At the heart of every great presentation is a skilled presenter. Great presenters are storytellers. And because audiences need more than slides, they tell stories with powerful interpersonal communication tools, like gestures, posture, and facial expressions. Great presenters know we’re wired for body language.

But in the digital age we have fewer opportunities to connect with our audiences on a personal level. We increasingly use online presentations, webinars, and meeting tools, which often fail to capture the body language and personality of the speaker.

The result? They fall flat, failing to take full advantage of the power of personality and storytelling that a good presenter offers to a live audience.

So what’s a content marketer to do?

1. Fully exploit video

The “disembodied voice” approach to online presentations needs to evolve. Audio-only online presentations — from webinars to online meetings, from voiced-over sales decks to screen-sharing tools — are popular. But this popularity comes at a cost: Most online presentations lack personality and effectiveness.

An audio-only online presentation is handicapped right from the start, as the medium robs the speaker of many of the visual communication tools that are available to a live presenter. No eye contact. No smile. No confident stance.

Put your best foot forward and deliver more “you” with online presentation tools that use video, not just audio.

Take a look, for example, at this online presentation from Australis Aquaculture. Pairing the CEO with an energetic product manager to tell the story of sustainable seafood, and sprinkling it with b-roll video, helps move the story along and personalizes the message.

2. Plan your presentation with online distribution in mind

So often, presentations are designed for a live event with digital capture and distribution as an afterthought. Of course you’ll send the slides after the presentation… but with no presenter, will your message seem out of context and your points be lost on your post-live audience? Capture your presenter live alongside your deck in all their hand-waving, storytelling glory and you’ll increase your chances that your audience will connect with the on-demand version of your insight.

Once the multimedia team at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise started looking around, for example, they quickly found that potential content marketing material was all around them. This keynote address by President Tom Burns, for example, was quickly turned into enduring online content that continues to work well as a demand generation and lead nurturing effort long after the live presentation has faded into memory.

3. Understand your goals — and the goals of your audience

By attempting to satisfy both your organizational goals and those of your audience, you can dramatically improve the effectiveness of your online presentation. Think about all your possible objectives for creating an online video presentation — and why your audience would sit through it. You may be looking to establish thought leadership and capture leads, or it could be that developing a fabulous online presentation is the key to your viral branding strategy. But what’s in it for them? Your audience has no interest in becoming your lead, but would love to evaluate your expertise and learn something new. When you hit the jackpot and exchange value, your presentation naturally becomes more personal.

International consulting firm Parthenon Group, for example, produces a series of thought leadership presentations by its chief economist, Roger Brinner, that directly addresses key client and prospect anxieties about the state of the economy. Brinner’s quiet authority comes through clearly in these video presentations, in a way that it simply would not using audio-narrated slides.

4. Move beyond PowerPoint by including a range of existing digital content types

Adding video to your online PowerPoint presentations will transform their effectiveness. But consider all the other great content you already have. Online video presentation tools that are on the market allow you to also pull in rich text, animations, ads, JavaScript applets, images, and more for an unique interactive experience. Your audience will thank you for not boring them with the same old flat slides. Just about anything you can render on your website can now be incorporated in an online video presentation. Get creative, save time, save money, and extend the life of all that content you worked so hard to develop.

New online presentation platforms allow live web pages to be synchronized into a presentation or webinar, for example. This is perfect for taking polls and displaying real-time results, or even for taking orders right in the presentation window.

5. Look for powerful, flexible online presentations tools, but start with what’s simple

Luckily, today’s most advanced online presentation platforms don’t stop at video synchronization. They further enhance the experience by providing just-in-time footnotes, virtual handouts, calls-to-action, forms, quizzes, surveys, interactive transcripts, and other tools as part of the entire interactive experience. And they augment that experience with powerful analytics that show how the presentation material is being interacted with. We’ve built all that capability into KnowledgeVision, but other platforms will undoubtedly be adding some of these features in the future, as well.

Most importantly, don’t get overwhelmed by trying to do too much, too early. Start simply, getting your bearings with basic, on-demand video presentations and adding powerful features and even moving to live streaming later on. It really is easier than ever to create video presentations for an online, 24/7, anytime/ anywhere world.

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a little tired of the “disembodied voice” approach to online presentations.  Whether it’s through webinars or online meetings or voiced-over sales decks, there’s no denying that the audio-only, narrated online presentation has started to gain traction.  But this popularity comes at a cost: most online presentations, to be blunt, lack personality.

Think back over the last couple of years to the most memorable and impactful presentations you’ve seen.  And if you haven’t seen any lately, go to www.ted.com and take in a couple of the so-called “TED Talks”.  Or reflect on some of the great lectures you might have seen in college.  Or look at what Steve Jobs does with his product launch presentations.  Great presentations are, at their core, performance art, augmented by the power of illustration in the form of powerful images and provocative text.  Great presenters are storytellers, and they tell those stories with every tool they have – with the inflection of their voice, with their gestures, with their facial expressions, with the images they show, and with the useful handouts they pass around.

An audio-only,  voiced-over online presentation is handicapped right from the start, because the speaker is denied many of the visual communication tools that are available to a live presenter.  What’s more, presentation narrators often compound the problem by reading from a script, further stripping the personality from the experience.

While narrated presentations certainly have their place as a quick-and-dirty tool in an online communications portfolio, they are hardly the way to put a company’s best foot forward – especially with an organization’s best communicators.

Fortunately, online video presentation tools like KnowledgeVision are now emerging that are easy, affordable, and powerful.  And I’m not talking about just dropping video clips into a presentation; I’m talking about a fully-synchronized reproduction of a presentation experience, with all the body language and nuance of the storyteller.  Take a look at this 6-minute example of an online video presentation and I think you’ll see what I mean.

Too expensive to produce?  Hardly.  At a time when most teenagers know how to create and upload video clips to YouTube, video capture and uploading skills are everywhere you look.  And the best video online presentation platforms can create quite serviceable “ad-hoc” presentations right from a webcam, plugged into your computer’s USB port.  Video online presentations can be produced in literally minutes from any computer, anywhere an internet connection can be found, with no special equipment.

Today’s most advanced online presentation platforms don’t stop at video synchronization, though.  They further enhance the experience by providing just-in-time footnotes, virtual handouts, calls to action, forms, quizzes, surveys, interactive transcripts, and other tools as part of the entire interactive experience.  And they augment that experience with powerful analytics that show how the presentation material is being viewed and interacted with.

Will this spell the end of audio-only narrated presentations?  Hardly.  Both narrated presentations and fully-synchronized video presentations have a place in a company’s communications portfolio at every level – from the corporate communications and training departments to product managers and sales reps.  And now that both capabilities can be found in a single flexible tool, there’s no reason not to spread that capability widely in an organization.

Some of Adam Gold’s points are well-worn and familiar.  Too many bullets on lecture slides.  The need for more provocative imagery.  Professors getting lazy, reading off the slides.  Even a question about why students should bother going to class if the essential points of the lecture are spelled out in PowerPoint bullets and posted online.

Another set of observations got our attention, though, because it goes to the heart of our beliefs about why online presentations need to be multimedia and multisensory:

A well-designed slide deck still needs a dynamic presenter to make the lecture effective. Far too often, lectures are conducted in darkness to help students see the slides, when ideally the lecturer should be well lit, as it is his or her body language and gestures which should help connect the slides to the speech contentcontent of their words.

This insight goes to the essence of why online presentations need in many cases to supplement PowerPoint with video: when you’ve got a presenter who’s full of stories and knows how to tell them not just with words but with gestures and expressions, you’re giving the viewer a much richer and more memorable experience.  And that’s what gets results — whether it’s learning in a classroom or marketing a product.

Too often, we’re seeing online presentations passed around with what might be called the “Brainshark drone” — that is, with an audio-only narrator who sounds bored to tears.  Can you imagine a TED Talk delivered on such an audio-only platform?

Online presentations have the ability to unleash the full storytelling power of subject-matter experts, product innovators, and yes, even Harvard professors, and allow them to transcend the bounds of time and space.  Take a look, for example, at this KnowledgeVision presentation given jointly by a Harvard dean (Cherry Murray) and an MIT Visiting Scientist (Richard Sears), recounting their time serving on the President’s Commission on the BP Deepwater Oil Spill.  The story they tell about learning the news about the oil rig explosion, the call from the White House, the team that was assembled, and boring in to the root causes of the disaster is compelling, and the combination of their physical presence with the intriguing imagery that illustrates their talk makes for a riveting and educational hour.

In his Crimson column, Mr. Gold is careful to point out that there are many very effective users of PowerPoint on the Harvard faculty.  He points, for example, to Lawrence Lessig’s technique of “rifling quickly through hundreds of slides, each containing only one idea or phrase to punctuate his prepared speech.”

“Harvard has so many presenters who truly understand the strengths and limitations of PowerPoint,” Gold concludes, “that the few who get it wrong look especially bad by comparison.”

Today, the technology exists to break the bounds of time and place and spread the work of these great presenters throughout the world and across the ages.  And as that happens, these voices and storytellers may well begin crowding out those who use new multimedia platforms less effectively…or not at all.

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Note: We’ve started collecting articles and books about great presentation technique, and encourage you to visit that collection under “Fresh Ideas” on the KnowledgeVision.com website.

Irony of ironies: Motorola's Xoom website cannot be browsed on an iPad because of Apple's iOS Flash ban

UPDATE (2/24): The Motorola Xoom had its first commercial release on February 24, 2011, and those who were looking for a quick fix to the lack of Adobe Flash on tablets suffered an instant letdown, as the tablet-oriented update to Flash didn’t make it in time for the release.  So Xoom buyers will need to wait a few more weeks to see if Android 3.0 does, indeed, deliver the “full web experience” and, over time, liberate content creators from Apple’s forced march.

The picture on the left says it all, doesn’t it? It’s a screen shot of the Motorola Xoom website, as seen on an iPad. With the launch of the Android 3.0-enabled Xoom rumored to be a week away, the Flash-on-tablets argument is poised to flare yet again.

The verdict from the Safari browser on the iPad – the browser touted by Steve Jobs as giving the “best browsing experience ever created?”

“To view this content you’ll need to install the latest version of the Adobe Flash Player.“

But…but…

This is the moment when push really does come to shove. After a year of making thousands of internet content creators and website owners’ hair turn grey and forcing them to face up to tens of millions of dollars in unnecessary development, we’ll finally see whether Apple will stick to its anti-Flash guns in the face of stiff new competition.

The issue, of course, is Apple’s refusal to support Adobe Flash in its iPad and iPhone web browsers. A year after Apple told content creators that they might as well get with the program and reject Flash on their websites, we encounter “broken” content dozens of times a day as we browse the web on an iPad. It’s frustrating. It’s anti-user. And it’s wrong.

Yes, we’ve read and re-read Steve Jobs’ self-righteous defense of the decision. Flash is buggy, it chews battery life, and it’s not an open standard. If that were really a legitimate basis for slamming the door on would-be enhancements, then there are dozens of iPhone apps that should have been banned a long time ago.

We still view Apple’s stance for what it really is: a power play that attempts to turn the market away from a powerful rival.

We believe that Apple will eventually need to soften its stance, as the iPad begins to stand alone among tablet devices – and not in a positive way. Apple has a history of digging its heels in and then backing off: Motorola vs. Intel chips, Macintosh file interoperability, three-letter file extensions, etc. But in the meantime, what’s a content creator to do?

Over the last few months, I’ve talked with dozens of content creators who are throwing up their hands, since they’ve made huge investments in interactive Flash-based content. A great example of this is the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, which has spent hundreds of thousands of generously donated dollars creating some remarkable interactive safety training courses that are critical to educating today’s general aviation pilots. These courses don’t work on the iPad, which would be a terrific place for them to be consumed.

Should AOPA relent and re-create its courses on HTML5? At this point, that’s hardly an option: there is not yet an interactive media application development environment that measures up to Adobe Flash and Flex. So instead, AOPA needs to tell potential students to go consume their courses on a desktop computer…unless they’re lucky enough to have an Android tablet (their courses work like a champ there!).

At KnowledgeVision, we have faced a similar dilemma. In order to preserve animations in our clients’ PowerPoint presentations, we convert each animated PowerPoint slide to a Flash movie. It’s a great way to create an engaging viewer experience that’s faithful to the original presentation. And for more than 98% of all viewers who have Flash installed on their computers, it works great.

But there’s not a way to convert these animations to HTML5 yet, since there is not yet an established HTML5 animation standard or platform that comes close to Adobe Flash.

So until Apple comes to its senses and supports Adobe Flash for iOS devices, we and thousands of other content and platform creators had to come up with an interim, special-case solution for iPad. In our case, it’s a “smart” player that offers to launch an HTML5 player when it encounters an iPad browser. It doesn’t – and can’t – have all the neat features that are available to desktop or Android viewers, but is certainly a workable experience. (See a sneak peek here.) And iPhone/iPod Touch visitors are still out of luck because Apple doesn’t support embedded video with their iPhone browser.

This is progress?

In every other way, the iPad is a terrific piece of technology and an incredible tool. But Apple’s anti-Flash stance is patently anti-content community and anti-user. We’re proud of the workaround we’re releasing formally next week, but consider it entirely unnecessary.

Illegible slide text, amateurish camerawork, and even a banner ad obscuring some of the data: is this any way to present an important corporate message?

It was an ironic, almost surreal experience to watch the online on-demand version of the “State of Online Video” — a talk given by ComScore’s Dan Piech at the Online Marketing/Media/Advertising (OMMA) conference.  On the one hand, the data and insights Dan presents are uplifting and exciting about the further growth of online video.  On the other hand, the experience also showed how very far online video has to go, for the online version of the presentation was embarrassingly poor.  It’s one of those situations where the content is intriguing but the medium makes it virtually unwatchable.

In other words, the medium gets in the way of the message, big-time.

Several problems were immediately apparent:

• Because the video is distributed on the free UStream service, it’s constantly interrupted by ads — at best diverting attention, but often obscuring the content on the slides
• The video is streamed at a resolution that is too low to be able to read the slides
• Some of the slides have details too small to be viewed on video at any resolution
• The camerawork is amateurish

It’s beyond comprehension why a company like ComScore would allow itself to be represented like this — ESPECIALLY when talking about online video to a sophisticated audience that’s interested in online video.

True, the folks at ComScore probably just taking the feed that OMMA gave them, but if you’ve got an important message that is going to be viewed again and again on your website, why not take the hour to recreate the presentation specifically for your website using an online presentation platform?  Now, all the slides would be super-crisp, the presenter would always be in view, and ComScore could put footnotes and links in strategic places to encourage viewers to look up ComScore reports and advisory services that give more information to back up the summary statistics presented on the screen.

Hopefully, 2011 will be a year in which companies learn not to “just settle” for UStream/YouTube quality video presentations, and “up” their game.

I was impressed by the fact that the White House took this kind of approach.  But at the same time, I was disappointed that they didn’t go further.  And it was impossible for me, as an online multimedia presentation creator, to resist speculating how they could — and should — improve it next time.  And the good news is that with a modern online presentation platform like KnowledgeVision and its tools, they could do so without breaking the bank — our small contribution to reducing the federal deficit.

Interestingly, the Republicans, too, have thus far missed an opportunity to do their own enhanced State of the Union response using this new online presentation medium.

Breaking down the “enhancements” to the State of the Union online experience (and treating this entirely as a non-partisan analytical exercise), here’s the list of what’s there:

• The video of the president’s speech, of course, from entrance to final applause (just over 1 hour 7 minutes);
• A panel that occasionally contains graphics illustrating a point in the president’s speech — most often, infographics and charts (see illustration);
• A call-to-action panel that asks for your email address, promising “updates from President Obama and other federal officials”;
• A follow-up panel displaying a calendar of post-address live online events and, after the fact, videos of those online events;
• A video “Inside the White House” featurette telling the history of the State of the Union Address;
• A promo for a White House iPhone app;
• A neat little Flash app that shows who’s sitting with the First Lady (ironically this doesn’t work on the iPhone or iPad);
• A little rotating “fun facts” box; and
• Several social media buttons and viewers.

So there are lots of things to do further down the page if you’re tired of looking at the president.  But as an informational experience, this Enhance State of the Union experience doesn’t work as hard for the viewer as it could.

Here are some of the things they could have done to truly enhance the address, but didn’t:

• First and foremost, there should have been a way to navigate through different parts of his speech.  This speech, like all State of the Union addresses, was highly structured: an education section, an economy section, a foreign policy section, etc.  With all due respect to the President, it would be unusual to someone to sit through the whole speech on-demand.  And they certainly would want to skip the six-minute entrance ritual before the president utters even a word.  My advice: lay out the sections of the speech in a navigation panel…and even put a search box in that would allow people to search for specific items (e.g. “Pell Grants”) and find what he says about that, in context.
• Second, the White House might have avoided squeezing the infographics into a YouTube screen, but instead separate it out into a high-resolution side-by-side experience.  When you compress PowerPoint to video, it’s incredibly inefficient.  And when a viewer’s internet connection isn’t fast enough, the slides become illegible (see the screen grab to the right, which was taken from the low-bandwidth version of the video).  PowerPoint slides are incredibly efficient to transmit in a crisp, clean way if they’re converted to vector graphics — even at low bandwidth.  And tools like KnowledgeVision do that automatically.
  

  At low bandwidth settings, the "enhancements" on the right of the screen become virtually illegible. This is typical when trying to render PowerPoint into a video stream; KnowledgeVision fixes this problem.

• Third, they could have offered just-in-time footnotes to reinforce and document the president’s points.  When he cites a federal study, offer a link to it.  When he talks about a law, give us the chance to click through to its language.  When he talks about a historic news event, give us a chance to bookmark a search of news articles about that event, so we can go back and explore it later.

I could go on, but the key thing here is that the White House missed some important opportunities to truly enhance the State of the Union address as an informative and educational experience for online viewers.  And especially because it lives on as an on-demand event, the ability to navigate around, find sections, drill down into references, and bookmark are especially valuable.

It’s great to see the White House taking the first baby steps toward building an interactive online experience around one of the most important presentations the nation views each year.  By next year’s SOTU, the bar will be raised around what an enhanced online presentation can really deliver — in terms of viewer navigation, just-in-time footnoting, high-resolution synchronized images and more.  And that will make these online, on-line presentations truly different and valuable in their own right.

In the meantime, though, one could easily imagine a radically different — and enhanced — kind of Republican response to the SOTU — one that takes the president’s speech, adds PowerPoint slides and footnotes with, shall we say, a different set of counter-facts and references.  Putting Congressman Paul Ryan up in front of a camera with a generalized rebuttal is one thing, but countering the president’s speech with detailed data — mapped to the moment and backed up with detailed, data-driven counterproposals — would be quite different and very powerful.  Put another way, online presentations can be used to both powerfully reinforce and rebut a traditional video message.

By taking that first step into online presentations to deliver important messages on the national agenda, the White House has opened a valuable new chapter in online communications.  It will be interesting to see if they’ve also opened Pandora’s box.

For me, the experience is all too fresh in my mind, since this month we successfully closed the first $2 million venture capital financing for KnowledgeVision Systems. And there was a little extra pressure on us, because our company is all about tools to help people present better and to reinvent the business presentation for an online, on-demand world. My four-month fundraising presentation marathon drew on everything I’d learned from a career as a journalist, a columnist, an executive, and a documentary filmmaker. Yet, curiously, I found myself, early on, making rookie mistakes that are embarrassing in retrospect.

There is an asymmetry in the world of entrepreneurial finance: while in an entire career an entrepreneur might only have an opportunity to pitch a handful of companies and ideas, the audiences are viewing dozens of pitches every month. The audiences have seen it all before; the entrepreneurs, by and large, have never done it before. The best ideas may well be forever buried by a clumsy presentation.

Many venture capitalists and angel investment groups recognize this, and have taken to gentle coaching of entrepreneurs, sharing advice on how best to present to them. Mind you, this does not spring from a sense of sudden generosity on these financial gatekeepers: many actually are relieved to have an excuse to say “no”, as they must to more than 95% of the pitches they see. It is doubtless also motivated to preserving their own sanity as they watch the endless parade of hopefuls ramble through their presentations…wondering if there’s a pony in there somewhere.

So here, with the blessing of 20-20 hindsight and the relief of an entrepreneur who made it through the gauntlet, is my favorite advice from leading venture capitalists about successful fundraising presentations:

The team at Highland Capital Partners reminds us that it’s as important to understand what you’re not selling as what you are.

“You are not selling your products, technology or assets. What you are selling is your stock and the opportunity for us to join you in a business partnership. To accomplish this you need to demonstrate not how great your product is, but how great your team is, and how well it’s suited to the project you are undertaking. In short, your job is to offer a convincing story about who you are, what you have accomplished so far, and what you plan to do.”

The Highland team also suggests that you be willing to ask questions of the firm, too. After all, a venture capital relationship is a partnership and you’d better know what you’re getting into.

YCombinator co-founder Paul Graham counsels that it’s better to describe your product or idea in a narrow way and resist the temptation to paint all the possibilities for the product.

Your primary goal is not to describe everything your system might one day become, but simply to convince investors you’re worth talking to further. So approach this like an algorithm that gets the right answer by successive approximations. Begin with a description that’s gripping but perhaps overly narrow, then flesh it out to the extent you can.

Guy Kawasaki talks about how to interpret the secret language of venture capitalists, and the “Top Ten Lies of Venture Capitalists”. His account is a riveting tale of VC’s who string entrepreneurs along because “there is no upside to communicating a negative decision” and the eternally optimistic entrepreneur, who, “if they don’t hear a conclusive no, assume the answer is yes.”

Draper Fisher Jervetson Managing Director Warren Packard urges in a video on the firm’s website that entrepreneurs stress points of uniqueness for their ideas, but that they do it within the firm’s particular framework.

“You need to do your research on what markets they’re pursuing, how much risk they’re willing to take.”

DFJ offers entrepreneurs a useful checklist of the items that should go into an investor presentation and business plan.

Ben Yoskovitz, a founding partner at Year One Labs, advises that you need to “tell your story quick”. He points out that you have a captive audience when you pitch to investors, but they won’t stay captive for very long unless you set the hook early.

To-date I’ve seen two things that keep investors’ early attention on you versus their Blackberrys:

1. An entertaining story on the problem you’re solving
2. An entertaining story on the founders and how the company came together

Both of these points are about putting some context and relevancy on the upcoming pitch and discussion. If you make the problem feel real and explain it in an entertaining way it’s going to resonate much more strongly with investors.

To all of this insight, I would simply add that you should remember always that you a storyteller. And it’s important to remember that how you tell the story is just as important as the substance of the story you tell. In contrast to your presentations to customers or to professional conferences, your audience is sizing you up as much as they’re sizing up the business opportunity.

A final thing to realize is that there are a lot of invisible players in the audience in addition to those who are actually in the room. For every person who’s hearing you first-hand, there are probably several who will be hearing about you and your company second-hand from those who attended the live presentation.

The challenge of arming your audience to retell your story accurately and powerfully is an important one, and not always easy.  The more clever your PowerPoint deck in the live presentation, the more difficult it can be to decipher when it’s handed around.  Part of the answer is to arm your audience with powerful catch-phrases (ours was “reinvent the business presentation for an online, on-demand world”) that will stick in their minds, particularly with repetition. But we also had a secret weapon, which was our own product, KnowledgeVision. KnowledgeVision is a way of recreating an on-demand version of a live presentation, and making it easy to pass it along to those who weren’t in the room. And we know for certain that the KnowledgeVision version of our investor pitch was viewed 3-4 times more than the number of people who were in the room at our various investor pitches. More about this “not in the room” phenomenon in a future post.

The movie shot straight into the ears, eyes, minds and hearts of millions of children in the audience, in a very intimate way.  The film captured and conveyed the sweetness of Princess Aurora, the delicious wickedness of the witch Maleficient, the affectionate goofiness of the Good Fairies and the shining goodness of the Prince.

Fast-forward to 2010.  It’s now possible to achieve a similar effect for business communications.

Presentations with OOMPH

Today, businesses can create highly interactive, online presentations that make  their people, ideas and brands alive jump off the screen into viewers’ heads and hearts.  The presentations can be viewed anytime, anywhere, from any Internet connection.

Welcome to the new era of corporate storytelling.  Say hello to “the Oomph- ies” (Online, On-demand Multimedia Presentations with Heart).

Walt Disney needed armies of highly skilled animators and a huge budget to deliver “Sleeping Beauty.”  Businesses don’t need any animators or presentation experts – or huge budgets – to deliver compelling, engaging online, on-demand presentations.

You can take advantage of standards and ubiquitous technologies such as Adobe Flash, online video platforms such as Brightcove and Ooyala, and online presentation publishing tools and platforms from companies like KnowledgeVision.  You can make use of “available materials” – the PowerPoint presentations, images, audio, video and handouts in corporate content libraries.

Eventually, all businesses will need to participate in this new world of pervasive online multimedia presentations. Viewers increasingly expect to receive presentations when they want them and where they want them. Many businesses are allocating large budgets for moving video and content assets online.  What’s missing is a strategy for weaving these content assets into compelling multimedia presentations and then delivering them online, on-demand, at scale.

Choosing an Online Presentation Platform

An Online Presentation Platform (OPP) is a set of technologies and best practices for creating compelling multimedia presentations and delivering them online, on-demand at scale.  An OPP answers questions such as the following:

• What’s the most efficient and effective way to collect my content assets?
• What’s the best, fastest and most cost-effective way to turn my static presentations into on-demand-ready presentations that take full advantage of the online medium?
• How can I ensure that my online, on-demand presentations always look and behave correctly, given the vagaries of broadband connections and the differences in viewing devices?
• Where do my live presentations – webcasts and online meetings – fit in this strategy?  How do I get more value from my investment in live presentations?
• How can I organize all my online presentations to get the most use and the most value?
• How do I control the cost of storing and managing all this stuff?
• How can I make sure that that my online presentation strategy scales with my business – and my budget?

What’s your online presentation strategy?

His statement is as true today as it was for the Cone, Foote & Fielding ad agency back in the 1960s.  In 2010, your “inventory” of people – with their ideas and expertise – is a vital part of every sale. Customers want to see the people behind the products and services they buy.  It’s the Age of Content Marketing:  Businesses provide free information and useful advice to establish trust and credibility before asking for the sale.

The Web and low-cost/no-cost publishing technologies have made it easier for prospects to “see” your people, but most companies aren’t taking full advantage of their inventory of experts. Why? The Long Tail.

A lot of expertise is trapped in PowerPoint presentations.  Getting the most value from a PowerPoint usually requires that the expert speak live in front of an audience.  On its own, the famously telegraphic PowerPoint presentation can’t convey the power of the expert, his personality, or his anecdotes and stories. The speaker must be there. Therefore, every expert presentation has high distribution costs, including the time and travel expense for the speaker and audience members. But 80% of the time distribution is not worth its cost.  This is an example of the Long Tail: there are small (niche) audiences that you would like to reach, but traditionally couldn’t afford to reach.  Combined, these niche audiences could yield significant value.

Now you can economically reach more audiences with your experts.

Using technologies like video, Adobe Flash, dynamic synchronization, advanced players, and easy-to-use online presentation publishing tools, you can create interactive, multimedia presentations that capture not only expertise but also presenters’ personalities and personal anecdotes – and even “virtualized” versions of their handouts.  We’ve eliminated the need for face-to-face, in-person contact while improving the experience for the viewer.

You can make these presentations available online, on-demand to thousands or millions of people over the Web.  You can publish the presentations on your Web page, or use Web-based online video and online presentation platforms as your publishing platform. These platforms are available in the cloud on a pay-as-you-go/SaaS basis, eliminating the need to invest in any new hardware and software.  The cost of scaling presentation distribution is usually minimal.

Now, an expert can reach 10 million people without boarding an airplane.

You can not only leverage your top experts, but also use more of your experts to reach niche audiences with niche content. And you capture expertise permanently, for infinite reuse.

For example, a US financial trading exchange is using KnowledgeVision technology to deliver live presentations of its market experts to customers and prospects around the world. The presentations are then captured and made available as on-demand presentations, on both the exchange’s Web site and affiliate sites. The result: a trusted relationship with traders, resulting in more visits, more frequent visits, and more purchases of their services.

Emerson Hospital of Concord, Mass., is using our technology to publish a collection of lectures by its clinical staff members, as part of its continuing medical education program.

What untapped value is lurking in your Long Tail?

Some of those presentations may actually work. But I’m guessing that most do not.

Why?  Because business has changed dramatically since PowerPoint (and, for that matter, Harvard Graphics and Lotus Freelance) was invented in 1984, but the business presentation hasn’t.

How Times Have Changed

Consider these trends:

• We live in an online world. Through our computer, mobile, tablet and TV screens, we’re bombarded with multimedia information that engages multiple senses.  But the typical business presentation just ping-pongs our eyes from presenter to slide and back.

• We want information when we want it, where we want it, and how we want it.  We can order custom-made blue jeans over the Web in the middle of the night. And yet, we still have to sit through canned, scheduled business presentations.

• We have less time and travel budget for face-to-face meetings, and we’re relying more on the Internet and Web for important business communications.  However, we still want to do business with people we can see and trust, particularly when making important decisions.  And yet, the traditional presentation is tied to time, place and a format that displays information not people.

• Our information consumption patterns have changed. Our attention spans are getting shorter. We fragment our attention by multi-tasking.  We’re reading Tweets, messages and blog posts, and consuming huge amounts of short-form video. And yet, most business presentations are scheduled and long – and we have to consume them all in one sitting.

• We crave personal connections and interaction, as evidenced by the popularity of social media.  And, as we have since the Stone Age, we respond to stories that include people and anecdotes. And yet, speakers still make audiences sit through impersonal presentations.  The most memorable content is often what speakers say when the slides are off – content that is lost forever.

Edward R. Tufte, author of The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, said that misuse of PowerPoint ignores the most important rule of speaking: respect your audience.  Tufte was saying that PowerPoint – “a competent slide manager and projector” – has become a substitute for a presentation, instead of a supplement.

But it’s equally disrespectful when we forget that people’s lives have changed. And it’s short-sighted if we’re hoping to sell them our products and ideas.

Bringing the Business Presentation into the Modern World

It’s time to reinvent the business presentation, and bring it into the real world.

Think about this:

• How could you take advantage of the Web’s reach and bandwidth, and technologies like video, Flash and online presentation networks to deliver rich, interactive presentations online, on-demand?

• How could you think beyond the slide to animate your people and your brand for millions of people worldwide, and create more compelling stories?

• How could you attract and keep people’s attention by letting each viewer self-serve based on his time, interest and preferences?

We have the technologies to turn the business presentation into an experience that transcends the boundaries of time, place and social conventions.

Most businesses already have the raw information available – PowerPoint presentations, video, images and so on.   You just need to think differently.  Think about the presentation as a blank canvas for painting your story, instead of a frame for words. Think multimedia and multisensory.  Finally, use technology to assemble and publish the presentation efficiently.

Some Examples

At KnowledgeVision, we’re doing this today for our customers, with some great results.

For example, we helped a businessman sell his personal jet, “sight unseen,” over the Web. The KnowledgeVision presentation provided a 360-degree view of the plane, technical specs, maintenance records, and a video tour by the owner. He said: “The KnowledgeVision video was so powerful and descriptive that the buyer didn’t feel he needed to see any more before committing to the purchase.”

Other customers have created libraries of online, on-demand presentations that capture the expertise of their most experienced and highly paid employees. The presentations capture not only the experts’ knowledge, but also their personalities, anecdotes and insights. Millions of people now receive consistent, memorable stories that establish thought leadership and trust.

What other ways can you imagine to modernize the business presentation in your organization?

Most people have a love-hate relationship with PowerPoint.  Presenters love how quickly they can put information together.  Viewers, however, are often frustrated by the slow pace and inability to get to the points that interest them the most.  In-person presentations are linear and are inherently an inefficient use of time.  And the slides alone are flat and two-dimensional.

To help minimize frustration, people creating presentations need keep in mind the perspective of the viewer.  Because it’s so easy to create a slide with bullet points, it’s very easy to put too much information on a slide for a live audience to absorb. This problem is magnified if the speaker spends too much time looking at his notes or the audience, and doesn’t maintain the best pace.

PowerPoint is a tool, and it takes practice to use it well. An accomplished presenter:

• Looks at the slides often enough to know he’s on the right one, but focuses mostly on the audience;
• Remembers that the audience is only going to get one shot to hear the remarks and view the slides at the same time; and
• Makes presentations interactive by asking questions and reacting to the body language of the audience.

Even with a fantastic speaker, PowerPoint is still a two-dimensional tool for presenting in the three-dimensional world of motion, voice and visual. PowerPoint forces an audience to try to retain the written and spoken information. But without the accompanying presentation, handouts can lose context. Twenty-five years after PowerPoint hit the scene, it’s only recently that it can be used as part of a three-dimensional solution that doesn’t require being there in person.

No, we’re not talking about hologram messages in droids just yet, but KnowledgeVision definitely solves a lot of the maddening problems that PowerPoint can create in a remote presentation. Here are a few:

• Talking to the screen. Ever watch a speaker who turns his back to the audience and reads off the slides? We turn him around and have him look at the camera, so you can watch him and see the slides at the same time in the adjacent window.
• Information overload. It’s good practice to keep the amount of information to a minimum on each slide, because the audience will listen less if it must read more. But if the audience can pause, rewind, and review the remarks and slides as often as desired, it’s not as much of a problem.
• Slides running amok. As bad as it is to watch a speaker “talk through some slides” with his back to the audience, it can be equally disastrous if he never looks at the slides, and they scoot ahead of his remarks or lag far behind. Syncing up PowerPoint and video in a KnowledgeVision presentation means that the same slide will be visible during the same portion of the video component, every time.
• Loss of body language. Most web seminars and replays give you the slides and voice.  You lose all the advantage of human body language to make or emphasize your point.  KnowledgeVision brings that back by showing the presenter, the slides and the voice, all together.

Taking your remote presentations and making them three-dimensional allows the eye to easily take in both slides and speaker, ensuring that neither is neglected by the audience. You can even be broadcast live, allowing for viewer interaction, while being recorded for later reference. Taking your presentation to 3D means being able to navigate through a presentation in a non-linear way, guaranteeing that the important facts won’t be lost on viewers who don’t wish to sit through earlier commentary.

Presentations can be viewed again and again, complete with all the necessary slides and virtual handouts to make them make sense, in sync, every time. That’s presenting in three dimensions.

Chase suggests a number of specific strategies, including:

1. Be willing to take a position on the subject, rather than simply talking around it. Committing to a position can garner respect among your peers and clients.
2. Share new ideas, instead of restating old ones. No matter what business you’re in, your customers are more sophisticated than ever before. Repackaging someone else’s idea isn’t thought leadership – it’s following someone else’s leadership entirely.
3. Focus on your niche market. Your specialist expertise is probably brimming with ideas that you assume are “old hat,” but would probably be extremely useful to your target clientele.
4. Identify markets your competition does not serve so you can. What problems do you hear about in your industry? Which of those aren’t a problem for your clients?
5. Develop your professional personality, an opportunity that we’ve previously discussed at length.

Thought leadership can have a powerful effect on the entire sales cycle, once it’s ingrained in your corporate culture. Consumers understand that you have a product or service you’d like to sell to them; you don’t have to hit them over the head with it. A mindset of providing useful, relevant information warms your customers to your other services naturally. “When they are ready to buy again you are their first port of call and they are psychologically vested in your brand already,” says branding consultant Craig Badings. It’s common knowledge that regular content keeps you present in your clients’ minds, but that’s not entirely accurate. If you’re providing rehashed content that they can find anywhere, your clients are not going to be in the habit of looking to you for new solutions.

If you are launching a thought leadership campaign, consider KnowledgeVision as a platform.It combines aspects of many of Chase’s 13 essentials, including:

• Public speaking, by synching up video and PowerPoint content much as it would be in person; and
• The personal connection forged by attaching a real face to your company.

A client of ours in the manufacturing industry uses his KnowledgeVision presentations to get his ideas out in an unforgettable way to investors. When he has a new prototype that he’s bringing to market, he creates a video that walks viewers through all of the prototype’s features from a first-person perspective, so they can picture themselves in his place as he runs through the demonstration. Alongside that video are PowerPoint slides that detail the benefits of each feature and examples of its different applications. Our client uses dynamic footnotes to include links to detailed financial and technical data for additional reading. “My investors get pitched on a lot of different ideas,” he told me, “and if they don’t get my vision right away, they’re probably going to move on to another project. I no longer worry that they didn’t grasp a prototype’s potential, because of the feedback I’ve been getting from the walk-through.”

For most large companies, getting an idea out fast often means sacrificing quality of delivery or impact.  You can send a PowerPoint deck with a script, but then you hope someone reads it.  You can send video files or a link to something streaming, but sent files clog up your email server, and good quality video takes a while to produce – not the timeliest approach. And audio – podcasts or broadcast voicemails – tend to suffer from lack of visuals and aren’t retained as well as their visual counterpart.

So we spent some time talking with him about trying out the KnowledgeVision platform to create a compelling message to worldwide staff.  KnowledgeVision makes it easy for him to communicate the changes in strategy and the overall vision, in a quality fashion that will get allow his company to get the ideas across without unreasonable production delays. The four main components of a KnowledgeVision presentation (video, images, virtual handouts, and navigation) will allow the company to mix and match to find the right balance for the message, while being mindful of timeline constraints.

The KVStudio suite of tools already makes creating a presentation a simple process, one that can be streamlined even more with strategic repurposing of existing content.  For example, he could tape the in-person presentations done at the home office and then integrate the tape of him presenting the PowerPoints into a KnowledgeVision presentation. Additional notes, links to other supporting content and even Q&A from the audience can be integrated and synched.

Voltaire once wrote, “The perfect is the enemy of the good,” reminding us that speed is a powerful market force. KnowledgeVision makes it easy to craft a nearly-perfect message quickly enough to get it out while it’s still meaningful.

1. Sincerity sells. Don’t choose a style that will stifle your passion. If the video environment is contrived, it will be obvious to your viewers that something is “off,” even if they can’t put a finger on what “it” is.
2. Watch what works. American Express’ Open Forum has a list of 12 CEOs and Founders who use web video well. See what they’re doing – not to imitate someone else, just to be inspired by other thought leaders.
3. Look around you. Do you have a dress code in your company (even an informal one)? Do the doo-dads on the desks in your office suggest a certain type of hobby or activity theme that could be leveraged? Find common elements in your company’s culture that could suggest a personality.
4. Visit clients’ offices. Just as you look at what your staff has in common, pay attention to dress and memorabilia that your clients display. Look for common elements (particularly things that aren’t work-related) among your existing clients to better understand what appeals to them as a group.
5. Walk around with a camera. You may not be the ideal “face” for your company – or you may not be the only one. Take another look at your staff through a camera’s lens while they work. You may find a new spokesperson, or you may decide that using a literal face just isn’t the way to go. People act differently when there’s a camera pointed at them; doing so in advance lets you decide who is a natural for the screen, and who would be grateful not to be included. (If you decide to produce in-house, camera-shy folks can be involved without being on camera.)

Before settling on a personality style, give some thought to how you’d like to use the video component of a KnowledgeVision presentation. Will you be responding to customer questions? Demonstrating how to use products? Profiling key players? Will the PowerPoint portion be adding depth to the video, or would you rather have the video illustrate the PowerPoint content? The intended purpose will mesh more easily with your personality if you develop them in tandem. For example, the Blendtec “Will It Blend?” videos take a very different approach to product demonstration than the KnowledgeVision demo, but each of them reflects the personality of the company behind them. The exact approach you take must consider the content you wish to deliver as well as the tone of the presentation.

Until there is a way to reach out through the screen and shake your client’s hand, video remains the best way to connect with your potential customers on an emotional level. Careful consideration of how to incorporate that emotional message into your broader KnowledgeVision presentation will transform your message into an indelible one.

As bandwidth increased and authoring tools improved, the amount of video content has exploded. Jeremy Alliare, the founder and CEO of the leading online video platform, Brightcove, says “Video is becoming as ubiquitous as text.” The web is no longer a printing press; it’s a radio, television, phone, and magazine all rolled into one. Companies that understand how to use these multimedia, multisensory capabilities can build stronger connections with their customers, market more effectively, reduce costs and maintain an advantage over their competitors.

Video and more robust multimedia content invites deeper involvement in your website and email messages because video is more engaging than images and words alone. Video engages the senses more fully, activates more areas of the brain, and sparks interest in people who simply aren’t interested in reading. It moves people at an emotional level.

With more of your site visitors staying longer or your emails actually being read, your multisensory message is going to have more time to educate your prospects and turn them into clients. Joe Chernov, Director of Content for Eloqua stated that “Press releases that include video components receive a 500% increase in views, and email campaigns that include links to video elements have a 50% higher click-through rate and a 75% decrease in subscriber opt-outs.”

Videos can be used in a number of different ways to make a message more engaging and useful than your competition’s. However, by coupling video with PowerPoint, the potential uses multiply, such as:

• Illustrating concepts that don’t translate easily into words
• Demonstrating a product or technology
• Repurposing of sales presentations, shareholder addresses, and other content

Video content puts a face and a personality on a company, making it easier to connect to current and prospective customers alike. That face may include introductions of key staff, but the company’s personality will come through even without a literal face. The tone of a video can be anything from polished professional to off-the-cuff whimsical, depending on the purpose and intent of the website.

On the other hand, PowerPoint is critical for detailing step-by-step instructions, emphasizing key concepts, accelerating mastery of skills, and conveying compelling stories. Where video falls short, slides and illustrations can take up the slack.

People are now viewing more than 12 hours of video content online every month, and that number is likely to keep climbing. What makes video so appealing is the fact that it engages the senses in a much more robust way. Listening uses a different part of the brain than reading does, and watching moving images stimulates regions that simply looking at pictures does not. Video content is more memorable, so it’s more useful in helping your audience make an informed decision and learn quickly.  Viewers will understand more about your products, services and ideas in less time, and they will also spend more time on your site.

At KnowledgeVision we think a lot about weaving content together in a unique way to create stories that move.  Video can be far more than just a camera pointed at your CEO or sales person.  Our goal is to help you incorporate diverse elements such as PowerPoint slides, sound files, existing video content, footnotes, virtual handouts, and related links into a unified, synchronized presentation that’s much more than the sum of its parts. This multisensory presentation can easily be integrated into your site or an email message.

Content doesn’t have to be flat and static.  It can move – both on the screen and at an emotional level.  By engaging more senses and conveying stories that people understand and relate to you can increase the success of your communications, improve the effectiveness of your training and generate more sales.