Webinar Wire

Don't Let Your Slides Steal Your Job

Posted by Ken Molay December 4 2007 3:49 PM EDT

| 1 comment

A client of mine recently sent me some materials in preparation for producing and delivering a webinar. There were newsletter articles she had written, a marketing brochure, and a sample PowerPoint deck she had used in live presentations to audiences. I replied with the following email message.

You are obviously a "words person." Your newsletter articles are well written, with a good hook at the beginning and a smooth flow that brings your audience along with you as you describe your points. Your PowerPoint presentation is written the same way. It is so clear and fully-written that it delivers your message without you being there. This would be very effective as a leave-behind for audiences who have seen your presentation and want reference materials that they can pass on to colleagues or refer to later.
 
But paradoxically, this kind of construction actually reduces the effectiveness of a live presentation. If your audience is carefully reading all the text on your slide, they aren't listening to you. They are reading ahead of or behind the point you are currently talking to. And their brains are getting conflicting information channels to process and comprehend... part of it through reading, and part through listening.
 
Your presentation becomes more powerful if you reduce the amount of text on your slides and add graphics to support and reinforce the points you are making verbally. Some of your slides would expand naturally to six or seven individual graphics, each one letting you speak to a new bullet point and drive the information home. The addition of more frequent visual changes helps keep your audience focused on the screen and waiting to see what shows up next, rather than sitting on one slide for five minutes at a time.
 
And while many corporate PowerPoint templates are made just like yours, with the company logos prominently displayed on every slide, these have been shown to detract from your message and effectiveness as well. Keep your logo and company information prominent on the invitations, registration, title slide, closing slide, etc. and there is no need to pull focus from the points you are making while you are talking. It's like placing your logo at the beginning of every paragraph in one of your journal articles. Come back to your company as an action item at the end of your presentation and refocus the audience's attention on who can bring them all the benefits you have just introduced.

If any of this sounds like it pertains to your presentations as well, think about breaking out of your comfort zone and spending some time making your presentations visually interesting and involving. Your job as a webinar speaker is to present information, not to show text to your audience and read it out loud for them. Try handing a copy of your slides to a friend or coworker who doesn't know the subject matter. If they say, "Oh I understand" and they don't have any questions about the material, your slides are doing all the work and you are unnecessary. Cancel the webinar and just email the slide deck. It's cheaper and easier.

If you would like an example of a graphics driven presentation, take a look at one that I created for my company. As an experiment, you can try turning the sound off and seeing if the slides do all the work. I think you'll find that the graphics and the narration are complementary rather than redundant.

And if you'd like to explore the science of better presentations more completely, there is no better reference than Garr Reynolds' blog on Presentation Zen. I bow at his feet!