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June 29, 2011

What to do before you step onto the stage…

Two facts are true for any performance:
1)    The show must go on
2)    Life goes on independently of the show

When you get that last minute call from your boss or you read an incoming email from an irate customer, the show must still go on. Professional athletes, actors, musicians, and yes, professional speakers have some sort of pre-show ritual to get them into the ‘zone’ despite whatever life throws their way.

Have a routine

Whether it’s a breathing exercise, meditation, or a pep talk you give yourself in front of a mirror, develop a routine that shifts your mental energy to being ‘on stage.’

Have a checklist ..and own it

Something almost inevitably will go wrong. When it does, will you remember everything you need to do?  A checklist can help you remember things like having a glass of water ready or more important things like shutting down all desktop applications.

Whether you make a checklist of your own or the webinar planner provides you with one (or it’s a combination of the two), own it. Review it and organize it so that it 1) makes sense in a way that you see how one task flows into the next, and 2) so that it has a sense of timing.

Have a backup copy of your slides

There are two reasons to print a copy of your slides:

Risk Management: It’s not a matter of if, but when you’ll experience an internet slow-down or some other kind of latency or visual freeze. When it happens, you’ll want a copy of your slides on had to refer to. In addition to a backup copy, you’ll want a teammate on standby to advance slides if something goes wrong.

Access to Notes: Print the ‘notes’ version so that all those annotations and reminders are at your fingertips. Moving all that text off your screen makes room for you to use the tools that help you keep an ‘eye’ on your audience. Investing in your audience is investing in your success.

Take a moment to slow down

As show time nears, your adrenaline may start pumping and you’ll have a tendency to speed up. The challenge is that you risk breezing past important points. In getting ready for the mic, practice slowing down.

Have a cup o’…never mind

Caffeine can compound the affects of adrenaline. If you take in a lot of caffeine, you probably don’t notice the effects it has on your nervous system. Even if it doesn’t give you the jitters, it may affect you in other ways like making vocal variation more difficult to control. Moderate your caffeine intake before a show.

The bottom line

As inevitably as the show starts it also inevitably ends. If you’re rehearsed your presentation, and spent some time ‘backstage’ getting ready, you’ll have fun and you’ll deliver like a rock star. The audience came to see what you have to say, and if you’re doing things the 1080 Group way, you’ll have an experience for them that will knock them off their socks.

Go be a rock star.

Guest post by Katie Stroud, a learning solutions engineer and 1080 Group rockstar. Learn more about her here.

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March 21, 2011

What does it take to “engage” a webinar audience?

Engagement is a hot topic.  Web site developers, human resources & L&D folk, and even webinar presenters…all realize that in today’s change-the-channel world, we’ve got to get and keep attention.  Or we lose.

Here’s the bad news:

As I’ve addressed many times, engagement in a webinar isn’t “pushing a poll” at someone.  It’s multi-dimensional, and it happens throughout the whole webinar.

Sounds hard, right?

Yes, and no.  The answer is simple, but learning and growing (read:  becoming a pro) takes time.  Here’s where to start:

Create whole-brain content
Research supports the fact that we’ve got to appeal to both sides of the brain if we want to optimize the impact of our messages.  It has to be logical or we miss the opportunity to help them “get it.”  But content also has to have an emotional connection (e.g., “wow!  here’s why I should take some action to <avoid continuing pain or gain something beneficial or both>).  My own research has shown that content is still the number one reason people show up to and stay engaged in webinars. (Catch some of that in this report licensed by the good folks at ReadyTalk)

Amateurs create info-barf.  Pros construct data and story into clear, interesting, and compelling Point-A-to-Point-B whole-brain content.

Deliver a holistic sensory experience
Your audience is hearing something, seeing something, and maybe doing something.  You’ve got to use your voice effectively, deliver something visual that’s worth watching, and interact with them naturally.  This may include a poll, but it may not.

Amateurs think about tools.  Pros adapt to a new set of tools to deliver facilitate experiences.

Facilitate natural interactions
For most presenters and audiences, talking with another human being or group is fairly natural…until we have a new set of tools through which to do it.  The responsibility, therefore, is yours to guide the experience.

The key here is that unless you’re delivering a one-way lecture or keynote address, people connect with people (you and each other).  If you’re not doing that in your web seminars, you’re likely missing an opportunity.

Amateurs talk AT people.  Pros learn to talk WITH people in a new way.

The bottom line
You’re not a “pro” because you make a full-time living doing it.  You’re a pro when you’ve got an attitude of self-improvement.

Engagement isn’t a thing you place in an event like an object (e.g., a poll) or at a pre-defined interval (e.g., “every 9 minutes”).  It’s a skill that you work on and grow…and when your audience is one click away from “changing the channel,” you’d better figure out how to get and keep attention throughout.

If not, you’re going to be like a television playing in the background, not the main focus of the person you’re trying to reach.  And sooner or later “noise” gets turned off.  Game over.

Engagement starts with attitude.  Be a pro.

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March 18, 2011

What do I do if partners use PowerPoint like documents?

If you can believe it, my new partners insist on writing consulting proposals in PowerPoint, and then using the proposal for the presentation. Any suggestions on how I can convince them to avoid this practice? -Steve H.

Steve, I do believe it.  A couple thoughts:

Pick the right battles
The reality is that people can and do use PowerPoint as documents. Honestly, I’m not going to argue this point…the division I worked in at Microsoft did the same thing. Whether it’s PowerPoint or Word in landscape format or some other software, the key here is that documents are documents…consciously.

Remember that there’s a difference between collaborating and presenting
To be fair, meetings are places where you discuss, collaborate, analyze together, and web conferencing is a great tool for virtual meetings.  The difference between collaborating and presenting is behavioral.  A presentation isn’t a document or even slides, it’s what you do to educate or persuade an audience from a starting situation (Point A) to an outcome or action (Point B).  Yes, it IS confusing that “presentation” has such a broad and indefinite meaning, so focus on the purpose of the communication, not the tools.

Make sure your own presentations demonstrate best practices
As you heard me say in the webinar, create presentations, not documents.  We won’t change the world overnight, but we can be part of the solution, not the problem. The reality is that much of our learning as adults is experiential…and it’s likely your partners are doing something they’ve seen over and over.  It’s like a new golfer learning to play by listening to Uncle Joe who plays every week, but Uncle Joe’s a hack.  The result is perpetuating the badness.

Find your own best process to create presentations and documents/handouts
Here’s what I do…as I outline a presentation, I’m creating the basis for the handout that summarizes the key points I made.  I don’t to have the handout/leave behind mimic every story, every comment, every nuance…it’d be 20 pages long.  Then I transfer the concepts to PowerPoint and start adding the visuals that tell the story.  Sometimes that transfer is word-for-word (like the key points), but much of the time the concept is represented visually (in a way that would read poorly or not-at-all as a document).  In the end I’ve got a presentation that’s the best audio-visual experience I can produce, and I’ve got an document that reads a lot better than someone trying to look at a pile of slides in a .pdf.

Steve, if you’re even asking the question, you’re already on the right track!  Stick with it, and good luck!

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May 26, 2010

How to turn disaster into success

Unlike eleven years ago when I started in this business, web conferencing is quite reliable.  But often the internet itself, is not.  The good news is that with 700 or so online presentations in the bag, I can tell you assuredly that it’s quite rare to have a problem.

But then there was last week.

I spoke at two conferences last week, and in the middle I did a presentation to an Australia/New Zealand audience…from my hotel room.  Wouldn’t you know it, literally 10 minutes into the presentation the hotel’s internet connection went down.  And it was down for the rest of the presentation.

There are a lot of different ways to “plan for the unplannable,” but here are the specific things I/we did that turned disaster into success.

Rehearse
Pros rehearse.  Amateurs don’t.  You might be a “professional” in the business world, but you’re an amateur presenter if you don’t rehearse.  In this case, my moderator and I had chatted before hand.  I was able to keep going because he pushed my slides.  Note that this was possible because the failure wasn’t the conferencing provider or my computer…it was local to me in the hotel.

Print a copy of your slides
I use a lot of slides, and I know my material well, but I still print a copy of my deck in the “nine slides to a page” handout view.  It gives me a chance to look ahead, and since I use very visual slides, I’m not reading them.  But a printed copy is like car insurance…not something you plan or want to use, but in the case of disaster, you live or die by your ability to adapt.

Write the login details somewhere at the top of your printed slides
Again, this is experience talking.  If you get booted off your web conference, or the audio drops (I had my local phone provider cut me off in the middle of an event once!), you’re not searching for how to get back in.  If you’re using an operator-assisted call, give the operator a phone number where they can call you right back.  AND, if you’re using VoIP (I was in the hotel room), it goes down with the internet connection.  But a minute later I was dialed back into the audio conference and we were back to presenting.

One other note here…I close all extraneous applications, including email.  So where’s that phone number if you’re looking for it?  In an email or on your Outlook calendar.  Spare yourself the headache…the time it takes to reboot email and get the phone number will seem like HOURS when you’re under the gun.

So, was the event a disaster?  Not if you look at the post-event survey.  Audiences realize that “stuff happens” (oh, BTW, stuff happens in the offline world, too!).

The question is, “Are you prepared?”

Plan for the unplannable.

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April 7, 2010

“Now introducing…uh…” Setting your moderator up for success

One reality of most webinars is they aren’t moderated by professionals with experience in being a moderator, emcee, or host.  This isn’t an indictment, just an observation that leads to a couple ideas you can use to set yourself up for success.  If you’re speaking at a webinar, do yourself a favor:

Unless your surname is Smith, be sure to tell the moderator how to pronounce your name.

You get two big benefits:

Your audience gets started with better momentum
It doesn’t help anyone to have the moderator stumble over pronouncing your name correctly.  You’re not going to turn someone into a radio personality, but you will save them kicking off your webinar with some mush-mouth intro that starts you in a momentum hole.

Your audience will have better connect with YOU
People connect with people, and in today’s global environment your surname doesn’t have to be Smith to be acceptable.  But what if someone in the audience wants to call you after the webinar?  Help ‘em out!  What if you want to have the audience at least remember you and be able to tell someone about you?  Nobody wants to look foolish in front of a peer, and if they can’t pronounce your name, it’s less likely they’ll share.

Help your moderator help you.  Tell them how to pronounce your name.

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March 26, 2010

Another way to start late (and get by with it)…and one that doesn’t work

Last year’s research into online presentation best practices shows that people hate it when you start a webinar late.

To be fair, sometimes crap happens.  And to be doubly fair, I acknowledge that two minutes late doesn’t seem like much when you’re in person.

And a confession:  when you’re online and your early arrivers are looking at their computer clock and start typing “hey, is this thing starting!?” and “hey, how unprofessional to start late!” into the questions panel at one minute past my gut reaction isn’t full of love and joy.

But, here’s another way to start late and get by with it.

—-> Put it on your opening slide.

Less perfect is a phrase like “We will be at approximately 11 am.”  But you’re off the hook.

I prefer being specific with “We will begin at exactly 11:03 am.”  But then you better do it.

Like I said in a previous post about one way to do this, since a good chunk of your audience is logging in a few minutes late anyway, this gives you a chance to get more of them into the ‘room’ and more of them will hear the opening welcome/instructions.

And while we’re at it, here’s one thing I’ve tried that didn’t work.

While the Sr. Dir. of Marketing at Corvent (as a co-founder I had liberty to try new things), I tried actually advertising our internal webinars with start times like “11:03 am.”

Problem?

Nobody noticed, remembered what they saw or read their confirmation emails or all of the above.  #Fail.

Start late without pissing anybody off by stating it clearly on the slide attendees see when they join your event.

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March 12, 2010

How long should a webinar be?

I was recently watching a TED video and the thing I found most interesting for once wasn’t the video itself…it was a comment below the video where a viewer rated the presenter as “long winded.”

And this was a 17 minute video.

My first response is to quote a line from Amadeus, the 1980s movie about Mozart.  In one scene, after Mozart concludes a new piece, one of the royalty in the audience exclaims, “Too many notes!”

Wolfgang replies, “And which ones, sir, would you have me take out?”

But that’s just the smarty pants in me.

A frequently asked question is “how long should a webinar be?”  I usually play on Einstein’s “make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler” with something like “as short as possible but no shorter.”

Two cultural challenges beset us:  One, meetings somehow always have to be an hour long.  Two, content and context have everything to do with it.

In short, there is no simple answer.

Given that I’m fond of saying you should talk WITH your audience and not AT them, here’s a guideline or two.

If you are going to talk at them, make it short.  Then shorter.  Remember the ‘long winded’ 17 minute TED presentation.  State your point, make your recording, post it on the web.  Especially if it’s about you, not them.

If you have interactivity, especially in a training context, you can go longer.  I’d still keep it to two hours or less with a break in the middle.

Here’s why:

We live in an information-on-demand culture.  If your live webinar is the equivalent of on-demand information (meaning there’s nothing uniquely live about it), you’re competing with every other source of on-demand information available in those 23000 results that come up in a search on a search engine.  You’d better get to and make your point quickly.

If, however, you treat an event as a shared experience, allowing adult learners to be active (vs passive), giving the audience the chance to get questions answered (a radically high form of personalization), you’ll command attention more effectively and at very least keep audiences around to experience more.

A final tip:  plan to end early.  Nobody complains about presentations that end early.  This doesn’t mean you can’t take Q&A through the hour, but it’s one simple way to set yourself apart from the many who drag on and on.

Make your webinar as short as possible, but no shorter than necessary to make a focused point or deliver what you promised.

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February 23, 2010

Last chance to share and learn

If you’re curious about how to promote and deliver engaging webinars, this short survey is for you.

Why?

The research we’re conducting will be turned into a practical set of best practices…and you’ll have a chance get a pre-release copy of the report.  It should only take you a few minutes to complete.

On behalf of 1080 Group and our co-sponsor, QLM, thanks in advance.

You can find the survey here:  http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MSTVDYX

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February 2, 2010

Curious about how to promote and deliver effective webinars?

1080 Group has partnered with my friend Bob Hanson at QLM Marketing to conduct an independent study on the success factors for webinars.

To get a pre-release copy of the report, participate in the survey.  It should take you about 5 minutes.

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January 22, 2010

Webinar mistake: not walking in the invitees’ shoes

Imagine you’re an event planner…the traditional, terrestrial kind.

Would you consider hosting a trade show booth, networking luncheon, cocktail reception, or seminar at a hotel somewhere without considering all the details, tangible and intangible, that are part of the experience?  Would you invite people to a “great presentation” but not tell them where to park or how to find the restroom?

Nope.

Don’t do it for a web seminar either.

Design the user experience every click of the way from the first thing they see when they get an invite to the last follow up afterward.

Then test it.

Walk in their shoes.

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