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January 28, 2009

Can you live without web seminars?

More than once I’ve presented for the American Marketing Association on the subject of “Irreplaceable Webinars.”  The primary education of the presentation is that we as marketers think in terms of segmentation, and that should include thinking psychographically in terms of time and place – our audience gets information in different ways at different times.

Ergo, presenting virtually becomes an indispensable part of the communications mix.

time-place

Unlike teleseminars, web and/or video conferencing add multi-sensory (visual) components to live, distance communications.  And because the activity is snychronous, the power of dialogue explodes your opportunity to deliver influence ~ and what marketer, sales person, or trainer isn’t attempting to create a certain outcome?

Webinars/webcasts/web seminars don’t replace in-person meetings, seminars, and events.  But don’t get trapped into thinking that a recording is the same thing.

Dialogue + Distance = Uniquely Irreplaceable

Posted in: Presentation Planning, Strategy, Web Seminars Continue Reading »

January 19, 2009

How many slides?

I was on the phone with Jim today, and he gets it.  He’s the chief sales training wizard at a company with 1500 sales people, and he described to me showing up to a presentation with lots of slides and not a lot of time.  Consider this:

I moderated a web seminar years ago for Jeffrey Gitomer, and he showed up to the gig with 109 slides.  For a 60 minute webinar presentation.  And he made it through with time to spare for questions.

Two BIG lessons:

One, Jeffrey knows sales people are ADHD.  Keep it moving.

Two, take the amount of time of time you spend on a slide and cut it in half.  Cut in half again, and then push the “next slide” button ahead of time.

Get my drift?

One more thing:  that was quite a number of years ago.

Today you must also engage.  MAYBE if you’re Seth Godin you can get by with not engaging the virtual audience , and even he is getting better over the last few webinars I’ve *seen* him in (with recent kudos to Duct Tape Marketing Listen here.).  To be totally fair, Godin and Jantsch get marketing, so you should read them and buy all their books.

But live presentations of any type are about audiences who paid a VERY high price to be there…their time.  Engage them, or apologize to them for making them put something on the calendar they could otherwise have listened to at a more convenient moment than 10 a.m. on a Tuesday.  (Direct responsers, take a Xanax – I know the value of a deadline, and to which I say, “webinar attendees are going to find YOU boring if you don’t make a live event live.)

Virtual + live = move ‘em or lose ‘em.  Be like Jim.

Posted in: Content, Delivery, Design, Presentation Delivery, Presentation Design, Presentation Planning Continue Reading »

January 18, 2009

Not another “about me” slide

When should you use a ‘corporate background’ slide?  You know the one that starts with a bullets like this:

  • Founded:  1996
  • Offices:  Mountain View, London, Troutdale

If, and it’s a terribly big IF, it truly adds a demonstrable point of value to the person looking at it.

And that’s NOT often.  Maybe never, but that’s a big statement.

The key here is that for every single slide of your presentation, there should be a clear point, a benefit, that you can state clearly.  Preferably so powerfully that if you took it out of the presentation your story wouldn’t be the same.

And then you want one point per slide.

If how long you’ve been in business is important to the client, it’s worth a slide pointing out your longevity, stability, ability to have long-term relationships, ability to provide that support contract for the next ten years, whatever.  And if you state “Founded,” you’ve just sold yourself short by naming a feature rather than a benefit.

Banish the corporate backgrounder slide.

Posted in: Content, Delivery, Presentation Planning, Storytelling Continue Reading »

December 24, 2008

When not to present online

In another post I’ll come back to talking about what’s really cool about online publishing portals like Slideshare, but today let me address a common mistake, namely the failure to ask the following question:

“If I want to impact my audience, is a presentation the best way to do it?”

Here’s the crazy thing.  PowerPoint, and now by default Webex, LiveMeeting, GoToWebinar, Connect, et al, are often used to deliver content that frankly could be better delivered in another way.

Web conferencing providers are in the business of selling you a service, and they do good stuff.  But they’re not going to ask you to put on your marketing hat and ask “If I want to impact my audience, would I better serve them by writing a white paper than making them sit through this webinar recording?”

Another point we’ll cover at another time…  public speaking best practices include NOT handing out a copy of your slides as a handout.  If those slides are truly speaker support instead of the content itself, they’ll not tell the story anyway.  And if you put ALL your content on slides one of two questions arise… you either need to ask the format question (e.g., would the whitepaper or other mechanism be a better format) or a presentation design question:  is this presenter going to have an audience groaning that the presenter has cluttered, text-heavy slides (and probably risks reading them too)?

Do yourself and the audience a favor:  deliver presentations when that’s the most appropriate way to achieve your goal.

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