Marc and I were getting ready to present recently, on Zoom, as so many of us do these days. We were planning our 60-minute talk about a certain facet of marketing; how to write a blog that will both interest your Reader and still attract new ones. We also wanted to cover how to illustrate and emphasize certain aspects of your blog to help it attract more attention on-line. We decided that Marc would conduct an interview, tossing me softballs to slam, given that I am the one who has clearly been infected with the blog-writing bug; I often write two of them a week, and have been known to turn out five in as many days.
PowerPoints are the go-to tool for presentations. Shortly after our meeting to discuss the substance of our webinar, Marc sent me a PowerPoint which he proposed to use during our presentation to review.
He had created a beautiful and powerful PowerPoint. However, my reaction was “It’s a non-starter.” Here is the problem: people are more interested in watching other people's faces and gestures, than they are in watching pretty PowerPoint slides and, unfortunately, we would not be live in the room with them so that they could still do that while the PowerPoint plays on the big screen at the front of the room.
Instead, in Zoom, faces become teeny tiny when a PowerPoint dominates the screen. Even more disastrous, most people presenting in Zoom tend to forget when they leave the PowerPoint slide up on the screen while they continue to talk to their audience. How many times have you attended a webinar in which one of the attendees finally asked the presenter to take down whatever he was sharing on screen?
I had to explain to Marc why I was uncomfortable with the idea of using his lovely PowerPoint. Thankfully, he was understanding. He suggested that we share the PowerPoint after the fact with everyone who attended. This is a wonderful way to capture the audience’s attention and reinforce their understanding going forward. An unexpected value add!
I hope sharing my thoughts was insightful and productive. Please share your own ideas with me at Joryn@JorynJenkins.com. The more we share our collaborative marketing stories, the closer we come to making this approach the preferred practice in the State of Florida. And we are leading the collaborative way in these United States!
I disagree. I like to hear it and see it. Need to engage both senses or I am likely to lose interest. To the old expression, a picture is worth 1000 words, I might add, but sometimes it still needs an explanation. That speaks to me wanting to hear and see. Prefer the power point with little, tiny presenters if they take the slides down when it comes to just conversation. Sometimes, I agree PowerPoint is ineffective especially if you are doing a role play. But PowerPoint can come first with facts, etc., and then do the role play.
Interesting topic! I am a note taker and when the info presented is dense, I find it helpful to take a screen shot of a power point slide when it contains more info than I can easily capture otherwise. When the info is not as complex/dense, a power point feels more static.