A Wider Net

Motion Computing, maker of the impressive C5 medical tablet computer, has released a new rugged mobile tablet PC, the F5, an impressive field sales device. We have been fans of tablet computers for field sales and exhibit applications for many years. We find them to be excellent for one-to-one or one-to-few presentations and they make great tools to put in the hands of customers for impromptu interactive experiences.

The F5 is even better than your typical tablet because it was designed with this application in mind. For starters, they ruggedized it and made it fairly light (actually, it weights the same as the MacBook Air.) They added a handle to make it easier to carry and to hold. And they added extra features such as wireless internet connectivity, a camera, RFID and barcode readers, speech recognition, and even theft prevention to make it an outstanding device for the field.

Some applications for this are somewhat obvious: field presentations, data gathering, site surveys, and real time estimates with access to full CRM data. But I also see this as a great exhibit gadget.

Let’s imagine that you have a large trade show exhibit with many product groups. You can hand one of these devices to everyone who registers at the reception desk. They bring it with them as they tour the booth. After filling out some basic information, the device plots a tour through the booth and guides the visitor along. As they tour the booth, the tablet senses RFID tags and displays information about nearby products and how they relate to the specific needs of the visitor, based on the information they provided. Interactive activities may include video demos, 3D pen-based walk-through experiences of products or solutions, games, scavenger hunts, and augmented reality visuals (more on that on one of my next posts). At any point the visitor can opt to have product information sent to their office email or downloaded to a memory stick on their way out. The custom guided tour would provide great value to the visitor by tailoring the presentations to meet their needs, while providing tremendous measurement data for the exhibitor. Also, exhibitors may gather feedback and even content from visitors such as comments, ratings, photos, and videos, then share them on the show floor and online.

I will be writing more about this device as soon as we put it through its paces. In the meantime, you can get a chuckle at Engadget, where they compare the handle-held device to that other bit of hardware brilliance, the infamous Speak N’ Spell.

It’s magic, and I want one for presentations. It’s a motorized screen that you carry into a room, plop it down on the floor, and an 84 or 100″ screen rises out of it like a charmed snake. See the video at Gizmodo.

Before:

After:

I have been working on, in, and around webcasts for seven or eight years now, and I can say with some certainty that webcasts are boring. That’s really saying something, since I actively suggest webcasts as one potential part of a marketing or communications strategy. But to be fair, they’re usually boring. They’re not all boring, and they don’t have to be boring - they just usually are.

The sad thing is, webcasts have long been sold as the answer to boring conference calls. And there are still millions of meetings carried out huddled around a Polycom starfish or some other conference phone. I’ve even conducted conference calls with five people huddled around my cell phone with the speaker turned on. Now THAT’S engaging.

WHY ARE WEBCASTS BORING?

1. PowerPoint. The focal point of most webcasts, webinars, and webconferences is a slide window built in, most likely, PowerPoint. And the vast majority of those presentations suffer from the same ills I discussed in this post. Where PowerPoint can dull the fun in a live meeting, it’s absolutely lethal in a webcast.
2. The Presenter(s). A webcast is a public speaking event. Just because your audience isn’t in the room with you doesn’t mean they’re not there. If you wouldn’t put your presenters in front of a large crowd at a face-to-face event, then don’t put them in a webcast.
3. Looooongggggg. Look to YouTube for the answer to your question about how long your webcast should be. YouTube has stated that the optimal length for their videos is 2 minutes. I’ve seen webcasts range from 5 minutes to 5 hours and without question, the most well-received were under 30 minutes. These days shorter is better. Going back to watch a long webcast using chapters seems to be giving way to shorter presentations and more of them.
4. The Experience. Your audience is at their desk. Your webcast is competing for attention against piles of unfinished work, the phone, coworker interruptions, incoming email and rss feeds, and widget alerts. Asking them to focus on their computer screens can be asking quite a lot. I’ve always thought it would be fun to email the attendees a PDF of a sign that says “Don’t Bother Me- I’m Watching a Webcast!” to hang on the back of their chair or office door, if they are so equipped.
5. Bad Video or Audio. YouTube has lowered the bar for video production standards, but serious webcasts still benefit from real production values - clear, intelligible audio and video that uses multiple cameras, decent lighting, etc.
6. Interactivity. One of the coolest aspects of webcasts and webconferences is interactivity - yet very few webcasts use the interactivity at their disposal. Q&A is only one part - you can push polls and surveys, provide content to explore, and allow users to network with each other. Frankly, it’s amazing that so few webcasts offer any kind of audience networking, discussions, or group opinions.
7. Fun(less). Webcasts are a natural platform for using games to reinforce content and create engaging fun, but they almost never incorporate them. You can push trivia games, bingo, and all kinds of simple flash games - and they can be competitive with the rest of the audience, with a prize reward. Add a game, make it fun - make it memorable.

WHAT ELSE CAN WE DO?

Handle more questions: Many long webcasts get long because they handle questions one at a time. With an audience of 500 people asking 1000 questions, a typical webcast gets to 10-20 of them. Instead, you may consider having a team of people answering questions via text that the audience can browse right within the webcast player, at their leisure. That way more people get their questions answered faster.

Get a Moderator: A good moderator can spruce up a webcast better than a coat of paint on an old house. By setting the pace, keeping things moving, and using their talents to keep the energy level up, a professional moderator can make or break a webcast.

“You”: The man of the year, “you”, wants to be involved. Let the audience drive. Q&A and user-driven chapters and interactivity is just part of it. Support Social Media. Companies like Operator11 are building webcast platforms using Adobe Flash that allow any audience member to insert their own videos, live or pre-recorded, into the overall broadcast (under the control of the webcast producer, of course.) Support Social Networking. A webcast audience usually has a lot in common. Let them meet each other and communicate about the topic at hand. Before the webcast, let them tell you what they want to discuss.

Any other ideas on how to improve webcasts are most welcome - especially if anyone has a way to broadcast chocolate.

no… that picture is not of me.

Every now and then I store ideas for the blog for later use. Here’s one I’ve been sitting on that I know you’ll like.

Sue Pelletier put this on her terrific MeetingsNet blog, Face2Face, a little while ago. Bad PowerPoint is one of my pet peeves, so I’m happy to reflect it to our readers.

If this video resonates with you, and especially if it makes you angry, then here is Seth Godin’s Really Bad PowerPoint post. His e-book, which was once available for free on Amazon, is even better. I just realized that I have posted the link to that PDF twice now. I guess I really want you to read it. Seriously - I really want you to read it. There. Make that three times.

Whenever I stroll the toothpaste aisle or the peanut butter aisle in the local mega-supermarket I often think we have too many choices (at least in North America). That doesn’t apply to Presidential candidates, of course, when we are given 2.1 candidates to choose from and we end up with walnut brains like our current nutjob, even though we technically didn’t even give him the most votes. But when I was reading Choice, Seth Godin’s short but sweet commentary on the difference between “then” and “now”, I had to agree that choice is where it’s at.

I’m not sure if we need a hundred toothpastes, or a thousand flavors of high-fructose corn syrup, but we do enjoy having choice. The need for choice is obvious in the changes in web marketing. Gone are the days where a flash-based website did all the driving. Now users demand small bites of web content in easy to browse arrangements, even though they increasingly need a crowd of content raters helping them make their choices.

But, oddly, the age of choice hasn’t caught up with events. Exhibitions - yes. But try to find the elements of choice in a user conference or sales meeting. Here it’s still about sit back and be spoken to. You can choose your sessions. You can choose your muffin. But you sit and watch a general session. For how much longer, I wonder?

The nearest equivalent I can think of is movies. They’re about the same length as a general session. You sit and you watch. And with increasing numbers, people are choosing to have a remote control in their hands instead of a frighteningly over-priced bag of artificially buttered popcorn. At home, we control our pace, our volume, our seating position, our food choices, and our breaks.

While the movie industry scrambles to keep people in the theaters, will we have to do the same in live events? Maybe not to the same extent, but we will do well to understand those issues and respond to them with choices.

The choice to sit through some or all of a session.

The choice to watch some or all of it online later, or on my phone, PDA, PSP, or PMP.

The choice to listen as part of a crowd or speak as part of a conversation.

The choice to hear about a solution or to be part of the solution.

The choice to present another PowerPoint slide show full of words or make a lasting visual impression

Slidecasting, an elegantly simple method of synchronizing a slide show to an audio file using tools from Slideshare, is the latest in an overabundant array of online slide presentation tools. Now you have more flavors of online PowerPoint presentations than there are flavors of toothpaste at the local supermarket. You’ve got your plain paste, minty gel, tartar control, tartar control gel, tartar control whitening, tartar control whitening gel, tartar control whitening breath-freshening enamel-strengthening paste, tartar control whitening baking soda gingivitis breath-freshing sensitivity spicy cinnamon sparkle pearl, and all natural organic sand mixed with milkweed ooze. Multiply that times the number of brands and you have a full aisle of tubes that all say “do not swallow.”

Oh, wait - this is about PowerPoint presentations. So, like toothpaste, there are loads of options. You have your slide shows, your animated slide shows, and your animated flash embeddable slide shows. You have your slide shows with audio, your slide shows with video, and your slide shows with video, flash animations, Q&A, polling, downloadable white papers, quizzes, interactive games, and audience sleepiness sensors that alert the speaker to be less boring. And then you have degrees of slide show psychosis - presenters who try to use slides as book pages and ask us to read while they talk - a truly annoying form of multitasking.

So, if it isn’t obvious, I’m a little skeptical at yet another me-too slide show tool. In fact, I’m VERY skeptical at another tool coming from Slideshare - a site I never understood. People upload PowerPoint presentations - WITHOUT the audio. I suppose you could design a slide show that stands alone, but most of the presentations I saw on Slideshare were slide stacks from presentations that needed the audio from the presentation to make sense.

But Slidecasting from Slideshare isn’t bad at all. They have created an elegant tool, and a nice embeddable slide show player to go with it. Plus, the community at Slideshare makes it easy for anyone to store and share presentations. This is actually what Podcasting on the iPod should have been. Surprisingly, they do not have a way to export a Slidecast to a video iPod for a Splodcast.

If you have a need for a little multimedia on your blog or if you have some simple presentations you want to archive and distribute, you may give this tool a try. As a sample, see below. I would say this tool is roughly the slide show equivalent of Crest Whitening Expressions Tartar Control Lemon Ice.

Thanks to Gogi for tipping me off to Slideshare

I’m in the process of putting my house on the market. When you do this, you have a unique opportunity requirement to purge - to get rid of all sorts of clutter that has been weighing you down like a waistline full of sin-a-buns. I imagine that frequent movers could get addicted to this process - the clutter purge. It may even have it’s own “condition” and support groups. It may even have a confusing name like “Movelemia” or “Annexia Disposa” or something. Anyway…

While digging and tossing, I found this brochure - a vintage manual with a steep sticker price of $1.25 that contained everything you need to know to make more effective meetings - with overhead projectors. I’m willing to bet that no one ever paid cover price for this pulp.

If you think PowerPoint is a pain in the neck - take a look at how we USED to have to make slides.

Classic.

This article reinforces what you have been told - that putting the same words on your PowerPoint slides that you intend to speak is a big negative. Now you have the scientific evidence to fight back.

We all hate excessively wordy slides, yet we see them all the time. This study shows that even a few words, if they simply repeat the speakers spoken words, can have a net negative effect on understanding.

Seth Godin hit the nail on the head with his e-book “Really Bad PowerPoint” - still one of my favorites.

Speaking of presentation techniques - check out my next post…