On viewing the slide below, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan,  remarked, “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war!”

This would be funny if the consequences weren’t so serious.  In this recent article in the New York Times,  they reveal the growing use of PowerPoint within the military and the backlash it’s creating.

In essence, PowerPoint is being used to replace more in-depth briefing papers, and its templated design encourages the elimination of  complex details and nuanced conclusions.

The real argument is not against a complex graphic if its needed to support or clarify your argument, but the use of bulleted lists that cause the author to over-simplify and state conclusions like fact. The simple reality is that PowerPoint is not a good replacement for a written report, whether your in business or the military!

Read the complete story “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint” to learn more.

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Great tips on telling your story in this video with NPR’s  Scott Simon.  There are takeaways here for any presenter delivering presentations via video webcast or audio webinar.

Tags: authenticity, effective presentations, presentations, storytelling, video presentations.

Want to personalize your webcast delivery?

Ken Molay at WSuccess recently shared this webinar presentation tip that resonated with us:

“Speak to the Individual, Not the Crowd”.

Rather than use phrases like “can anyone in our audience tell me ….” speaker directly to each listener “can you tell me …”.

This goes a long way toward personalizing your delivery and leaving your listeners with a more personal experience.

Thanks for the great tip Ken.

Tags: effective presentations, presentations, Web Seminars, Webcasts, webinars.

Webinar presenters should smile when you speak to add energy to your presentation.

This is an old telemarketing trick, but works equally well for any presenter.

Your smile really comes through in your voice and we improve the audience’s perception of your likeability and friendliness. Other research shows that likeability directly impacts your audience’s reception of your message – so smile!

Tags: audio webinar, effective presentations, video presentations.

The question “How much time do I need?”  comes up alot in the context of preparing for a webinar.  What tends to happen is the presenter has a slide deck in hand and they wait until the week before to really start considering the audience needs and reviewing the content.  It’s not until the webinar practice session a few days before the presentation that they see what others are presenting and get any feedback on their slides.  Due to time constraints, there is only time for slides corrections.  So how much time should you spend on presentation creation?

Presentation authority Nancy Duarte, author of the book Slideology and principal at Duarte Design (clients include Apple, Cisco, and Al Gore among many others),  puts it this way;

“The amount of time required to develop a presentation is directly proportional to how high the stakes are.”

Duarte goes on to provide this guidance:

• 6-20 Hours Research & collect input from the web, colleagues, and the industry
• 1 hour Build an audience-needs map
• 2 hours Generate ideas via sticky notes
• 1 hour Organize the ideas
• 1 hour Have colleagues critique or collaborate around the impact the ideas will have on the audience
• 2 hours Sketch a structure and/or a storyboard
• 20-60 hours Build the slides in a presentation application
• 3 hours Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse (in the shower, on the treadmill, or during your commute)

Total Time: 36-90 hours

At first glance this may sound like too much time, but when we started tracking our own content development time for new presentations we found this to be fairly accurate. When you already have a presentation, tailoring it for a specific audience will eliminate some of the up-front time, and in many cases you will be able to re-use slides/slide layout with only minor modifications.  Still, you will be looking at 30 hours to put together a quality presentation and be comfortable with its delivery.

Tags: create a presentation, create a webinar, effective presentations, LinkedIn, PowerPoint, practice, storytelling, time, web seminar, Webcasts, webinar, webinars.

I wanted to share this tip for those of you scripting your live webinars or on-demand presentations.

Make sure that you read that script out-loud!

Why?

Writing is for the eye, while your narration is for the ear.  Good writing and punctuation does not always sound very natural. By reading your script out loud, you will catch those phrases that just don’t roll off the tongue in a natural way, and can rewrite them so they are easier to speak.

Using this technique your presentation won’t sound canned, and will be easier to deliver too!

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Richard Mayer

We recently wrote a post on Richard Mayer’s ‘Ten Multimedia Design Principals‘  citing his book Multimedia Learning.

I wanted to share another point from Mayer’s research that Cliff Atkinson drives home in his book Beyond Bullet Points called the Redundancy Effect.

Mayer’s research shows that reading text displayed on the screen actually lowers retention.

Mayer conducted experiments using two multimedia presentations. The first was your typical PowerPoint presentation that used bulleted text and the second had all text on the screen removed.

The result; viewers of the second presentation retained 28% more information and were able to apply 79% more creative solutions using that information than viewers of the first presentation.

Bottom line: Stop putting bullet points on your slides! If they need that detail, create speaker notes for download after the event.

Tags: Cliff Atkinson, effective presentations, LinkedIn, PowerPoint, Richard Mayer.

Richard Mayer is a professor in psychology at UC – Santa Barbara. Mayer is considered the authority on educational psychology, publishing over 18 books and 250 articles and chapters on the topic.

Mayer and his colleagues conducted numerous experiments and studies into how we learn best through-out the 90’s. The result of their efforts was the landmark book Multimedia Learning.

Following are some key conclusions and principals from his work  to guide your multimedia development, including your webinar presentations.

Multimedia Works!

People do learn better with words and images, versus words alone.

Bottom Line: Ditch the conference calls, go online for greater effectiveness.

Redundancy Principal

We comprehend explanations better when words are presented as verbal narration alone, versus both verbally and as on-screen text.

Bottom Line: Don’t read you slides – if they are text heavy use them as notes and a handout and put relevant graphics on your slide.

Segmentation Principal

We learn better when information is presented in bite-sized chunks.

Bottom Line: Break your content into clearly defined segments, like chapters of a book.

Signaling Principal

People learn better when information is presented with clear outlines and headings.

Bottom Line: Agenda/outline slides and progress indicators/sign-post slides do help your audience. Slide titles matter too.

Personalization Principal:

We learn better when information is presented in a conversational style rather than a formal one.

Bottom Line: This theme is why we like to record your company’s thought-leaders and subject-matter experts, rather than produce a canned, professional narrative.  Your presentations are naturally the most authentic and genuine. For presenters, it means you should practice your presentation so that you can simply use notes to guide you. You already know the subject matter. Being comfortable with the presentation structure allows your expertise and enthusiasm for the subject to come through naturally.

Spatial Contiguity Principal

We learn better when related text and images are placed next to each other.

Bottom Line: Don’t make your audience guess which images and titles go together, put them next to each other.

Coherence Principal

We learn better when any extraneous information is removed from a slide.

Bottom Line: If it isn’t critical to your point, delete it. I know some presentation experts even recommend ditching the ubiquitous logo, tagline, and date information from your footer since it is superfluous to your point.

Modality Principal

We learn better from animation with audio narration than from animation and text captions.

Bottom Line: We need to engage both the audio and visual “channels” to the brain. Voice narration with your images is the best way to go.

Temporal Contiguity Principal

We learn better when narration and animation are synchronized versus asynchronous.

Bottom Line: You want your narration and animation to reinforce one another. Animations or screen motion need to happen in sync with what you are describing.  This is particularly important for demonstrations and takes some practice to do correctly.

Individual Differences Principal

Each of us will interpret a presentation uniquely based on prior knowledge, visual literacy, and spacial aptitude.

Bottom Line: We each learn a little differently. It is important to consider your audience profile when creating the presentation, use examples and stories to clarify your points, and gather feedback from your audience whenever possible.

You can learn more about Richard Mayer and his research here.

Tags: effective presentations, LinkedIn, Multimedia Learning, PowerPoint, Richard Mayer, web demonstration.

I just finished reading Malcomb Gladwell’s Blink, which is another fun read. I found two chapters in particular relevant to delivering effective video presentations.

For the record, I am not a psychologist, so if you are, and what follows does not make sense, please set me straight by leaving a comment.

In essence, modern psychology is giving our “adaptive unconscious” more and more credit for making sense of what we see and hear and filtering the information without the need for conscious, higher-level thinking. This is both good and bad. It means we can effectively process and evaluate situations readily using only “thin-slices”, but we also unconsciously impose cultural bias and situational influences into our judgments.

What do I mean?

First, the research shows that we are pretty good at judging others in just a few seconds to a few minutes. We can read faces and tell when the delivery is sincere and truthful, and when it is fake and deceptive. We may not be able to tell you why, but our unconscious will sense a disconnect between what we see and what we hear. Video gives us both the visual and audio input to make that judgment.

Now the bad news is that we also bring a lot of bias – cultural, experiential, and situational – to these judgments. Gladwell uses the example of the performer that was praised as the most outstanding trombonist in a blind audition. When this happened in 1980, orchestras were still dominated by men, and it was commonly believed that you could tell the difference between how men and women played the same instrument. When they were introduced to Abbie Conant, a woman, they were in disbelief. Clearly if it had not been a blind audition, Conant would not have been selected.  This is one case where visual, video communication can work against you.

And how receptive we are is impacted by other, situational circumstances. In fact, you can influence other’s behavior by “priming” them with words. Gladwell cites an NYU experiment where two groups of students were primed with words and then sent off to reception to get their next assignment. One group was exposed to words like “aggressively”,”rude”,”bold”. “bother”, and “intrude”. The other group was exposed to words like “respect”,”considerate”,”patiently”,”polite”, and “courteous”. When they arrived at reception, the attendants were engrossed in a personal conversation with a fellow employee. The group exposed to the aggressive words interrupted on average after 5 minutes, while 82% of the group exposed to the polite words did not interrupt at all. (The experiment was stopped at the ten minute mark.)

Now I understand why they start playing good, upbeat music 10 minutes before the band takes the stage.  And how music lead-ins to presentations can ‘prime’ you to be more receptive to the presentation.  It makes you think we ought to be doing more than show dial-in telephone numbers before our web seminar’s start.

For more information, I recommend reading “Blink” or visiting Malcomb Gladwell’s website.

Tags: effective presentations, interviews, Video, video presentations, video webcasts.

I came across this SlideShare presentation from the Graduate School of Education at the University of Buffalo. I thought it added a few good points regarding how we process information so have embedded it below. Here are the highlights:

• The slides should not say everything that you do. (This is the same message that all the leading presentation experts – Garr Reynolds, Nancy Duarte, Cliff Atkinson – are saying so its not a ground-breaking thought but sets up this next important point).
• Show your slide for 14-21 seconds before talking about them to increase retention by 30%. The reason – the image will make its impression, then you complete the picture with your story.
• The average attention span is 18 minutes. Makes you wonder why we schedule everything in 60 minutes blocks.
• Two-Three slides per minute. Now this is a good point of argument – I’d say it depends, but if you do a good job of using images and not text on your slides may be effective. It really is not clear to me how this works with the second bullet about showing the slide for 14-21 seconds before speaking. Doing the math, you would have 6 to 15 seconds to talk per slide! I have seen this work, but you really need to have your talk well rehearsed to do this smoothly.
• Engage the audience every 3-4 minutes. Obviously polls can be used, but simply using chat to get feedback and draw connections from those comments to your content works too and keeps the presentation flowing.
• Color visuals increase willingness to read up to 80 percent and improves retention by 75%.  Yellow is the first color that you see.

Tags: effective presentations, PowerPoint, Training.