the East Coast of America. Ah, the joys of international stardom!

For more information and registration, please visit my upcoming webinars page at www.effectivewebinars.com.

Webinar Announcement: Local vs. Remote Techniques

Friday, October 7 I am the guest speaker for an online event sponsored by Adobe Connect and the American Marketing Association. They have asked me to talk about similarities and differences in presenting for local vs. remote audiences. I will cover tips for presenters in both situations, with best practices that apply to a particular environment and universal truths that apply to any presentation.

We already have a very large audience registered, which means lots of interaction and live questions. I encourage you to join in if you can. You just might learn something that will help with your next presentation.

The webinar is scheduled for one hour beginning at 10am Los Angeles, 12pm Chicago, 1pm New York. Here is a conversion chart for other time zones: http://j.mp/oct7time

There is no cost to attend. Registration is available at http://j.mp/ocXc7s

See you online!

Technorati Tags: webinar,presentation tips,presenter tips,presenter training,speaking tips,speaker training,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing,web seminar,online seminar