While at Microsoft I did a lot of sales training and support presentations for those same sales teams. For the latter, I was the invited expert to demo something – meaning it was the sales rep’s appointment manage (including setting up the web conference). Over countless sales calls I saw patterns of behavior that lead me to one simple observation:
Your sales reps need to go beyond “competent.”
I’m not throwing anybody …
Once upon a yesterday I worked at a company where reserving a conference room in the building required sending an email to an admin. It’s not like it was a hard task, it’s just the way it was. And if you needed to get a room quickly and they were at lunch or out for the day, well…
Webcasting, for many organizations, is a lot like that. 
Webcasting serves a broad set …
Katie Stroud is a “learning solutions engineer” who I met on Twitter many moons and projects-worked-on-together ago. As we chatted this morning about missing being at #ASTD2012 this week, she started saying some things worth repeating.
What follows is a brief interview where you’ll find some tasty nuggets of wisdom you’d do well to savor (in bold for the skimmers). Enjoy.
Roger: I love …
Today’s guest post is from Mike Hodkinson in London (contact info below). Mike was one of the book winners at a recent webinar I delivered about storytelling in the virtual classroom, and he followed up with an email about how he uses simple story to illuminate Excel training. I asked his permission to share what he sent…hope you enjoy the English accent, too. 
Roger,
I look forward to receiving the The Virtual Presenter’s Handbook in the …
Guest-poster Angi Courville shares tips six through ten in this second of a two part series (part one is here). All the books consulted for these tips (and the webinar I delivered yesterday to 1000 people on story in the virtual classroom) are at the end.
Familiarize yourself with some aspects unique to the virtual classroom
We’ve already touched on one aspect …
Today’s guest post is by an amazing speaker in her own right, Angi Courville. As we were simultaneously researching a volume of books to hone our storytelling sensibilities, Angi penned her own take on the subject.
So you’ve decided to start working storytelling into your virtual communication toolbox!
Quick question: What qualifies as a “story?”
Experts quarrel and quibble, but for our purpose – using story effectively in the virtual classroom – we’ll define story as:
Anything but “once upon a time.”
We want to …
The new content marketing report from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs doesn’t tell a whole story.
Don’t get me wrong, Joe and Ann and their respective organizations do a killer job. I’m a fan.
Effectiveness is more than content, …
The science of studying multitasking is young, and as researcher Eyal Ophir points out, it’s a zero-sum game of task switching.
Presenters in webinars, webcasts, and virtual classrooms often don’t care about the science – they “get” that it’s a challenge to them landing their message (perhaps because we expect that others do what we do when watching a web-based presentation?).
Knowing that this is a …
As long as there have been events of any kind, meeting planners and producers have been getting creative to make it all happen. Likewise, pre-recording a presenter or presentation to be used in a live webinar or webcast is true the virtual producers among us.
In part one of this two-part series I looked at five scenarios that might give you an idea about how to use this hybrid approach. Now let’s look at …
To paraphrase a question from Dave following a recent webinar, “What about pre-recording the presentation, playing that in the live event, and then having live Q&A?”
While 1080 Group is now exclusively in the teaching business, our legacy hearkens back to the first virtual event production company on the planet, EnvoyGlobal.com. With that much time in the biz we’ve seen our share of successful and not-so-successful pre-recorded webinar/webcast presentations.
In this, the first part of a two part series we’ll look at …
