Tag Archives: powerpoint

Webcasts Grow Up

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In one of the earliest posts on this blog I complained about the lack of social-media awareness and interactivity in most B2B webcasts. I haven’t seen much improvement in the intervening 18 months—until today. In an online event this morning, webcast service provider On24 showed off a new webcasting platform that provides the kind of multimedia and social-media integration that the technology needs to thrive.

If I were still an On24 customer (I last worked with them three years ago) I would be very excited about this new platform. One attraction for me is what appears to be huge flexibility in arranging the console for both the producer and consumer. As an event attendee, I was able to resize, rearrange, and close or open the various windows within my browser, and it appears that the producer has even more flexibility in the setup. There are a number of social media widgets that the producer can add to the console, including Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

One of my complaints about traditional webcasts is the dominance of the slides, which are rarely compelling, to put it politely. The new platform offers a number of ways around that deadly problem. First, it includes live video capability to show the presenter, using a setup as basic as a web cam, and allows for switching between speakers. Perhaps more importantly, it allows presenters to share their screens, so that a degree of spontaneity is possible.

There’s a lot more to the new platform than I can address here, and on the basis of a half-hour introduction, I’m probably missing some key points and being overly impressed by others. I’d recommend that you read more for yourself, both on the On24 site and elsewhere.

Nothing that On24 does with this platform is revolutionary, but it seems to integrate existing technologies and social-media tools smoothly and effectively. It’s no doubt priced at a level that puts it out of reach for smaller companies, but it may well set a standard for integration and ease of use that will spread to other platforms.

Now if only they could supply better waiting-room music. . . .

 

Throw Away Your Slides! (Maybe.)

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Whenever I attend a webinar, I find myself getting frustrated with the format’s limitations, occasionally to the point where I complain about it in this blog. Someone, somewhere has probably put together the perfect webinar, but I haven’t seen it. Though the causes will vary from one webinar to another, whether it’s a lack of interactivity or the failure to show the speaker, there always seems to be one insurmountable problem: the slides.

Though you can look for help with your slides from sources like Guy Kawasaki’s “10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint” or, more recently, Jesse Desjardins’ “You Suck at PowerPoint,”  most people don’t have the will, the time, or the artistic resources to make many improvements. Until yesterday, however, the most radically effective solution of all had never occurred to me: Don’t use slides at all.

Now before you conclude that I’ve lost my mind, let me share my experience with you. Yesterday I attended BtoB magazine’s Digital Edge virtual trade show, primarily to watch a leadoff keynote by Chris Brogan and a concluding one by Gary Vaynerchuk.

Brogan’s prerecorded presentation, on the “Rise of the Trust Agents,” was very good, of course. While he used slides, they were accompanied by video of Brogan giving his talk. I found, though, that the slides made me pay less attention to what he was saying. I tended to read ahead of or behind where he was, and to wonder whether he was skipping over some of his bullet points.

For him, too, I sensed, the slides were as much an impediment as a guide: he seemed to hesitate now and then, as though looking to see which slide he was on or whether it was time to advance to the next one. Though the distraction was subtle, it felt as though the slides were a wall between Brogan and his audience, preventing him from connecting as completely as he might have.

If I needed any reminder of how strong Brogan’s presentation was, distracting slides or not, a sampling of a few of the mid-day webinars provided it. Excellent content and presenters, to be sure, but they were sabotaged by disembodied voices, bullet-stuffed slides, and overly complex tables and charts.

Vaynerchuk’s end of the day talk, though, on “The Thank You Economy,” was in an entirely different, higher class. Like Brogan’s, his presentation was prerecorded, but he spoke without using slides or, apparently, any notes at all. Instead of being placed in the smaller presenter panel, his video appeared in the large panel where the slides usually are shown.

Without slides to distract me, I found that I focused more closely on what Vaynerchuk was actually saying.  It felt to me as though he was entirely focused on his audience throughout his talk, and that though he couldn’t actually see us, he was able to make a real connection. (It may have helped that he had a few people listening to him in the studio where his talk was recorded.)

The end result for me was that, although his content wasn’t necessarily more compelling than Brogan’s, I absorbed much more of it from him.

If you insist on being realistic, I’ll admit that Vaynerchuk is a special case. It probably helps that he’s spent the last four years or so doing daily video blogs, that he’s given many versions of this talk before, and that he’s a born talker who knows his subject cold. Few of us can ever hope to match his presentation skills.

But if your topic permits it, why not try going slideless? For most presenters slides are just an outline, a crutch to keep them on-topic. If it feels like tight-rope walking without a net, so much the better. Your audience will be riveted.

Even if we never feel ready to throw away our PowerPoints,  we can aspire to be less dependent on them. By using fewer slides with simpler content, we can spend more of our presentation time focusing on our listeners. In the end, if they just wanted the content, they could read your presentation by themselves. What they really want is to connect and interact with you. Throwing away your slides is one way to start that process.

Can Webinars Get Hip? Three Radical Ideas for Change

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Between old and new media in the B2B world, there is a class that might be called middle-aged media: e-mail newsletters, webinars, and digital magazines. Though digital in nature, they have been in use for years and are starting to show their age. Like print, they will always have some role to play, but their glory years are fast receding. So as a savvy new-media type, should you write them off as tools for the future? Not quite yet—if you’re willing to try some radical surgery, at least.

What brought this topic to mind was a webinar on digital magazines earlier this week. Although I signed up to learn what the future might hold for digital magazines, my focus ended up elsewhere. For most of the presentation, I was thinking instead about the future of webinars, and how they might be made more effective in the age of social media.

The reason behind this train of thought wasn’t any particular problem with the webinar. It was as good as virtually every other one I’ve sat through. But there is the root of the problem: one webinar seems just like another. A robust medium, like print or video, should allow, if not promote, innovation and creativity, and hence diversity. Most Webinars don’t.

It doesn’t have to be that way. There is nothing inherently restrictive in the technology of webcasting (of which a webinar is one specific type) that should impede creativity. The problem lies in the way this type of webcasting is typically implemented.

So here are three radical ideas for making webinars more relevant in today. I make no claim that these are practical ideas. Having sat on both sides of the screen, whether as producer, organizer, or moderator, or as an attendee, I understand the daunting nature of the hurdles.

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