Webinar Wire

Book Review: Beyond Bullet Points

Posted by Ken Molay January 10 2008 10:24 AM EDT

The last time I reviewed a publication on this site, I told you to rush out and spend $500. I'm taking it easier on you this time... Today's must-have book is a bargain at only $19.79 on Amazon.

The full title is a mouthful: "Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 to Create Presentations That Inform, Motivate, And Inspire" by Cliff Atkinson. Whew! I think I'll just use the abbreviation BBP as Cliff does throughout the book.

The thrust of the book is apparent from the title. Atkinson writes about how to make your PowerPoint presentations more communicative and engaging for your audience and more comfortable for you to deliver. That automatically makes it important for all of us who deliver PowerPoint-driven webinars and webcasts.

But the surprising thing is that Atkinson doesn't just give blandishments like "use more pictures, cut out data overkill." Instead, he presents a step by step procedural guide that shows you how to start with a blank slide and a topic and move through the entire creative process. I have seen vanishingly few tutorials that lay out a process for being creative. Atkinson describes how to organize your thoughts, structure the presentation flow, find appropriate words and images, and accomplish the mechanics of putting it into the software.

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About "About"

Posted by Wayne Turmel January 3 2008 11:15 AM EDT

One of the biggest mistakes first-time webinar presenters make is deciding to tell people "about" their software or their product. This sounds reasonable, but can lead to your biggest marketing events looking unfocused and ineffective.

Think of it this way- you don't want to know "about" how much money you have in the bank, you want to know you have _________ dollars. (I'm going to assume it's more than I have, and good on ya.)

If someone doesn't have a pretty good idea exactly what your service will do for them they are less likely to take the time to register for your event. Even more frustrating- ever wonder why people would sign up for an event and then not appear? It's because the reasons to attend your webinar are less compelling than the other things going on in their lives.

Don't be insulted or frustrated. After all, the audience acts no differently than you do. They ask one question above all others, and it's not "I wonder what this software does?"... it's "I wonder if it will fix________, which is the thing that's keeping me up at night". A software demo is something they'll watch if they have time. Solving their record keeping nightmare will ensure their attendance and attention- and hopefully their gratitude and their business. 

TRY THIS: Identify the single biggest benefit to your customer, then break your demo or webinar topic down to a question-answering sentence. Rather than: Introducing "Widget-PRO 3.4", it should read "Reduce employee turnover with Widget-PRO 3.4"

Of course, we at www.greatwebmeetings.com are always happy to help. Check out us and our free resources.

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Features: Annotation

Posted by Ken Molay December 20 2007 3:23 PM EDT

Today's feature discussion focuses on how vendors approach the concept of adding markups to presented materials. The two most common implementations allow users to doodle on a blank white background (a "whiteboard") or to draw on top of a PowerPoint slide that is being shown to the audience. Less common are implementations that allow annotations on shared documents such as Word or Excel files, and only a few vendors (such as BizConference and iLinc) let you place annotations on a live screen share, which is a marvelous bit of extra functionality.

The next area of distinction between products is control over who gets to make annotations. In a collaborative "brainstorming" meeting it can be useful to let all participants have the opportunity to add markups, but in a large group event this can lead to chaos. Some vendors only allow the active presenter to add annotations. Others allow access based on role, so all presenters/organizers/hosts might be able to draw while the audience is blocked. I like this ability because one person can concentrate on speaking while another adds helpful highlighting marks to emphasize key points. I often support my clients in this way when I moderate their events. It adds some visual dynamics to the presentation, which can help refocus audience attention.

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Animation - Good or bad?

Posted by Ken Molay December 17 2007 5:19 PM EDT

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I would like to challenge an oft-heard tenet of "good slide design." This is the dictum that says "Animation is bad. Get rid of it on your presentation slides."

I know where the concept comes from... Overuse and misuse of PowerPoint effects can drive an audience stark raving mad. If you have ever sat through a presentation where every bullet point flies in and does a cute little bounce before settling in position, you know the frustration. And when every graphic enters the page by spinning around and around in an effect that takes five seconds to complete, you just want to give the designer a short course in subtlety, preferrably delivered with a cattle prod as your primary teaching aid.

But as with guns, box cutters, and movie production deals, it is unfair to condemn the entire concept because of the carnage and terror that some people cause with the basic instruments. There are appropriate and useful applications of PowerPoint animation.

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Convoq Says Goodbye

Posted by Ken Molay December 15 2007 12:11 AM EDT

To be literal about it, Convoq said goodbye earlier this year when it stopped selling the ASAP line of web conferencing products and changed the company name to Zingdom. I reported on this in August with an interview in The Webinar Blog with company co-founder and CTO Christopher Herot.

This week Christopher added a final entry in his business blog, announcing that Convoq/Zingdom "closed its doors Friday, November 30th." He summarizes five years of technical and business innovations, challenges, and lessons learned in a remarkably candid piece that should be required reading for software entrepreneurs everywhere.

Good luck to you in your next venture, Christopher. Thanks for sharing with all of us.

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Features: Polling

Posted by Ken Molay December 12 2007 8:40 PM EDT

Interactive audience polling can give you extra information about your viewers as well as increasing their level of participation and concentration on your material. Today I will examine differences in implementation approaches for polling among web conferencing vendors.

The first distinction is what types of questions you can ask (or more accurately, what types of answers you can receive). The most common implementation of web conference polling allows audience members to select one answer from a multiple choice list. Some vendors only allow you to create a poll from a preconfigured answer template. In this case, your audience must pick one of the set answers in the provided question template. These might be choices such as YES/NO, TRUE/FALSE, or HIGH/MEDIUM/LOW. You cannot customize the response labels or the number of choices available.

[A very few vendors don't even let you display a question and answers to the audience. They ask you to announce your question vocally, with the audience setting a flag such as a "raised hand" icon to signal their response. This type of polling is analogous to surveying raised hands in a live conference room and barely fits into the concept of interactive polling as a supported conferencing feature.]

Adding a bit more flexibility, some vendors let you create your own list of answer labels, but limit you to a preset maximum number of answer choices (typically five to seven). With more flexibility still, some vendors let you add as many answer choices as you want, with no limit.

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Features: Slides

Posted by Ken Molay December 10 2007 8:58 AM EDT

Part two of a series... Collect them all!

Today we turn our attention to the ways in which web conferencing products deal with the single most common use of webinar software: Displaying presentation slides to the audience.

The first thing to realize is that web conferencing vendors are singularly myopic on the issue of slideware. As far as they are concerned, slides come from Microsoft PowerPoint. I am not aware of any webinar product that advertises the specific ability to take slides from Apple Keynote or OpenOffice Impress, to name two other presentation slideware products. Therefore, I will refer to PowerPoint in this article for brevity when talking about the source content for displayed slides.

Each vendor takes its own approach to showing slides to the viewing audience. Here are the major classifications:

1) Convert the slides to Flash and show the Flash video. Adobe Connect is one vendor that uses this approach. Flash conversion gives the possibility for retaining animations and slide transitions in the converted version, although different conversion algorithms have different success rates. Adobe for instance is good at preserving most animations, but does not attempt to preserve transition effects (like a wipe from one slide to the next).

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European Conferencing Outlook

Posted by Ken Molay December 9 2007 3:58 PM EDT

This is just a quick reference to a Frost and Sullivan webinar on Wednesday, December 12. They will be reviewing the results of their recent report on the conferencing market in Europe. Vendors interested in building their European business may be surprised to learn that the report calls for faster growth in Central and Eastern Europe than in Western Europe.

Read the hyperlinked press release for more information and instructions on how to register.

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Punch Up Web Conferences with Visuals

When it comes to Web conferences, one challenge many presenters have is keeping their audience engaged.  Part of this is because it’s difficult to gauge eye contact, gestures, and interaction in a virtual environment.  But what it all comes down to the presentation. 

Most presenters focus on messaging and the delivery, but the visual story is just as important.  It’s the key to a successful Web conference.  In fact, visuals can make presentations more than twice as effective (67% vs. 33%), according to communications training company Decker Communications. 

The most important consideration is whether the visual plays to the audience, and the content of the presentation.  Visuals should help you tell a story without numbing the audience with heavy facts and figures.  Most presenters find that photos, dramatic audio, video, and simple flowcharts help them make a lasting impression. Another way to keep your audience in the mix of the discussion is to use advanced conferencing features like collaborative whiteboards and document sharing.  A 2005 Frost & Sullivan shows that participants are 20 times more likely to retain info when they write it themselves than when they are just hearing it.  Both these technologies allow presenters and participants to share and prove ideas.  It also generates discussion, interest, and involvement. 

What are the kind of visuals that don’t work?  If the visual doesn’t support the story, then it should be left aside.  This means that some of the “fun” features like animations and patterned text transitions can actually slow down the presentation.  Some participants think of them as distractions.  Others may even find them annoying.  Also, overly detailed flowcharts can be difficult to read and follow on the small screen. 

The best presenters know that the appropriate use of visuals can add a lot of punch to a Web conference.  It’s best to keep the audience in mind, though, and remember that the other rule of thumb is to create interest, not distractions.  

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Features: Q&A

Posted by Ken Molay December 7 2007 9:22 AM EDT

3 comments

I'm starting a new series today. In each article I will discuss a single feature of event-related web conferencing software. We'll take a look at different implementation approaches by vendors and the advantages or disadvantages they offer.

Since this is a community blog, I encourage lots of input on the subject. Comment on my views, disagree, point out things I may have overlooked. Submit your own feature discussions. If you are a vendor and are particularly proud of a unique feature implementation in your product, you can send me an email and suggest that I add it to the series.

On to our first focus feature: Q&A

You would think this is the world's most obvious and trivial piece of functionality... Let attendees type a question and let hosts answer it. Every vendor checks off this feature on the ol' RFP checklist. But the variations on implementation in different products are mind-boggling.

Let's start with where the Q&A area lives. In some products, there is a dedicated space for audience entries and host responses embedded in the panels or framing that permanently surrounds the meeting content. ON24 is an example of this fixed-frame approach. Some products let the audience move that panel to different locations in the frame or undock it to free-float as its own independent window (Microsoft Live Meeting takes this approach). Adobe Connect Professional lets meeting organizers determine the size and position of the Q&A panel, but the audience can't alter that location on their own computers. Vcall places Q&A in its own window, separate from the main meeting content. It can easily get covered up by the meeting window and you might not see that a communication has arrived. Some products allow the meeting content to be displayed in full screen mode, where you don't see any surrounding control panels. I like WebEx's implementation in this case, where there is a small question mark icon at the bottom of the screen. An audience member or host can click on it to display the Q&A panel overlaying part of the screen and then minimize it back out of the way. And the icon changes color to alert you that a new message has arrived. It's just subtle enough to work well.

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