The Webinar Blog

Avoiding The Trap Of Familiarity

Allow me to share a personal story. I wonder if it might resonate with you?

I’m giving a presentation next week. I carefully planned my story flow, interaction breaks, and content. I went through all my slides, speaking out loud, and was pleased to find that the duration was exactly what I wanted.

I then turned my notes into a handout version, nicely written out in full sentences to be used as a leave-behind reference document.

The last step involved cleaning up a few cosmetic details on the slides, adding some judiciously-chosen animations and slide transitions for a bit of pizzazz.

Being the conscientious sort, I went through another practice recitation. I figured it might be a couple of minutes shorter, since I now knew so clearly what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it.

Imagine my dismay to find that my speaking time was now well OVER the planned session length! What the hell happened? I hadn’t added any new content!

What happened was that I fell into the trap of familiarity. The extra time I spent writing the handout document and revisiting the slides reminded me of additional anecdotes, tips, examples, and explanations that now slipped into my recitation without me even consciously realizing it. I was so familiar with each topic point that I had more to say than when I first put everything together.

So now I have two choices… Remove some content from the agenda or refine my vocal presentation to get back to my initial state of basic brevity. (The answer is NOT to talk faster. Although this seems to be the preferred solution for many people.)

This trap is an easy one to overlook. It is one of the reasons presentation coaches advise you to rehearse your entire speech out loud numerous times. For an important presentation, four times through your content is not at all unreasonable:

1) Basic flow and timing. Figuring out what you want to say and how you want to say it.

2) Getting comfortable. Smoothing the rough edges and practicing sounding natural, energetic, and confident in your delivery.

3) Rechecking timing. Watching out for the trap of familiarity adding more talking points and extending your duration. Figuring out where to cut back if needed.

4) Muscle memory. Rehearsing your polished speech to cement the included/excluded content and timing.

Yes, this process takes time. But as Henry David Thoreau so eloquently said:

 

Technorati Tags: presentation tips,speaking tips,presentation,presenter training

Who Do Your Webinar Emails Come From?

What can you do to make sure your webinar communications have the best chance of breaking through email overload and clutter these days?

You work on crafting pithy, concise, and informative subject lines. You’re careful about writing persuasive body text. But there may be another overlooked factor that is dragging down the effectiveness of your webinar emails. Let’s talk about the “FROM” field.

When someone fires up their email app and finds a hundred new unread messages, their eye scans the list looking for familiar landmarks. That’s why all your webinar emails should ideally come from the same name.

There are four primary categories of webinar emails (although each category may have more than one instance):

• Invitation
• Confirmation
• Reminder
• Follow Up

If all the emails associated with these categories come from the same sender, it makes it easier for recipients to mentally connect them as part of a single cohesive communication chain about the same subject. This increases the chance that they will be spotted in the overflowing inbox and opened.

Unfortunately, practice is not always as easy as theory. Invitations may be sent from a house mailing system or a third-party bulk mailer that has a hard-coded sender name associated with it. In smaller companies, invitations may go out under the name of someone working in the marketing department. I can tell you that when I see an unexpected email coming from an unfamiliar “Dave” or “Julie” it tends not to get a lot of attention.

Registration confirmation and reminder emails are most commonly sent automatically via your webinar software. Different products deal with the sender name in a variety of ways. My favorites are products that give you complete control over the displayed sender name. But look at GoToWebinar and Zoom – two of the most popular lower priced webinar platforms on the market. Confirmation and reminder emails sent through those systems come from whatever name is associated with the master account. This may be an employee in accounting, or someone in a central IT department, or a generic name that was chosen arbitrarily. Sender names cannot be customized on a per-webinar basis.

The final category is follow up emails sent to attendees and registered no-shows. These may come from an individual working on the webinar (an admin or one of the presenters), they may be set up in the webinar software and come from the account holder, or they may come from a central marketing group using CRM or bulk mailing software.

If you can figure out a way to achieve consistency in the displayed source for all emails associated with your webinar, you boost the chances that your recipients will notice the emails and recognize that they relate to a webinar they are interested in. It’s worth the effort to get a little extra psychological advantage wherever you can.

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,webcasting,webcast,web conferencing,email marketing,web event,online event

Pop Culture References In Presentations–Where’s The Beef?

Today I saw a tweet from a presentation trainer whom I know and respect. They wrote that in a training call, they used an analogy referencing a 1980s Sally Struthers ad campaign about feeding children. It landed flat, leaving the audience bewildered.

Last night on the Oscars, quite a bit of attention was paid to the Will Smith/Chris Rock altercation. But I wonder if younger viewers had any idea what Rock was talking about in his joke when he referenced “GI Jane 2?”

My adolescence took place during the 1970s. There was no internet. No smartphones. No DVRs or VCRs or home video. There were three network TV stations, carrying 99% of the programming that people regularly watched.

My point in bringing this up is not that things were BETTER then… Just that things were DIFFERENT then. If you consumed a piece of popular culture, you consumed it in the same way at the same time as everybody else in the country. We saw the same commercials because there was no way to skip them. We saw the same episode of the same popular TV shows on the same night and then talked about them the next day at work or at school.

As a result, we shared media-generated cultural touchpoints in a way that is almost inconceivable today. So many people watched the same things and discussed them at the same time… Then they took on even more staying power based on the references ABOUT the original moments, as comedians and parodists used them to connect with their audiences over weeks, months, or years.

It’s very easy for people who came of age pre-internet to communicate in a series of catchphrase references, simply expecting others their age to understand not just the source, but the underlying meaning expressed by use of the quote.

• “You’re going to need a bigger boat.”
• “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.”
• “Where’s the beef?”
• “You’ve got spunk!”

A very gradual weakening of this homogeneity started happening as more TV channels became available, with more programming choices. By the 1980s, home video rentals made a wider choice of movies available from a wider timespan, and home recorders made it possible to time-shift viewing. But it’s the growth of the internet and social media that has undermined the entire concept of a time-based shared cultural experience.

Nowadays, nobody is expected to have seen anything at the same time. “Don’t mention anything about that show or movie… You’ll spoil it for me!” Cultural touchstones may indeed pop up, but they have far shorter lifespans. I get an email each week covering the top memes of the preceding week.

News and entertainment is concerned with collecting instantaneous clicks and views, which means they have to constantly move on to the next “Shiny New Thing.” There is precious little time for things to settle in and collect cultural resonance by comedians and parodists using them as a base point over a long period of time. If Colbert or Kimmel or Fallon makes a joke reference about something, it’s unlikely to come back for another reference the following night… They’ve moved on to the next item that has briefly caught public attention.

Earlier in this post, I referenced the Oscars broadcast with an oblique reference to Will Smith and Chris Rock. The global viewing audience size and amount of coverage the incident received makes me fairly comfortable that you knew what I was talking about today. But would I embed the reference in a presentation I planned to deliver in a month? Probably not… I don’t trust it to have that much staying power in the minds of the general public.

What does all this mean to you as a presenter? You need to watch out for assumptions of shared knowledge, experiences, and memory among your listeners. You’re dealing with different ages, different time-shifted consumption of media, different niche interests being served by online micro-communities. Things that were briefly popular may have faded from memory before you ever deliver your presentation (or may fade over the lifespan of an evergreen presentation that gets reused over time).

And this doesn’t even address the international multi-cultural problem presented by our globally-connected world. I used to give presentations to people primarily in my own country. Those days are long gone. Now even if I find an audience my own age, they may be located in countries that never saw the same programming or wildly popular movies we all experienced together here in the USA.

In most cases, for public presentations where you don’t know the makeup of your audience I recommend staying away from popular culture references. If you really feel it’s important to your message, give a little context for the people unfamiliar with your source reference. And ALWAYS explain the meaning or point you want people to take away from the reference… Never assume that they know what you were trying to communicate by making the allusion.

After all, you want to end up like Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra, not Shaka when the walls fell! *

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

* The closing line is a reference to an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that postulated a culture that communicated entirely in references and allusions to shared stories. It means you want to gain understanding and cooperation with your colleagues rather than failure in your presentation.

Planning International Meeting Times

Well, we’re getting towards that time of year again… The “danger weeks” when locations start changing between Standard Time and Daylight Saving Time. Here in the United States, some states (or even localities within a state) may choose to use DST while others won’t. Meanwhile, standard offsets that you have memorized between cities you use a lot (like New York – London) will be wrong for two to three weeks as the US makes its shift two weeks earlier than UK/Europe and three weeks earlier than Australia.

But the challenge doesn’t just apply to March. In our globally connected world of online meetings and webinars, planning session times is a critical planning step. What time(s) should your webinar be held in order to reach the attendees in all your target locations? What time should you make your prep session in order to accommodate your presenters in various countries?

Never assume you know what time it will be in another location on any given date. Localities can adopt their own time zone and use of DST and change it at will. I have long relied upon www.timeanddate.com for its great collection of global time utilities, such as the Event Time Announcer that lets you copy a link with worldwide time equivalents for a given day/date.

Here’s a great way to keep a handy global time chart available to help you with planning an international meeting or webinar. It’s really just a way to speed access to the World Clock Meeting Planner on the above-mentioned website.

Start by setting up the cities you work with the most or that give you the best quick view across your target geographies. Feel free to start with my list of cities covering lots of time zones (apologies to Central/South America, Africa, and other areas not included in this list… It’s just a starting point!). Pick some date in the future. Save the resulting reference grid page as a bookmark in your web browser. I use mine so much, I put it right on my quick access bookmarks bar in Chrome, as highlighted at the top of this screen shot:

Now any time I want to plan an event, I can click the bookmark and change the date in the quick selector I highlighted in the middle of the screen shot. Voila… I get an easy to read chart that properly accounts for all local time zones and DST offsets in each location for the given date. No guessing and no assumptions.

No browser should be without it.

Technorati Tags: Meeting planning,web meeting,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,online meeting,web event,online event,webcasting,webcast,timeanddate.com,event planning,Daylight Saving Time

New Instructional Video On Smoothing Camtasia Video Edits

Are you a hardcore Camtasia user? I just put together a video explaining a way to use the morph feature of PowerPoint to make your video edits a little less jarring in Camtasia.

You can find my video at https://youtu.be/YyzXzCloNv0

If your feed reader supports embedded video format, you should also see it immediately below this line:

 

I recognize that the technique I describe is overkill for most projects. It takes extra time and effort on every edit. But once you get things set up and go through the process a time or two, it turns into a fairly quick extra few steps. I find it particularly useful when editing “talking head” video of a person narrating. You can create better transitions between takes or after editing out an unwanted bit of speech so that casual viewers aren’t as aware of the jump cut.

This isn’t going to fool a professional, and it’s not meant to replace professional-grade editing tools. But every little bit helps, and it’s kind of fun to combine some products and editing techniques you might not have thought of bringing together.

Hope you enjoy it!

 

Technorati Tags: video editing,Camtasia,morph,video production

Tell Me How Much You Like This Post

My car has OnStar driver assistance. I tap a button and a live representative comes on the line. I was driving the other day and asked them for directions to a restaurant.

(Yes, this is a post about webinars. Stay with it.)

The representative downloaded the directions into my car’s navigation system and I completed the drive with a delightful Ethiopian meal. I thought no more about it.

EXCEPT…

The company won’t stop sending me emails. “You recently contacted us. Please tell us how we did. Thinking about your overall experience, on a scale of 0 to 10 how likely would you be to recommend OnStar to a colleague, friend, and/or family member?”

In my mind, I didn’t “contact them.” Of course I technically did, but it wasn’t significant to me. I got the information I needed and went on with my day, giving it nary another thought. I’m not interested in reflecting on “how they did.” That’s more work than I wanted to put into the transaction.

This is now a universal scenario. Every damned time you have a transaction with anybody, for anything, in any context, no matter how briefly, you will be asked for an opinion about how it went. Check your fast food receipt. There’s a feedback request at the bottom (just enter these 28 digits to identify the transaction you are commenting on). Call someone to ask a question about your bill. Have an online chat session to track an order. You’ll be asked to complete a short survey because your opinion truly matters to them.

And webinars are no different. Five years ago I wrote a blog post saying “I am a big fan of post-webinar surveys.” I’ve changed my opinion on this. Oversaturation has soured me on the concept. And I’m not the only one… I administer many webinars for many clients in many industries across many topics. The one common factor I can tell you is that we are getting fewer and fewer responses on our post-webinar surveys. Nowadays you are lucky to get more than a small handful of people to complete the request.

There’s no magic bullet to getting truly high completion rates on post-webinar surveys, but I can give you a few tips that might at least make them high-er!

1. Shorter! Shorter! Shorter! Every additional question you ask reduces the probability that people will complete it. It doesn’t matter whether they are required or optional. Just seeing a bunch of questions makes people close the page.
   
   
2. Don’t ask ambiguous questions. “Rate the presenters” is useless with more than one speaker. What if one person was good and another was bad?
   
   
3. Don’t ask whether you would recommend the webinar. “Would you recommend this webinar to a friend or colleague?” The answer tells you nothing. Maybe they liked it, but they don’t like recommending things. Maybe it was right for their interests, but they don’t know others with similar interests. Maybe they wouldn’t recommend it because of general dissatisfaction, which still gives you no actionable information.
   
   
4. Pick one rating scale. Don’t swap between 5-point and 10-point scales within the same survey. 5-point scales are general better because they require less thought on exactly where to answer. What’s the difference between a 7 and an 8 response?
   
   
5. Only include one comment box. Don’t add optional comments to every rating question. Just put one box for “Additional comments, clarifications, and suggestions.”
   
   
6. Set up value to the attendee. Tell them you want to refine your webinars to make the content, presenters, and format more useful and valuable for your listeners. Never make the responses about the benefit to you (“Please help us out by answering”), make it about them (“We’d like to make these webinars more useful for you, and you are the only one who can tell us how to do that”).
   
   
7. Give an incentive. Everybody who fills out the survey gets a handout. Or is entered in a drawing. Of course this kills the ability to do anonymous surveys, but in conferencing products where the survey is integrated and you know the responders anyway, you can use that info.

And the most important piece of advice is to step back and truly ask yourself if you are making any substantive changes based on the responses you get to your surveys. In most cases, the answer is no. Somebody glances over the numbers, which look good on status reports, but the next webinar follows the exact same format as every one before it. All you’ve done is wasted your audience’s time and increased their frustration. Give them the information they requested in the webinar and let them move on with their day.

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing,web meeting,online meeting,web collaboration,online collaboration

Get Free Tips About Virtual Engagement

Engagement, engagement, ENGAGEMENT! It’s the buzzword darling of our industry right now.

You can’t click on a link about webinars, webcasts, and virtual presenting without encountering a sentence urging you to find ways to better engage your audience.

Want to know what they ALL get wrong about the concept?

I’ll tell you within the first few minutes of my upcoming webinar next Tuesday, October 26. It’s free, courtesy of Adobe Connect and the American Marketing Association.

We have an hour to go over practical guidelines and “tricks of the trade” that actually work and are easy to put into practice. We’ll take a look at examples taken from real webinars with an eye towards making the presentations more engaging. And of course I’ll answer your questions live in the session.

The start time is 10am San Francisco / 1pm New York / 6pm London (click to see conversions to other locations).

You can register by clicking here. I will be focusing on the needs of virtual marketers, but I’ll bet you can pick up tips that will transfer to other virtual scenarios as well.

I hope to see you there!

Technorati Tags: presentation tips,presenter training,virtual marketing,webinar,web seminar,webcast,webcasting,online presentation,web conferencing

You Are Presenting The Wrong Thing

Well, that’s a confrontational title, isn’t it?

The last three presentations I watched all suffered from the same fundamental mistake. It’s very common and there’s a good chance your presentations might feature this design error as well.

Now when I say “design error” I’m not talking about PowerPoint layout or use of graphics or any other visual design aspects. I’m talking about the conceptual design of deciding what you want to share with your audience.

The conceptual error that most presenters make is to think of their task as one of sharing data with the listener. The presentation is primarily a collection of graphs, tables, or lists of reference information on slide after slide. Displaying factual information becomes the purpose of the presentation.

That’s wrong. It’s ALWAYS wrong.

Presentations are the least effective way to make reference information available. White papers, PDF documents, web pages, and textbooks are designed to collect and make information easily accessible. They are mediums that are built around the “whats” in life. The nouns of our existence. “This is a thing that exists. This is another thing that exists.”

A presentation on the other hand is a transient thing. It exists in the world of verbs… a vehicle designed to make people think, feel, or act. “How can you use the information? Why is it important? Who is it appropriate for? Where can you find it?”

Of course you can include data in a presentation. It would be ridiculous for me to say that a graph or table should never appear on a presentation slide. But the point of including the data is never simply to show it. The data must be there to support the way you want to influence the listener. How does learning this information affect them? How does it provide a benefit? If you can’t clearly articulate that, the data doesn’t belong in the presentation. Let it live in a reference location for later study.

You get to choose your role as a presenter. You can offer insights, be a mentor, help to drive behavior changes, encourage new perspectives. Or you can be an audio version of a textbook. I know which I would rather listen to.

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

PowerPoint Zoom Navigation Curiosity (Don’t Call It A Bug)

Here’s a strange one for you! I discovered a curious behavior in Microsoft PowerPoint that looked like a bug to me. But I found that Microsoft considers it intentional designed behavior. Take a look and see what you think.

As is so often the case with software functionality, it’s easier to show than to describe in words. I made a short video to clearly demonstrate the situation:

 

If you have trouble seeing the video in this post, you can watch it on YouTube at https://youtu.be/pQXtiFJfQRE 

The first three minutes of the video are an introduction to the use of Sections in a PowerPoint presentation and how to use the Insert Zoom Summary navigation slide to allow non-linear access to the different sections in your file. If you are a power user and know all about that, feel free to scrub forward to the 2:59 mark for the interesting part.

In a nutshell, the Zoom Summary slide inserts thumbnail images that hyperlink to target slides in your presentation and then return to the Summary slide. If you place any element of text or graphics that overlaps a thumbnail image on the Summary slide, the overlapping visual is shown on all slides in the section when selected from the Summary slide. If you visit the slides through other types of navigation, their display is unaffected.

This is one of those conditions that most people are unlikely to ever hit. But if it happens to you, you’ll want to know what’s going on, and hopefully this demo will help.

 

Technorati Tags: PowerPoint design,PowerPoint,Microsoft PowerPoint

Stop Using This Word In Presentations!

There is a famous gag in the old “I Love Lucy” TV show where an English tutor tries to stop the gang from using slang terms:

The hapless language expert tells them there are two words they should never use… One is swell and the other is lousy. You can guess how well that works out.

I’m here to add just such an admonition to your speaking habits. Please stop mentioning ‘slides’:

• “Now on this slide, I’m talking about…”
• “As you’ll see on the next slide…”
• “We’ll drill down on this topic in a few slides…”

No, you’re not trying to hide the fact that you built your presentation in PowerPoint or Google Slides or Keynote or whatever. Everybody knows that.

The idea is to put the listener’s focus on your message, not on the physical transport mechanism you happened to use when separating your visual elements so you could get to them easily.

If you call attention to “this slide says” and “that slide says,” you abdicate your authority as the presenter. The slides are presenting the information… You are just helping to click them along.

The structural flow and organization of your presentation topics, stories, and data should be independent of whether the information is grouped on one slide or spans multiple slides. Visuals and supporting text or data come and go as necessary to support the points you are making as the presenter. The audience should not know or care which slide does what.

By the way, this is why I hate page numbers on displayed slides. If you want to add them for a print-friendly handout, go for it! But as you speak, the information should simply flow with no sense of artificial subdivisions indicating which “page” you are on at any given moment.

Given all that, how do you refine your speaking habits to stop calling attention to slide construction? It’s not hard, but you’ll need to practice it self-consciously until you get rid of your old ingrained habits:

• “As you look at this image, think about…”
• “The next thing to consider is…”
• “We’ll have a chance to discuss that in more detail shortly…”

If you’re worried about how to signal another person controlling the display that you are ready for the next click, please go back and read an article I wrote several years ago with plenty of practical alternative phrasing suggestions.

Let’s stop emphasizing our slides in presentations… they’re a swell way to get off to a lousy start.

 

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

No, Presentations With Visuals Are NOT 43% More Effective

Time for another episode of presentation myth busters. You may already be familiar with the oft-quoted nonsense about “Mehrabian finding that 93% of communication is nonverbal.” You may have read my own breakdown of why “The 10-20-30 Rule” isn’t a rule and doesn’t apply to you.

Today’s battle of reality vs hype takes us to a statistic that has floated around the presentation industry for many years (read on for a shocking reveal of how many years). I just saw it featured as the key proposition of an advertising campaign from a well-known heavyweight in our space. I’m not going to call them out, because this isn’t about them or their marketing. It’s about the statistic itself.

Presentations Using Visual Aids Were Found To Be 43% More Persuasive Than Unaided Presentations.

Wow. That is impressive! And the instant I read it, alarm bells went off inside my head. “More persuasive?” How is that quantifiable? To an extent as precise as 43%? And is that oh-so-exact figure a measurement of “persuasion” or “effectiveness,” as is often claimed? Are the two terms interchangeable? Is there such a thing as an overall measure that applies to every presentation use case in every context?

Fortunately, Google is a powerful research tool. And content lives forever on the internet. So I was able to track down a superb 5-part series of articles written by Ikumi Kayama of Studio Kayama who did the hard work of tracking down the source study and analyzing it with a statistician’s eye.

I was a little surprised to find that Ms. Kayama published her analysis 8 years ago this month. But that was nothing to the shock of discovering that the source study providing the suspect statistic had originated in 1986!

I urge you to read through Ms. Kayama’s detailed analysis. I’m not going to plagiarize her work and I don’t want to reduce traffic to her website. Suffice to say, the figure of 43% was made up out of whole cloth. The “study” was a predetermined advertising ploy by 3M corporation to act as a way to promote their line of acetate overhead transparencies for business use. The so-called “study” compared color transparencies to 35mm slide projector slides for instance. Guess what… Using the color transparencies that could be made with 3M’s own color transparency foils and pens were markedly superior to illustrations made in black and white or on projected slides.

If you like the 1986 3M research project, I’m sure you’ll also appreciate how Marlboro cigarettes make men 37.6% more attractive and masculine. It’s garbage produced by an unscrupulous corporate marketing department to support a figure they have arbitrarily decided on as a promotional campaign strategy. This nonsense still goes on today… Look no further than Cisco’s recent barrage of press releases and interviews going on and on about how “Webex makes meetings 10x better than in-person.” Reciting a specific number somehow makes promotional hyperbole seem legitimate.

Now look… I have nothing against good visuals in presentations. I’m right there with everyone else in our industry, exhorting presenters to make presentations more visually interesting and engaging. DO use supporting graphics to help emphasize key points and recapture audience attention! It IS a good thing! Just stop regurgitating meaningless “statistics” to prove your point. The fact that 3M wanted to sell transparency foils in 1986 has nothing to do with your use of pictures in a PowerPoint.

Good visuals in a well-structured, well-planned, well-rehearsed, and well-delivered presentation are going to help. But not by a factor of 1.43.

Technorati Tags: presentation design,PowerPoint design,slide design