When you are broadcasting a PowerPoint presentation during a web seminar it can be very distracting to have your mouse pointer (the little arrow) dancing across the screen as you or your presenter is speaking. The movement on the screen draws the audience’s attention from the presenter’s narration. It can even be confusing to the audience since their is no correlation between where the mouse is going and what the speaker is saying.

To prevent this from happening, after the Slide Show view has started, use this combination:

• To hide the mouse arrow:  Ctrl + H
• To restore the mouse arrow:  Ctrl + A

Here is another tip (when your in the Slide Show view):

When you really want the audience to focus on what you are saying, blank the PowerPoint screen:

To go black:

• Press the B key
• To restore press the B key again

To go white:

• Press the W key
• To restore, press the W key again

These tips and more can be found at David Paradi’s blog Think Outside the Slide.

Tags: PowerPoint, webinar.

A conversational approach helps on so many levels – new or related insights are often shared during a conversation,  there is more presenter energy, and audio interest is heightened from hearing multiple voices.

But it can’t be just an after-thought – you really should design it in to your presentation.  What do I mean?

We recently produced an audio webinar with a large group of presenters. To break up the slide presentations,  two of the presenters carried on a dialogue between them.  In concept this was great, but in practice it didn’t always work so well.

Why?  Rather than discussing a point in more detail and having a natural dialogue, one of the presenters was asking questions that so obviously pointed to the upcoming slide (and upcoming bullet point) in the deck that it clearly had to be rehearsed.  This defeated the naturalness and authenticity they were striving to achieve.

The fix? Make sure your accompanying slides are visual rather than text heavy.

This gives the presenters freedom to cover the points in any order or manner they wish.  The speakers can always use the original slides to remember the key points they want to discuss, and provide them as part of a hand-out after the event.

The feeling then becomes more like a discussion or interview and breaks up the longer webinar presentation.

Bill

Tags: audio webinar, authenticity, conversations, web seminar, webinars.

I must admit that we have recorded webinars that used more than one of these presentation tricks. That can result in ‘Death by Webinar!’

Life After Death with PowerPoint By Don McMillan

Tags: effective presentations, funny, PowerPoint, Web Seminars.

If your like me, your first response to the use of storytelling in your presentations is to roll your eyes.

You got facts, figures and bullet points to share. You don’t have time for stories.

Well, after listening, producing and delivering hundreds of presentations, I can confidently state that the best presenters always use stories to make their point.

Still not convinced?  Listen to a pro…

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: effective presentations, storytelling.

While learning about ‘Getting Things Done’ I discovered this great blog – Merlin Mann’s 43Folders.

He has been blogging for a long time and 43Folders started out focused on productivity solutions like GTD.  Although his focus has changed, his blog is still a good read.

He uses a presentation style that we also are putting into practice.

What’s really exciting is that this presentation works so well both for the live audience and the video webcast – the slides add to his message without taking your focus away from him as the speaker and what he is saying.  And from a technical perspective, the slide imagery avoids small text fonts that video does a poor job of broadcasting.

Take a look at this video of his final presentation: Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: effective presentations, GTD, live event recordings, Video, video webcasts, Webcasts.

David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) is a must-read for anyone who has that nagging feeling at the end of the workday that they forgot something.  GTD is an organization system that helps you better manage your time and increase your productivity.

Are you wondering just how this is going to improve your webinars and presentations?

One of the services we offer is professional management of web seminars. As part of our service, we provide a practice session and make time for the event coordinators and panelists to rehearse.

We see two things happen -

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Business, event management, GTD, practice, Web Seminars.

As part of our effort to bring a repeatable, scientific methodology to our web seminars we have been reading alot of literature on presentation development .

Currently I’m reading Doug Stevenson’s Story Theater Method; Strategic Storytelling in Business. This is a guidebook that shows how to mine your own life stories to help you connect with an audience.

Right away, Doug makes this point:

The key to becoming an effective speaker is to be authentic. The goal is not to change who you are, it’s to remain true to who you are. To do otherwise is to lose your power. Your power lies in your unique personality and style.

Doug goes on to talk about how actors connect IN to connect OUT to an audience. They go inward to pull from their own reservoir of emotions and experiences. If they do this well, they bring the character to life and the audience connects to them.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: authenticity, presentations, storytelling, Web Seminars.