Interactive Conversations » PowerPoint

It’s All About the Audience

Matt Varnum — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 04:21:33 +0000

The first and most important step in creating a great presentation is planning. And effective planning begins with understanding your audience.

First we need to ask a few key questions: What’s the purpose of this presentation? Is it to sell, or persuade? Is to communicate and teach? Does the audience have a common thread or interest (e.g. technical people, energy conservation advocates, senior citizens, business people, parents, potential customers)?

What is the audience expecting? How long is their attention span? Is humor appropriate? Will they expect detailed information or should you just hit the high points? Is the audience online, or in-person?

Many presentation experts offer hard and fast rules: “Use no more than 20 slides”. “Never use text bullets.” “Sell the benefits.” “Don’t use complex diagrams.” Rules like these may apply in the right context, but they can be useless in others. So the best rule is “Forget about the rules. Consider the needs of the audience.”

How long should we make the presentation? This too is an audience question. How long can we hold their attention? If we are creating a sales presentation for example, the optimum size may be relatively short. But a presentation that communicates information that the audience wants to understand in detail, can hold attention much longer.

If we expect the presentation to last 30 minutes, how many slides will we use? There’s no absolute answer to this question, but we can consider a few guidelines. If the presentation is online, we want the screen to be active, using animations, scene changes, pointers, highlighters, etc. Each slide will probably be on the screen for no more than 1 minute. So a 30-minute presentation would require at least 30 slides. If we stay away from lengthy text and bullet points, we may use one slide for each point, making the total even higher.

Does that mean that all presentations move fast with large numbers of slides? Does that eliminate the use of tables, charts, and diagrams? No. But complex slides of that kind require special techniques. You might magnify key segments with animations, or use other methods to highlight pieces as you step through a complex slide.

In the end, it’s always about the audience. In upcoming posts, we’ll discuss presentation design considerations that provide the best experience for our audience members.

Take a Closer Look at PowerPoint

Matt Varnum — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 22:14:12 +0000

Which of these statements is true?

• PowerPoint is the most effective presentation graphics tool in the world.

• PowerPoint creates the worst presentations possible worldwide.

Both statements may be true, depending on people, situations, and skill levels. PowerPoint has legions of fans and supporters. But for every proponent there is at least one detractor.

Occasionally we see PowerPoint presentations that are excellent. They communicate well and are visually pleasing. In parallel we see numerous PowerPoint files that are totally boring, confusing or amateurish.

The reason for this apparent contradiction goes back to the very first development of PowerPoint in the 1980’s. Early developers apparently explored a range of options. Some wanted to develop the most technically sophisticated tool in the industry, and to build the broadest set of capabilities imaginable. Others wanted to provide a tool that was so simple and easy to use that virtually anyone could open it and produce a presentation. At the same time, all developers knew that they would have to maintain compatibility with other tools that would eventually comprise a full office suite.

Predictably, developers were forced to compromise, and build the tool that eventually evolved to PowerPoint as we know it today. As with all new products, it was impossible for developers to foresee the environment they would create.

PowerPoint today has become extremely successful with hundreds of millions of users. Many of those users however, simply type text bullets then format typefaces, backgrounds, and borders to deliver presentation slides. This usually produces ineffective slides that people are supposed to read while a speaker is talking. Others insert diagrams, tables and charts to summarize their ideas. Unfortunately, those visuals are typically so complex as to require several minutes for audience understanding.

Why do we see so many weak presentations like these? They are the result of a well-meaning development team that hatched a product more than 20 years ago to enable unskilled people to use high-value capabilities.

Despite the many “death-by-PowerPoint” materials seen every day, there are also excellent multi-media presentations that communicate, inform and entertain. In upcoming posts we’ll explore some of these techniques and how they make presenters effective.

Webinar Tip #4: Extend Your Reach with On-Demand Webinars

Matt Varnum — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 22:11:19 +0000

How can a pre-recorded webinar be more powerful than a live presentation? Conventional wisdom says that viewers expect a webinar to be presented live. But pre-recorded, on-demand webinars offer several advantages over live programs.

People who can’t attend a scheduled online presentation can still view an on-demand version which is available 24 x 7. Offering an on-demand version therefore extends the audience. It not only reaches local people whose schedules don’t fit, but expands listenership across time zones. It even offers presenters the opportunity to be viewed globally.

On-demand webinars can also be embedded into a presenter’s website, so that they draw web traffic, and potentially create new sales leads. When viewed from a web page they can be surrounded onscreen with purchase links or additional offers.

Many audience members prefer on-demand versions. Pre-recorded programs enable viewers to control the presentation. They can start and stop as needed, and in many cases instantly back-space and repeat slides. And they can usually enjoy a program that wastes no time and has been optimized for quality.

Presenters who offer on-demand programs however, must create a presentation that’s different from record-and-playback of a live webinar. Viewers who know that presentations have been pre-recorded expect to hear highly professional programs. The quality level of a live webinar conference call or conferencing by VoIP (voice-over internet) is seldom good enough to maintain program credibility. When presenters offer live webinars, their programs typically include long pauses, mispronunciations, conversational fillers, and self-corrections. These are acceptable to viewers of live webinars since they are common in adlibbed conversation. Viewers of on-demand presentations however, expect them to be more deliberately paced, error-free, and less casual.

Presenters of on-demand presentations therefore, must prepare a version offline. Many record directly into PowerPoint. Others create small audio files and embed them into their slides. This process of course permits presenters to work from a script, listen to the results, and re-take any recording that doesn’t sound quite right.

Great Webinar Tip #3: Keep Eyes Onscreen With Animations

Matt Varnum — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 21:34:19 +0000

One of the greatest challenges for webinar presenters is maintaining attention of viewers that we can’t see. One great way to keep the eyes of all viewers onscreen is to create movement.

Viewers quickly tire of static images, and soon stop looking at a webinar screen until the slide changes. Presenters who stay on a single slide for more than a minute typically lose effectiveness. Attendees mentally tune out.

One good solution to this problem is to limit the screen time of any slide to 30 seconds or less. However, presenters may need more time to communicate their messages. The best tools then are onscreen animations.

The array pictured above for example, demonstrates how a single animated slide progresses onscreen. As the presenter speaks, animations advance to emphasize the next point in the slide’s overall message. The presenter controls them, ensuring that animations are timed to each point being made.

PowerPoint and other presentation graphics programs offer a rich array of animation features that can be used in many different ways. They can make photos, graphics or text appear or disappear, whenever appropriate. New items can fade in or fly in using a myriad of visual styles. Or items can morph into new forms.

Though animations can serve multiple purposes, their greatest value in webinars is to keep every viewer’s eyes on the screen, thereby keeping their attention. When they are used in pre-recorded on-demand webinars, animations can be perfectly timed to support a fast-paced narration. If accompanied by fast slide transitions, timed animations often create an effect similar to a tightly scripted video.

Seven Tips for Creating a Great Webinar

Matt Varnum — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 00:31:29 +0000

Webinars have emerged as the web’s most effective and inexpensive method of delivering business results. Businesses of all sizes deliver thousands of webinars daily. Sadly, most need to be greatly improved to deliver their true potential.

We view hundreds of webinars every year, and have been taking notes on the good, the bad and the ugly. We’re pleased to share seven tips that will enable any business to get far better results.

The first tip: Use Techniques that Maintain Audience Attention

Online Webinars are very different from face-to-face presentations. One obvious difference is that the presenter and the audience cannot see each other. The presenter therefore loses the power of eye contact. Even more important, there is no way to know whether audience members are paying attention. Are they still out there? Are they reading emails? Are they chatting with friends?

The best way to keep their attention is to make them into participants, by using interactive slides. Using the interactive slide example pictured above, the woman who is presenting begins her webinar by asking audience members to respond to the question onscreen.

The presenter then reads some of the responses back to the audience and mentions each respondent by name. She then promises to concentrate the webinar on the items that audience people have checked.

This request accomplishes two things. It empowers the audience to partially set the agenda, giving them a feeling of ownership. Equally important, the presenter has demonstrated that she is facilitating an interactive discussion, and each audience member must be alert to respond. This rapport uses the power of human nature as a presentation technique. No attendee wants to be embarrassed by being unavailable to answer.

Numerous studies have proven that participants learn and retain 70 percent more information when they are participating, instead of being passive viewers. And that’s the power of online interactivity.

(We’ll share the next six Webinar tips in upcoming posts.)

Smart Use of PowerPoint is Mandatory for Effective Sales

Matt Varnum — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 04:48:53 +0000

Microsoft PowerPoint is one of the most important tools used by every successful online marketer. It is the medium of choice for creating a clear, concise online presentation. Sales professionals soon learn that they need a strong visual presentation to tell a compelling story, and PowerPoint is the obvious answer.

More than 40-million people use PowerPoint. It’s the world’s most widely used presentation tool. So many people have used it that we can safely recruit new salespeople and expect them to be PowerPoint users. That means that any organization can quickly train new people to deliver presentations using the same basic tools.

Virtually everyone needs PowerPoint to build a business online. PowerPoint slides may be used like brochures in PDF format, for live presentations in a Webinar or as the basic medium of an on-demand presentation.

The negative side of PowerPoint is that many people think of a slide presentation as tedious and uninteresting. That’s because so many presentations are poorly planned and use only the weakest capabilities of the program. PowerPoint designers at Microsoft designed this tool with so much flexibility that presentations have an unlimited range of styles. Unfortunately, most people take the easiest road, resulting in the weakest possible presentations. We therefore want to offer recommendations for PowerPoint use that will provide the most compelling results for sales and marketing professionals.

Our most important overall recommendation is for every PowerPoint presenter to discover how to use the program’s full capabilities. Don’t re-use an unimaginative presentation produced for someone else. Customize every presentation to leverage yourself and create a professional, entertaining audience experience. Most people—even long-time PowerPoint presenters—don’t understand the incredible things that can be done with this powerful tool. Spending a couple of hours thumbing through “PowerPoint for Dummies” can deliver ideas that totally change the results produced by any presentations.

What are the basics for making presentations more effective? We can begin by following a few simple rules. The first simple rule is “keep presentations as short as possible.” Every slide should contribute to drawing audiences to “the next step” in a well planned sales, training or information transfer process. If any slide in a presentation doesn’t contribute in this way, delete it.

Rule number two is “use as little text as possible. Instead use graphics, photos, videos, cartoons, etc. to make visual statements. Although writing a virtual script of text bullets is easy, audiences don’t listen effectively when forced to read bullets. If the text bullets differ from the presenter’s speech they create confusion. If the bullets are identical to the spoken words, audiences assume that the presenter is simply reading from a script. PowerPoint provides much more powerful tools than simple text bullets. Successful professionals use these tools to be become master presenters, and master marketers.

We still need a few more rules to maximize the power of PowerPoint, and we will cover several of them in later posts.