The Webinar Blog

Presentation Slides Need Content

The title of this post seems self-evident, doesn't it? A PowerPoint slide doesn't offer any benefit if it contains no content. So why bother mentioning it? Because of a design practice I have seen too many times in presentations (online and in-person).

Presenters often like to incrementally add content to a slide, perhaps bringing in bullet points one at a time. Or adding graphic elements that add detail. Fine. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with that.

But please, don't let the audience see a blank slide before your first build. Every time you move to a new visual in your presentation, there should be a reason for its presence. The only reason to show something to your audience is that the thing you are showing supports and enhances your vocal presentation. If the "thing" you show turns out to be nothing at all, it turns the entire premise on its head.

Each new slide should have something on it to start with. Then you can add to the content if appropriate. When audience members see an unexpected and unexplained blank slide, they momentarily stop thinking about the points you are making. Instead, they wonder if something is wrong. On a webinar they wonder if the software stopped transmitting correctly. Do they need to notify you? Click something? Troubleshoot? This period of uncertainty might be short, but why introduce it at all? Keeping attention on your topic is hard enough under the best conditions… Why shift attendees' focus to the mechanics of the display process?

Fixing a "build from blank" slide couldn't be easier. If you find that any of your slides show up blank until you click them, open the animation panel and delete the first item in the list of animations. Done. Now the first item to be shown is already there when you move to the slide.

Selah.

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,webcasting,webcast,presentation design,slide design,PowerPoint

Expert Speakers... Aren't

I would guess that 95% of the webinars I attend use an “expert speaker.” The promotional materials promise that I will hear from “an expert on the subject.” Or a moderator starts the webinar with “We have two experts today, ready to share their insights and experience.”

Marketing departments often plan out their lead generation activities along these lines:

• We’ll deliver one lead-gen webinar per month.
• We’ll pull in some expert from an internal department or from a partner and have them talk to their topic area.
• We’ll give them a slide template and some basics about how to give a webinar.

The problem is that subject matter experts are often the least effective presenters for your webinar. Why is this?

1. The acknowledged internal expert in a topic is usually in demand internally. They have a LOT of responsibilities. Your marketing webinar doesn’t rank high on their priority list. This means their goal is to dispense with the webinar distraction with the least amount of time and effort possible. That means the least amount of time to plan the talk, the least amount of time to create slides, and the least amount of time to rehearse. [Please note, I am not ascribing evil intent here. This is entirely proper and correct given their workload and what their job performance is based on. They would be fools to think differently and you are a fool if you think you can change their priorities in your favor!]
2. Expertise in a professional subject does not equate to public speaking skills, comfort, or experience. The majority of the population does not like speaking in public and has never received training in how to do it well. This percentage does not magically change just because they know how to construct a box-girder bridge.
3. Subject experts often have difficulty communicating to non-experts. When you work with a specialized topic for a long time, you tend to take certain things for granted in work conversations with others. You assume a level of background and familiarity with basic concepts. You use abbreviations and references without even remembering that they are artificial constructs within your specialized community. They won’t even realize that some of their slides or statements are confusing to a more general webinar audience.

My suggestion is to designate a webinar presentation expert in your company. Find that person who is outgoing and enjoys being the focus in meetings. The person who won’t shut up about the time they played a lead in a community theater production. The person who puts zany messages on their voicemail. Make webinar presentations part of their evaluated and rewarded job description. Give them the time necessary in their work week to create good presentation materials. Give them some training in remote presentation techniques. Then use them!

That person can be the “voice of the company” in the vast majority of general lead generation and marketing webinars. But you can (and should) still involve subject matter experts. Have them commit to answering technical questions during the webinar. Give them a short segment to present their deep expertise, wrapped with your presentation expert’s lead-in and lead-out. Have your presentation expert conduct the webinar in an interview format, where s/he can draw out the subject expert and keep things moving.

Unsure of how to broach this concept to management? Why should they approve a new job function at a time when companies are consolidating work functions and looking for cost savings? Have them read “Maybe Presenters Aren’t The Problem” (and especially the comments with ideas spurring this post).

Good luck!

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

omNovia Adds Webinar Attention Checker

omNovia just announced "Presence Manager" as a new feature in their web conferencing software. This is yet another attempt by a vendor to answer the always-tricky question: "Are my attendees actually paying attention?"

I think (without any real certainty) that Citrix was the first to incorporate an attention monitor into a web collaboration product. But I have always been a bit cynical about trusting results from its "black box" algorithm that comes up with an artificial rating number for attentiveness. This is supposedly based on things such as use of chat, amount of time where the conferencing window has application focus, and number of interactions. At the end you get an integer that doesn't really mean anything and has no exposed basis for the calculation. Other vendors have implemented similar measurements.

One of my clients is a big professional association that offers continuing education credits for attendees at its webinars. To verify attendance and participation, they ask guest speakers to include many polls throughout their presentation. Sometimes these feel superficial and are obviously there only to do a spot-check on attendees. Having lots of polls that don't add value for audience members is a real turn-off, not to mention taking time away from additional content delivery.

omNovia's approach is more simplistic and brute force. When a webinar host elects to use it, the software automatically displays a big "Are you there?" message in a popup window on attendees' screens. Messages come up at random intervals and disappear if left unclicked. At the end of the session, you can get a report on a cumulative and per-user basis of clicks, giving an accurate and explicit insight into attentiveness and interaction with the webinar.

Hosts can customize various aspects of the tool: Size of the popup message, what text gets displayed, how often to do popups (within a range), and how long the window should remain visible to allow for a response.

It goes without saying that this is a much more intrusive approach to the problem than the passive monitors from other vendors. Attendees have their concentration on content interrupted randomly and repeatedly during a session. But for classroom and educational situations, I can see it being justified as a necessary evil in granting completion credit.

If you click through to the Presence Manager announcement page, you can see a short video of the feature in action. Tell me what you think in the comments section… Good idea, or too distracting?

 

Technorati Tags: omNovia,Presence Manager,web conference,web conferencing,webinar,web meeting,online seminar,web seminar,webcasting,webcast,continuing education,CEU

Advanced Polling in Adobe Connect

I received an email today from James Booth, the CEO of ActiveC. The email promoted a new add-on utility called SurveyMaker for Adobe Connect. I haven't tried out the functionality, but I sure like what I see based on their online description and examples.

SurveyMaker adds many types of questions, including slider controls. It scales to the size of the containing "pod" much more elegantly, and it has nice graphics showing cumulative results. There are also some cutesy color schemes and customizability. You can export results to external CSV files and PDF report documents.

Another nice feature is that you can save your poll questions up to an ActiveC cloud server and import them into other Adobe Connect meeting rooms.

Pricing seems to be per Adobe Connect domain and is GBP 70, EUR 94, or USD 122.

This looks like a very impressive and useful enhancement to Adobe Connect. I have always admired the open extensibility of Adobe's Flash-based pods and how they opened up integration to third party suppliers, in much the same way that "apps" became the lifeblood of what started out as purely mobile telephones. ActiveC SurveyMaker is a worthy addition to that library of extensions.

 

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CopyTele Goes After Citrix and Logitech

Two months ago I reported on CopyTele’s patent suit against Microsoft Skype. I concluded that post with a quote from CopyTele CEO Robert Berman: "This is the initiation of what will be a broader patent enforcement campaign" that could target 90 to 100 web conferencing companies.

It seems that his statement was not a bluff. Today the company put out a press release announcing similar patent infringement lawsuits against Citrix and Logitech. The suit against Logitech targets their 2009 acquisition of LifeSize video conferencing. Citrix of course has the GoTo family of conferencing products, including GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, and GoToTraining.

The new developments interest me for two reasons. First, I have to shake my head in sympathy for poor old Logitech. Their core business is in hardware. But in 2009 they bought LifeSize as a way to expand their footprint into the software side of videoconferencing. Apparently that didn’t work out as well as they had hoped. Early this year Logitech wrote down LifeSize’s value by more than half and announced that they were considering selling off the business. Then in late April the CEO announced that they had decided to keep LifeSize, but would scale back and focus sales efforts on SME businesses. Now they have to defend a lawsuit against it. I’ll bet the board meetings this week are fun.

The second and more important fact for me is that CopyTele is expanding its suit against several very big names all at once. That would seem to indicate a strong belief that they can actually win, rather than just hoping for a quick payoff to settle out of court. Going up against one defendant gives you room to negotiate and maneuver. Going up against three major players with strong technical and legal teams is a different story. I would imagine that those companies will share defense strategies and fight back fiercely in concert and individually. And if CopyTele keeps adding other major vendors (Cisco? Adobe?) to its hit list, this could turn into the biggest legal battle in web conferencing history.

I’ll keep reporting on this story as news develops, but I expect that to be a long, drawn-out process.

 

UPDATE MAY 2, 2014 - Logitech settled with CopyTele for an undisclosed amount. That was quick!

Technorati Tags: CopyTele,Citrix,Logitech,LifeSize,web conference,web conferencing,video conferencing,videoconference,webcast,webcasting,webinar