In case you missed it, here is Laura Foley’s NIM Live event – Rockstar Tips to Engage Remote Attendees Interactive Marketing Insights with Presentation Strategist Laura Foley #NIMLive

Top Tips to Keep Attendees Engaged: Rock Your Remote Presentations #NIMLive Newport Interactive Marketing with Laura Foley 

Marketing Solutionist #NIMLive Founder Suzanne McDonald: Laura Foley designs develops presentations, conducts presentation, webinar audits, and skills training to various clients like MIT, EMC, Nike, Proctor & Gamble, Nestle, Harvard Business School, lots of big names there. And she has a degree from Mass. College of Art and Design and 25 years’ experience.

Marketing Solutionist #NIMLive Founder Suzanne McDonald: So we’re really excited to have her join us here at #NIMLive. 

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Thank you so much for joining me today. Joining #NIM with Top Tips to Keep Attendees Engaged: Rock Your Remote Presentations. My name is Laura Foley, and I have been a presentation designer exclusively since 2009.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: I have been a remote presentation expert since oh, March, 2020, as many of us have, I’ve learned a lot about really crappy presentations. And I’ve also learned how to overcome the crappiness to make good lively and interesting presentations that will help to keep your audience focused on you and also be active participants in the meeting.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Before we get going, I wanted to do a little bit of housekeeping to let you know what you can do in this webinar to participate. I have a couple of slides in this presentation, pepper throughout that, where I’m asking you to raise your hand naturally, that means to either physically raise your hand, or if you prefer, you can use the electronic raising your hand by clicking on the reactions, a button, and then either clicking yes.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Or raise your hand. Yours might look a little different depending on if you’re on a PC, a phone, a tablet, but it’s going to essentially be under reactions. Raise your hand. The other way that I am going to invite you to participate is to ask questions. Whenever you see a slide with an orange band at the top, that is going to be your opportunity to ask questions.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Because we are a smallish group. If you want to unmute yourself and go on Mike and ask the question you may, or if questions occur to you during the presentation, you may put them in the chat. And if Sue’s able to read those, that would be great. And I will address the questions that way

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: let’s cast our minds back to 2019 and before where we would have in-person audiences, you might remember them. They were physical human beings taking up space in a real room, and they were really easy to read. If your presentation or your speech was going well, people would be smiling. They’d be clapping.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: They’d be nodding their heads so that you can tell you’re on the right. Alternatively, if they were looking puzzled or scratching, their heads are starting to look at their phones. You knew that you had to pick up the pace or somehow bring them back into the fold. However, this is what your online audience looks like.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: For some kinds of meetings, you can see in this case, I can see four participants on a little tiny screen, but that’s it. I don’t have an overall view of everybody. Sometimes you might not be able to see anybody now, as we know, being in an in-person presentation, it’s very easy to see when you’re losing the audience.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: In this case, there are two gentlemen in the audience who were giving very clear signals that this woman needs to change up the way she’s treating. But if she [00:04:00] is presenting online and some guy decides he’s going to take out his phone and start playing animal crossing, she won’t know because he is logged in as a participant and he has his camera off, but he still seems to be an active participant.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: And this lady in this case is hoping that they’re listening to her, but that’s really not what we need to do. We can’t hope we need to plan to make people listen to us. We don’t want people playing animal crossing at our remote meetings. We don’t want them messing around doing webinars. We want them paying attention and we have to work actively to make sure that happens.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: It doesn’t just happen. Happen. We need to do a little bit extra when we prepare our presentations so that people can engage with us.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: You’ll notice if you haven’t already, did I use the word engagement a lot? And the kind of definition that I am actually thinking about here is the definition of the act of emotional involvement or commitment. So an engaged audience is listening to you is responding to you, is asking questions and is otherwise showing every indication that they are fascinated with everything you have to say in this session, you’re going to learn different ways to make your remote presentations and your webinars more entertaining, more interactive.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: So that you can engage with your online audience. You can get two way conversations going and you can answer questions as they come up for your audience. I would like you please, to take a moment and raise your hand if that is why you’re here to learn how to make interesting presentations and to react or rather to engage with your audience.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: And I can see that many people have raised their hands. So that is good. If that is not the reason why you’re here, perhaps you will learn something by sticking around, or if this isn’t really your thing, that’s okay too. You can leave. What I did there was I put in something that is called a bluff statement.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Bluff statement means bottom line upfront, where you tell your audience what you’re going to do and how they will benefit from. If this is a majorly marketing crowd about the features versus the benefits and that it’s more important to highlight the benefits of people being here. Another good thing about this bluff statement is if people are not in the right room, if they are, if you’re physically giving a presentation, they can leave.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Or if you’re giving a presentation remotely, they can sign off because they learn right away that this isn’t the right spot for them. I’m going to be quiet for a moment so that you can read that.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: I admit that I was at a presentation last year, a webinar last year. That was so boring that I put it off on one corner of my screen. I opened up another screen and I did my entire meal plan for a camping trip.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: And I did my packing list while this guy was talking and he was none the wiser so bad on me, but it was really adult presentation. So of course you’re probably wondering, so that’s great. We know what the problem is, but how do we fix the problem? How do we solve it? You have to solve the problem by changing your approach to the way that you present on.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: And I’m going to go over six different areas of ways that you can rock your remote presentations. We’re going to talk about working with a camera with smile. You’re on camera. We’re going to talk about involving the audience in a conversation and in a two way flow of information, talking about how to master that chat window, using your presenter tools, knowing your meeting platform, which is very important and things to avoid.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: We’ll start of course, at the beginning with smile you’re on. Bye now, a lot of us have probably already realized that good lighting makes for good video and maybe you’ve even gone online and bought a couple of these bad boys. These are called ring lights. They are very inexpensive. If you don’t already have one and they really help illuminate your face with a suffused diffused light so that you don’t get harsh shadows.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: But if you like, you can also use this bad boy from the hardware store, which is just a clamp on a spotlight, or you can use your good old fashioned desk light to get the job done as well. However, if you are, if you do use these kinds of lights, the spotlight here, this is very bright light, right? And this kind of spotlight is also going to give very bright and harsh.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: What you can do is use a sheet of aluminum foil to create a bounce. And what that means is that you aim the light at the aluminum foil so that it bounces off the foil and onto you. And that’s a way that you can use these less expensive, more easily found lights and not have a super harsh shadow. This is a fun little Twitter account called room Raider.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: And it talks about what’s going on in the backgrounds of people’s presentations. Sometimes we don’t always think about it, and sometimes it’s not very important if you’re having a one-on-one with a colleague, if you are talking casually or doing something with a work group, not that vital. If on the other hand you are say pitching to a client, or you are a guest speaker at someplace, it is more important to pay attention to what’s going on in your backyard.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Oh, this is my actual background. And I’m using my background in real life. It is I did meet enough that view of it, but it is pretty busy and I hope that it projects some kind of image of ordered chaos or creativity, which is my thing. I’m a creative person, and that is something that I need to communicate to my clients.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Virtual backgrounds are pretty good. And zoom comes with a lot of options for virtual backgrounds between a bowler, blurring things out, putting videos in your backgrounds, or choosing actual photographs to put in there, depending on your situation. If I were delivering a keynote speech someplace, I might do this because this looks like a an architectural photograph, which it is, I would not do this for a major speech.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: I might do it for something fun, but really the background can say as much about you as. What you’re wearing, how you’re groomed and how you’re addressing the camera. So good things to keep in mind. Virtual background. Yes. For professional knots, the beach for the professional. Now I put this as a little video just in case you have the screen so that you can’t see me on camera, but looking into the camera and not at the screen is very important in [00:12:00] that Jeff, there, that I’m not looking directly at the camera.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: I’m looking at the person’s face on the screen. And here I am looking at the camera, even though we’ve been doing this remote meeting for almost two years now, it is still very hard to train yourself, to look at the camera and not at the person, but it really does create that illusion of eye contact.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: When you, in fact, are not making eye contact with anyone that you can see when you’re making eye contact with all the people in TV.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: It’s a little too hard to do. So I’ve made my camera into a guy. I put some googly eyes on him and I maintain eye contact with those two little googly eyes. And that helps me stay focused on what to look at.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Another thing that people often overlook is the way that you use your voice or 

Marketing Solutionist #NIMLive Founder Suzanne McDonald: Julia is asking about lighting is the light quality reflective ? Does it match pretty much how other people are seeing? How does that render? 

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: It’s all over the place. It depends on what people, how people are viewing you. If, they’re viewing you on a phone, if they’re in a brightly lit space, a darkly lit space. All you can do is to do the best you can with what you’ve got realizing that you’re probably never going to approach a TV studio level of expertise, unless you have a dedicated video studio in your office.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: But still some good things to avoid are sitting in front of a window where light is coming in from behind, because that will make your face and complete shadow. Try to avoid a harsh light coming in at either side or right in front of your face, because that will also create some shadows, not so much the front of your face, but the sideways ones just any light is better than no light, really.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: And if you need to test it, you can always start a zoom meeting by yourself or whatever tool you’re using teams, go to meeting whatever, just have a meeting with yourself in it and take a look at yourself and see if does that answer the question? 

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Actually we’re going to pause in a little bit for questions that will help me keep going. And we’ll also help keep the time condensed, but I will say that if there are questions that I don’t address, please do look at my contact information in the chat, and I’ll be happy to answer any questions that I don’t get to today with a personal email or even a meeting, if you wanted to set that up.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: All right. So back to the voice and you’ve been hearing a lot of my voice. It is important to remember that when you are listening to someone speak in a monotone, you don’t like. But it’s easy to fall into that boring teacher voice. When you’re talking about things that you want people to know about vocal variety means adjusting the sound of your voice.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: You go up high for other things and low for other things, you might talk quickly because something is exciting or you might talk slowly because you want people to reflect on what you’re saying. You need to convey energy and excitement and enthusiasm in your voice. When you’re speaking, even if people can see you on camera and you can see me gesturing right now, you can tell that I’ve got some more pep in my voice because I’m putting it there on purpose.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: And that’s something that you can practice. And that is very effective for keeping people interested and pausing is very effective. Especially when you ask somebody to do something such as if you were speaking on a subject, you’d say, think about a time when this has happened to you. Pause so they can think about it, then go on.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: There’s no need to be an auctioneer and rip through your presentation. You do need to slow down a bit so that people can think about the answers to questions you’ve asked so that they can reflect on what you’re telling them or so that they know that when you stop talking, it means that you said something important and you’re waiting for them to think about it.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: And the camera also can be used when you were standing up. And they’re in that diff that I am standing up and walking around and using the space more like a state. This can be helpful if you are, if you want to express a large amount of emotion, or if you have something that you want to show people that is big, if you walk away from your camera and actually hold that object, then they can see the whole thing.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Live demos are possible on camera, right there. I’m shining a laser beam right into your very eyeball, but it’s on camera. So don’t worry. You can show people things up close and show them how it works by holding it close to your camera. And you can also move yourself closer to the camera. This is helpful if you’re telling somebody this is really important.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: So like this. By getting up close to people. It’s like when you’re standing in front of somebody getting a poster, the camera has that same effect so that you’re telling somebody something that’s more important or confident or something that is that they need to know. So you’re getting very close to make sure that they hear it.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: All right. Now I’ve got to, I’m going to take a little break here and find out if there are any questions about or discussion about being on camera. I’ll stop the shares. We can see each other.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Does anybody want to open up their mic and ask a question? Oh, I see that Julia has asked how often should you take a break in a one or two hour presentation? If you are presenting remotely, then you should not be giving a two hour presentation. If you can have. Because that is a long time to ask someone, to sit still and pay attention.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Think about if you go to the movies or if you’re watching a show, how often do you get up and leave the room or get a snack or have to take a bathroom break? What I generally do if I’m, if I have a brief presentation like this one, I’ll cut it in maybe four times and have very short Q and a breaks.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: If I have a longer presentation, a half day presentation, then I will go no longer than 45 minutes and give people about 10 minutes to recover. And then back into the show, the time the downtime gives people the time to go take a break, go to the bathroom, take a snack, or just get up and walk around and get away from the computer.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: All right. Suzanne. Do you see any other questions that I may have missed? 

Marketing Solutionist #NIMLive Founder Suzanne McDonald: Nope. I think so. Julia, just to reiterate longest virtual presentation would be an hour, and Sal is saying about 30 minutes once, once you need to go past 30 minutes, it’s probably due for another, meeting. 

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Last year in September, somebody wanted me to do a three hour course online and I said, are you sure? And they said, yes, we have so very busy people and they can’t spare any more than a half day on this. We can’t break it up. Okay. And boy, the reviews stunk.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: People hated it. It was too long. The person talk that they were saying about me; that the presenter talked for too long. Yeah. Because your boss told me to, but it didn’t work out very well. Cause people get antsy and they get forgetful, or they’ll just do what I did with that boring webinar guy and go off and do their errands online while they’re waiting for you to wind down.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Okay. There will be other chances to ask questions later on. So if you find there’s something you’d like to ask, then either put it in the chat or you can ask in person later on. All right. Now we’re going to talk about how to involve the audience. And I want to involve you right now. Please raise your hand either by clicking on that raise hand, or actually doing it.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: If the last webinar you attended asked you to respond in some way, they ask a question, they held a poll and I’m seeing only two hands up three hands going up for participatory opportunities. That’s not. So I’d like you to unmute yourself and I’d like to take one or two of you to, respond to me on this.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Why is it important that we should interact with a remote audience? Does anyone want to chime in on why it’s important to react?

Craig: This is Craig, like we were saying at the beginning, just monologues are boring and conversations are more interesting. 

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Absolutely. And Leanne, I have, I see that your hand is up, is that because you’d like to weigh in on why we should interact with our audience? 

Leeanne: Menti was a way to gauge their involvement, whether they’re still listening, whether they’re bored, or whether they’re enthusiastic. Actually knowing maybe we could then as presenters tweak our behavior, like show more enthusiasm that we can pivot and adjust based on what we got from the remote audience.

Leeanne: Absolutely. Very good points. Now, I wonder if you saw what I did there and yes, that is a super old meme and no, I don’t. I just asked you twice to interact with me first, by raising your hand either physically or electronically, and then by inviting commentary and as Leanne pointed out, it is a way to get people to share, to get conversations going.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: And I’m sorry, Craig was saying that the conversations are so important. It’s also, and here’s the tricky, psychological part. It’s a way to keep people on their toes, because if they think that you’re going to pick on them or rather choose them, we would never pick on our students having forfend.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: But if we are going to call someone out by name and say, Hey, Billy, what do you think about that? Then they under, they come to understand very quickly that they need to stay on point and not be messing around and to pay attention. Now, these are the instructions that I gave you to help you to know when and how to interact with me.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Another thing. And I did this a little bit earlier with Leanne is I, and Craig is, I called them by name. And if I said something like Barbara, I love the energy you’re bringing to this room. You are laughing at the jokes, which makes me feel pretty funny. So thank you for that. And now I can see Barbara reacting there.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: And this is helpful if you’re in a position where you can make people slightly uncomfortable by calling people out, if you see them looking off camera and obviously typing something like, Hey Marty are we boring? You, but, oh, sorry. Which of course you wouldn’t do in a more formal setting or in a setting where that might hurt people’s feelings.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: I don’t know a classroom or some other room where you don’t specifically want to embarrass people, but you do want to acknowledge them. And that’s a real. Thing to do is to say their name and that’s a great way to acknowledge them. Another thing that I do to help people to stay interested and engaged is I will create a game, which we are going to play right now.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: And this game is played in the chat, which I, let me see if I can see this chat while I’m yes, I can see the chat while I am presenting. And the name of the game is the Rocky remote presentations trivia game. It’s very easy. We are going to, I’ll read a question and you are going to type your answer in the chat window.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: You don’t have to wait until I’m done with a question, just type away. If you think you know it, and the first person with the correct answer wins the round. Does that sound clear? All right, let’s begin.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: What common household product that I talked about can reflect light onto your face when you’re presenting online and boom Julia, right out of the gate. Super fast, 10 foil. Very good. I will accept 10 fold because I call it that. We have aluminum foil, aluminum, foil, and foil. So we see that people are paying attention.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Excellent. Next question. True or false. You should always maintain eye contact with the person on your screen.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Let’s say Barbara, you win. You should not make eye contact with a person on your screen, which looks like this. You should make eye contact with your camera, which looks like this. Bonus brown. What game was that board guy playing on his iPhone at the beginning of the webinar.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Justin, you were so close. It is in fact animal crossing still you’re on the right track, but this is a game that it’s, a fun way to tell if people are paying attention, it’s super easy to make. That was just smart art. Or if you don’t even want to bother with that, you can make a series of slides, one with a question, one with an answer.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Next one with a question and so forth. You would do this exercise at the middle or at the end to reinforce what you’re talking about, or you could do it at the beginning to see, to gauge what the baseline level of understanding might be and whether or not you’re issuing prizes or someone wins the internet, it’s up to you.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: But it’s the fun part of the game really is the prize. You don’t necessarily have to reward the correct answers with a prize, although that can be fun too. When you are working out what you’re going to do to increase the activity, you need to do your homework about your meeting platforms tools. And we’re going to talk a little bit more about that later on.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: I have time for one quick question. If there’s any question or discussion about involving the audience, would anyone like to raise their hand to step up to them?

Craig: How do you manage people interrupting too much? That is always a difficult question because you want to reward the fact that the person is being helpful and rather being interactive, but you want to shut him down in a polite way.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Something I did earlier when there were a lot of questions coming in at the time where I didn’t want them to, I allowed one or two or those questions to come in and then reminded people that there was going to be time for the questions. So if you do build in those interactive times, the Q and A throughout, you can ask the person.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: To defer the question until that time. But if it’s someone who’s confrontational interrupting, that’s a hard one. I’m no good with that. So I don’t have any good answers . 

Marketing Solutionist #NIMLive Founder Suzanne McDonald: If you have a moderator to have the moderator private chat them to try to address it. If they seem like they’re overtaking, that might be the best way to do it because obviously Laura needs to be engaged with everyone else.

Marketing Solutionist #NIMLive Founder Suzanne McDonald: So to have, a point person, you have to have a wing person to to be your bouncer 

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Excellent point. Thank you. 

Julia: I can also chime in. I’ve definitely dealt with this with an in-person presentations where one person is like, as if it’s only the two of you in a room. And after a while you just say these are really interesting ideas.

Julia: I’d love to talk to you more about this after let’s get back to the presentation or you don’t use the parking lot thing. This is a great topic. We don’t have time to go into it more, but if you want, here’s my business card, you can call me or something just to say like that’s enough.

Julia: We need to move on.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: We talked a little bit about what goes on in the chat window. And I’d like to address it specifically so that you can come up with ways to incorporate that chat window in your next presentation. Of course, the ask me anything is very helpful to to ask, to tell people, to put their questions in the chat, because believe it or not, everyone likes to be on Mike.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Not everyone likes to be the center of attention or even the focus of a minute amount of attention, and they feel better asking questions in that way. Reading through the chat for your questions is very helpful for the presenter because the moderator can actually read those questions and give people a break from that one voice coming through.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: We do want to encourage the participants to chat. And in my experience, if it’s a work meeting, a webinars, some kind of a lesson that people are generally very respectful about staying on topic, they don’t go off and talk about what they’re doing this weekend or what their favorite TV show is. They usually talk about the things going on, and sometimes that can be a nice boost for the presenter so that you can see, oh, the people are enjoying this.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: They are really having a lively discussion or any other case. If someone says I don’t get this, then the presenter can look at the chat and say, oh, okay. I need to spend a little more time explaining that you can exchange information in the chat. And we have done that today by putting in some contact information.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: If you before I continue, I will invite you to save the. Continually throughout the presentation, by going to the bottom of the chat screen and clicking on those three little dots at the bottom of the screen and saving the chat. And that way you can save all of that great information that’s come through.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: You can also in zoom exchange files, you can exchange files on different platforms sometimes in chat and sometimes in different ways. But this two way information exchange is great for the chat. And this is a really cool way to use the chat is that you can interact live with an audience during a prerecorded presentation.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Now here’s a picture, a screenshot of an actual presentation I gave last year where after I had been accepted to speak this at, oh yeah. We forgot to tell you. All of our sessions are prerecorded. And I said, this is a session about audience interacting. How is that going to work on a recording? And they said, we didn’t think of that.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: So I thought of it. And what I did was I, in my introduction, I told people the recorded introduction that I was going to be live in check. And when people type things in, I was immediately there answering their questions, saying encouraging things or giving people information right there in the chat.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: And it even worked with that trivia game because when the recorded version of me was saying, okay, here’s the question then recorded version of me paused. So that chat version of me could react in real time. And it was something that the people in the session had never seen before never [00:33:00] experienced it before.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: And it was very effective. So even if you are not in your recorded, Participating. If you’re in that chat, it can make a huge difference. 

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Chat is a goldmine of your contact information of your people that you are, or in the meeting also have all the questions that they have and you would save the chat using the meeting tools.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: As I described in zoom, clicking on those three dots at the bottom of the list, or you can actually select all and then paste it into another document. Any questions that come up in your chat are things that you can either incorporate into your presentation for the next time, or you can expect to come from the next audience so that you have already answer.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: And you’re gathering contact information from people. If you need to hook up with them, connect with them another time.

Craig: Because I’ve seen in presentations with hundreds of thousands of people in particular, the chat is just OK. 

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: The smaller the group, the easier it is to control. And just as if you were delivering a keynote speech at consumer electronics show where you’ve got thousands of people in the audience, you might just ask for a show of hands for something and you wouldn’t invite those chats or the Q and a while you’re live, because it would be impossible to keep track.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: You can get those general. Yes, no happy, sad binary answer kinds of things by doing show of hands and asking people to raise hands. And then you will see electronically that has happened, but you’re right, Craig, it is not possible to get all of those questions. You can set expectations. I have time for two questions.

Justin: I noticed when we started the meeting, you had a pre formatted introduction of yourself in the chat, which is nice. A lot of information in there. Is that something you just copied and pasted from somewhere else? Or is that not part of zoom or anything? 

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Nope. I’m on a Mac, so I’m using text edit, but if you’re on a PC, that would be just a basic text file. And you type in all the things you want people to know about you, or you can put links in, in, this document and I just cut what I want and paste it in.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: And it’s a lot faster than concentrating on what I’m going to type. 

Julia: I’ve been in presentations of various sizes where there are so many people off screen. Is there any way to say, please turn your camera on. It just feels like it just sucks the energy out of the room sometimes. 

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Oh, that’s a very good way to say it. Please turn your camera on and explaining that at the beginning, why it’s important to have that, camera interaction can help people to understand that you are not just some mannequin spouting robot talk.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: You are a person who thrives on the interaction of the audience, and you can explain it in that way. You don’t have to sound needy, although you do need that audience participation. But you can tell people the truth that “I do a lot better with this presentation when I’m seeing you.” And you will do a lot better when you’re seeing each other.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Now I’m going to show you a little bit about the presenter tools that are available to you in PowerPoint. I work primarily in PowerPoint. I do know that Google slides has some measure of interactivity as well as keynote, but this part of the presentation is going to deal just with PowerPoint.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: And there are things that you can do in PowerPoint while you are presenting, that will make a difference in how people are viewing you. What I’ve done here is a very simple animation, which is just a couple of shapes on that. Fade in, fade out in this side, it just, there’s a purple shape that fades in and fades out.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: And on this side, there’s an orange shape that continually appears from the bottom up. So it looks like flame looks like something a lot cooler than it really is. And it is very easy to do. Another thing you are observing is that I am using my pen tool and I have a mouse and not a tablet. So that’s why it looks like a drunken chimpanzee just wrote that, but it is a pen tool and it does give you some measure of movement on the screen.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Here you see the value of having slide titles, which I do not because I’ve got slide 15. So that’s not very helpful on the PC version. It’s a lot better because it gives you a slide, do so you can jump from one side to another. I have these different options here, so I’ve got my, I can erase what I wrote here by clicking on erase pen.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: And I’ve got other things like a laser pointer. So just like a regular laser pointer would, is a little dot and you can point at things and show them so that you’re focusing in focusing attention on different things. I like to use the pen tool because it stays there and it’s easier for me to highlight things.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: And right now I’m just, I’m right. Clicking and left, clicking to get the pen to work. And I’m right. Clicking to get these options to work. Again, these would be different depending on if you’re on a PC or a tablet or what slide presentation tool you’re using. But I did want to do this quick little demo so that you can see that there is more to showing slides than just showing static slides and you can [00:39:00] doodle on it and you can do all kinds of things to point attention to different parts of your side using these tools.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: This is what the, this is a screenshot from a PC. And this is the thing I was telling you about that has the slide sorter view that you can have all of the slides. You can jump from one to another. There’s this magnifying tool. If you want it to zoom in on specific parts of your presentation, that functionality just sadly is not available on a Mac.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Does anybody have any questions about that brief demonstration before I continue? 

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Yup. Sorry for the technical issues. Yup. So we’re almost done. No, please stick with me because it’s going to work out and if you don’t, if you have to drop off, that’s fine.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Thank you for being here. You can catch the tail end of the presentation on the recording, knowing your meeting platform is so very important because there are so [00:40:00] many of them and the meeting platform that you are comfortable with might not necessarily be the one that you have to use. These are just eight out of the.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: I don’t know how many there are. I know there are a lot more than eight, but these are the only eight that I’ve used. And the way that you get comfortable with these meeting platforms is to practice using them, practice by yourself. Or maybe you can get some colleagues to sit in and help you to workshop your presentation.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: If you’re not the meeting host, then it is not necessarily a problem because usually they will offer you some practice sessions, which you should always take. Even if you’ve given this presentation a million times, even if you are in a zoom pro, if suddenly you are hooked, up with a Go To Meeting or go to webinar, then you want to practice with that tool so that you come across as someone who knows what they’re talking about.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Sometimes you can even download a trial version of that software so that you can play around with it by yourself. If there isn’t enough time for a practice session, or if you think you need a little more practice after that one session, you are looking for ways to break the software. You are trying to figure out how things could go wrong and what you can do to counteract that.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: And you want to involve your hosts really early on. Don’t show up 10 minutes before the meeting and say, Hey, I’ve never used Microsoft teams before. So what’s this all about do your homework. And in case it wasn’t clear, it’s practicing. That’s going to get you better practice, but we’re not perfect.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: We’re not all TV presenters. We were just thrust into that role last year. Don’t worry if you’re the bestest presenter in the whole wide. Just being enthusiastic and sincere one. And that can overcome any small obstacles that the tech can throw your way, because we are a little pressed for time. I’m going to defer this slide to the end for our Q and A session.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: But I did want to talk about the things that you are not supposed to do during your presentations technical things that you can do in an re in an in-person meeting. Don’t often work remotely video can sometimes work. Whoops, sorry. Video can work depending on the bandwidth of your your system and that of the people who are watching.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Same thing for audio, you can have prerecorded audio just don’t expect it to be the same experience for everybody. Complex animations and slide transitions take a lot longer than sharp jump cuts. Like they, a fade transition takes longer than just a no transition. And that again, if someone’s at a low bandwidth, a hookup then complex animations are going to look really jaggy and jumping the five frames ahead.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: So do be mindful of the super complex and flowing animation that you can do in person might not necessarily work if you’re doing it remotely. And also remember that one way communication is so boring. That’s why I always like to involve another voice in the presentation, such as sill here to ask questions, to move conversations along.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: We we want the, other voice coming in and we also want the audience to be able to talk with us, whether it’s through. Or if it’s possible on Mike, not if it’s Greg’s situation of hundreds of participants, of course, but we do want to try to get some way to reach out and communicate with that audience.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: I wanted to leave you with a couple of very quick slide makeovers, which is also important. You don’t want to have a slide. That’s got so much information crammed in it that people don’t know what to do with it or this just so barf, ugly. They don’t want to pay attention to it as any of you ever seen slides that look like that, raise your hands high.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: It’s a sad truth that a lot of people don’t know how to do slide design, and sometimes your enthusiasm can overcome the bad design, but why work harder? We’re going to talk very briefly about side design. Present one idea per slide. That is, if you forget everything else about slide design, remember this one idea per slide, because that will help you to create uncluttered slides [00:45:00] here.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: We’ve got several ideas on a slide. I’m going to concentrate on just this one statistic here. Men’s baseball, because really we’ve got statistics about baseball, basketball, football. We’ve got how many people, how many go up to NCAA, how many are drafted? And then we go way back to percentage of pro and then the success ratio.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: So we’re giving people a lot of different ways to look at the same information. And I don’t want people to work that hard. I’m going to create a new slide using just a men’s baseball information and not all of the rest that can be on two other slides. We change it from a table to a. Because graphs are easy to read quickly.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: I’ll be quiet. So you can quickly read that 0.14%. How many of these high school players make it to the big leagues? Not many [00:46:00] big red statistic, red meaning bad or warning or negativity. That is a big failure rate. And visually that red failure rate outweighs that tiny sliver of green, which is a visual way of showing the same information that’s in that graph.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Next, this is from a presentation that is supposed to inspire people to join the Coast Guard Auxiliary. But if I were in this audience, I would say, wow, I get to be an old guy putting around the Harbor with a whole bunch of other old guys. That sounds like fun. There’s some interesting information here, but visually it just looks like most boring little thing in the world.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: How about that? That’s not boring. That’s exciting. That is another Coast Guard Auxiliary picture. That is a lot more interesting than this little guy here. It’s a dramatic picture [00:47:00] and it’s really big. The title asks a question and the text answers the question to get the rest of the information from that original slide.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: See, I just used the original, the first question here, and my next slide would be another answer. So this is a lot more visually engaging than the. I’ll be quiet for a moment. So you can look at that.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Why they decided an old concrete high-rise would be a wonderful illustration of this, these different software packages or rather support stage packages. I have no idea, but there’s a lot to read. It’s boring topography, meaning who just got green and black and it’s a nonsensical image. Instead we bring out what’s important.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Remember we focus on benefits. The benefits are not that we have these things, but that we support you at every stage of your growth. Boom boom, They come in on a click and you speak to them as they come in at the speed that you want to, address them. People get the information at the rate that you set.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Going to defer questions to the very, very end, because we are just about done and we have covered a lot of ground today. We talked about these six ways to rock your remote presentations, and I’ve given you some ideas on how to make your remote presenting a little bit more entertaining and interactive.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Why would you do that? So you can engage with your online audience, giving them and you a better experience. And now that you have all that information, it is time for you to start rocking those remote presentations. 

Marketing Solutionist #NIMLive Founder Suzanne McDonald: Laura this is fantastic. And I really appreciate you taking the time to share your wisdom with us. 

Marketing Solutionist #NIMLive Founder Suzanne McDonald: So if you still have questions, and meanwhile give people the opportunity to continue the conversation. These opportunities are so rare.

Craig: I just want to add this has all been great, but one of the benefits of remote conversation remote meetings is also that sometimes people don’t have to pay close attention to what you’re saying the whole time. And I’ve been on many meetings where I was doing something else in the background, and I was listening with one ear and then I heard something five minutes out of the hour was relevant.

Craig: A hundred percent engagement with everyone all the time is not necessarily the goal. 

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: That’s very true, Craig. When I’m talking about the importance of engaging with a cust with a an audience, I’m usually thinking of the standpoint that I, the presenter am trying to achieve a goal.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: And in this case, I’m trying to make sure my audience learns something. In other cases, it might be, I want you to buy something, or I want you to change a habit. Whatever the goal is that would really drive how much engagement you want back from the audience.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: If it’s the other hand, like you were saying, Craig, an all hands meeting where it’s just bla till they get to your department, then absolutely. That’s a great way to use your time while you’re waiting for your part of the meeting without being just super overtly rude in the audience, doing this until it’s time for the person to talk to you.

Presentation Expert Laura Foley: That’s a great point.

[00:50:37] Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Nope, Barbara. I have to say it was so fun watching your reactions. I got the screens that everyone was showing and you’re just laughing and smiling and nodding. So you are the ideal audience member and you would make an ideal plant. If you’re, if a friend of yours is giving a presentation and you’re the person that they can count on.

[00:50:57] Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Thank you. This was [00:51:00] extremely valuable. Oh good. No as a former classroom teacher in English and in technology, of course my students were much more engaged with their computers, then an English class, to be honest. Yeah, this is wonderful. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Suzanne, for organizing.

[00:51:23] Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Thank you. 

[00:51:24] Marketing Solutionist #NIMLive Founder Suzanne McDonald: Craig, thank you so much for, and Leanne, thank you so much for chiming in really appreciated your insights as well.

[00:51:32] Presentation Expert Laura Foley: Last year I was presenting at a conference where they had a word cloud in there, their bag of tricks. And it was fantastic because I could gauge how many people understood that I was going to talk about at the beginning. And then at the end, how many people now feel better about what I talked about?

[00:51:49] Presentation Expert Laura Foley: And you could very visibly see that people were more confident at the end and a lot less nervous that they were.

[00:51:56] Leeanne: That’s a great use of it, the beginning and then the, [00:52:00] then afterwards, before and after picture. And I absolutely like your idea of what do you want to talk about next because that’s excellent information for everybody, the organizer, the presenter, and gives the audience a chance to chime in on, Hey, I really don’t like playing video games while I’m at meetings, but you leave me no choice.

[00:52:20] Craig: I’ve had good luck. In the past I was using WebEx where you could do a poll easily, and I need to learn how to do that with zoom, but I was doing a series of, training sessions and I wanted to get feedback about whether I was going too fast or too slow, or just about right. And whether I was explaining things too much or not, as well as what was useful to you and how relevant this wasn’t so on.

[00:52:45] Craig: I found it was extremely helpful to have that feedback. For example, I always felt that I was explaining things too much and going too slow. And one person said that I was ever.

[00:52:56] Craig: Something I saw someone used with great effect was [00:53:00] a link that she put into the chat for a very quick Google form.

[00:53:06] Craig: And she was delivering a speech and she wanted feedback on how her speech was received. So she put that link in there and it was brief like one minute. There were five different sliding scales of one to five and then one fill in the blank, making it extremely easy for not only for people to give her the input, but also easy for her to aggregate it and see it in one place after she’d gotten a number of people to respond.

[00:53:37] Craig: Great idea and not a 10- page form. No, I don’t. I’ve I’m sure you’ve done this, too. Is that people ask for feedback or take this quick survey and it’s five screens on six screens — brutal. I don’t care about your product that much. 

[00:53:54] Marketing Solutionist #NIMLive Founder Suzanne McDonald: To Craig’s point is a lot of times if I’m logging on, if I’m [00:54:00] not sharing my screen, I don’t really want to be called on. I have a crying kid in the background something else is going on and I’ve logged off of webinars for that reason. You need to be realistic about people’s attention spans.