Interactive Conversations

Engaging your audience during online presentations—either live or on-demand format—requires skills different from those used in a face-to-face meeting.

When we attend a face-to-face presentation, most audience members remain seated, despite a presentation that may be dull and boring. Even the worst examples of so-called “Death by PowerPoint” seldom cause a mass exodus. Audience members may mentally tune-out, doodle, or read online email from mobile phones and laptops, but they usually remain physically captive. That’s somewhat good news for struggling presenters who may find a way to recover after the first few minutes. However logistics, scheduling and travel constraints also keep their audiences comparatively small. And having all of the “right people” in a room at one time is virtually impossible.

Live online presentations and webinars provide better opportunities for larger audiences, and easier scheduling for the “right people” to attend. However, audiences can leave without being impolite. Many audience members will multi-task, since they have no presenter eye-contact. Presenters therefore must grab and hold their attention early. Online success requires attention to all aspects of the presentation: excellent script or notes, a well-practiced presenter, clear messages, attractive slide design, and perfect coordination.

On-demand presentations have the highest potential impact of any presentation medium. Often embedded on a website, they can be viewed 24 X 7 for months at a time. Along with typical web and search marketing traffic, on-demand presentations attract viewers through paid search like Google AdWords, and email marketing.

Nevertheless, every on-demand presentation must grab and hold viewer attention within the first 15 seconds or the presentation fails. Without the need to register or identify themselves, viewers treat an online presentation like any web page or video. If they’re not immediately engaged, they bail. And they are usually lost forever.

Our next few blog posts will explore the “Do’s and Don’ts” of on-demand presentation. We’ll begin here with our first “DON’T.”

DON’T ever post the slides from a live presentation on your website or a slide sharing site without embedding voice narration. Slides that may have been easily understood when supporting a narrator’s voice, do not deliver their message without narration. They are somewhat like watching a TV commercial with sound muted. And if slides are filled with text bullets, viewers will seldom read and completely understand them.

DO create a well-scripted narrative and embed it for each individual slide. Re-do the presentation to remove any unnecessary slides. Then embed narration and time it carefully to support the view onscreen, especially if the view changes through animation.

We’ll provide tips for creating a clear, professional style narrative in our next blog post.

What’s the first thing that most people do in developing a new presentation? They open PowerPoint of course, and begin creating slides. That’s how they fall into the PowerPoint Trap!

Great presentations are stories. They may use pictures, graphics or charts as illustrations. But the words that come from the speaker’s mouth tell the story. A better tool for creating a presentation then might be a text editor like MS Word.

The easiest way to approach a presentation story is the traditional instruction: “Tell them what you’re going to tell them. Then tell them. Then tell them what you told them”. You also need to insert a call-to-action, identifying the most important takeaway of your presentation.

We recommend writing the story first in an essay format. Though you probably would never present it as such, writing it first makes the rest of the process much easier and more effective.

Once you’ve written the story, isolate each point as a separate sentence or paragraph, and paste each of them into the notes of a blank PowerPoint slide. Then looking at each slide, create the best way to illustrate the point. You might use one or more photos, PPT drawings, or charts to support the story visually. If possible stay away from text bullets, especially those that repeat the written text. Finally you can insert the obligatory chart, table or spreadsheet segment if necessary.

When the body of the story is in place, convert the text notes to speaker’s script segments. These vary widely, according to the project format, and your personal style. If you are creating an on-demand presentation for online access, you need an actual script, using short sentences and as few words as possible. If you have created the presentation for live delivery, you usually reduce speaker’s notes to a simple outline.

To capture the audience immediately, you might add an “attention step” to the beginning. This might be a cartoon, a news photo with a surprise caption, an inspirational scene, or anything else with a “wow-factor.” Then you can use the same or a related scene to close the presentation, tying it into the overall message.

And the final preparation step is: Practice, practice, practice!