Posted on March 20, 2012 by Tom Bishop , Posted in Blog, Microsoft PowerPoint, Online Presentation Platforms, Online Presentation Strategies, Presentation Tips & Tricks, Thought Leadership, Using Online Video , No Comments »
Email. I once wrote about it sticking around much longer than anyone would guess, and I stand by that today. It was once believed that text messaging, mobile devices and social media would make email obsolete. Instead, email is as important as ever. Social updates rely on it, text is limited in reach and scope, and as for mobile, well, there’s a reason smartphones offer so many email apps.
That’s not to say that email has not evolved. Today, email senders design for mobile devices, social sharing tools are frequently included in messages, email drives the transactional experience, and email marketers work harder than ever not just to raise open rates and clickthroughs, but to get delivered in the first place.
It’s the flexibility of email practices that has allowed it to succeed against strong headwinds.
The biggest limiting factors for email have always been message size and security limitations, and this is even more important today because of the sheer volume of email being sent around. Rich content like video remains locked out of using email to reach an audience. This is not video’s fault. It’s because email clients, browsers, and ISP email limits are set to protect servers and prevent viruses, which use the same kind of scripts and objects used by embedded video.
Without these protections, many types of rich content, which can certainly be compressed small enough to be sent as attachments, could be played within browsers and most email clients. But that’s not the world we live in. That’s why, to see a video, you have to go to the source.
So you shouldn’t send embedded video in email, but you can send highly compelling images that link to your video. Here are 5 steps you should take to make email and rich content work great together:
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Posted on March 19, 2012 by Tom Bishop , Posted in Blog, Microsoft PowerPoint, Online Presentation Platforms, Online Presentation Strategies, Presentation Tips & Tricks, Thought Leadership, Training Applications, Using Online Video , No Comments »
On-Demand Learning is Huge.
We know it’s becoming a widely-discussed topic in education and in the technology world, but because the audience for e-Learning spans the globe, it is literally huge. The size of the total marketplace for online courses is the main reason so many institutions and organizations are putting their courses online.
It is also cheaper to deliver online courses, because the presentation can be given once, and recorded for millions of views over time. Also, administration of student course involvement is automated and centralized.
The only issue with online courses is: How do you, as the teacher, make your presentations lively and dynamic for the people watching you online? Your slides and your delivery should be optimized for the web, yet still keep viewers interested and involved.
That’s why, this Thursday, Kirstin Lynde of Randstad Professionals and Michael Kolowich of KnowledgeVision will show how to bring on-demand training content initiative to life in Liven up! How to Bring Your Online, On-Demand Training Content to Life with Video. It starts at 1PM Eastern time.
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Posted on March 13, 2012 by Tom Bishop , Posted in Blog, Microsoft PowerPoint, Online Presentation Platforms, Online Presentation Strategies, Presentation Tips & Tricks, Thought Leadership, Training Applications, Using Online Video , No Comments »
Retention. It’s one element of learning the teacher cannot control. Educators from to grade school through technical training programs and universities use well-known tools to help the learning process along, such as lecture, repetition, reading, demonstration, and practice. Each technique has varying effects on retention, though all are essential.
The big question is how to create and store the teaching experience so it can be replicated and spread widely. With e-Learning and use of the virtual space gaining in use and cachet, online teaching is gaining wide appeal. We’ll examine how a flipped* online video lesson can improve message retention and broaden the reach of an educator.
* The flipped lesson is one where all of the material is pre-recorded and developed for an online audience instead of originally produced as a live event.
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Posted on January 9, 2012 by NatCramer , Posted in Blog, Microsoft PowerPoint, Online Presentation Platforms, Online Presentation Strategies, Presentation Tips & Tricks, Thought Leadership, Using Online Video , No Comments »
This article was originally produced for the Content Marketing Institute blog and published there on December 19, 2011. We hope you find these tips useful!
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?
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Posted on March 12, 2011 by Michael Kolowich , Posted in Blog, Corporate Storytelling, Online Presentation Platforms, Online Presentation Strategies, Presentation Tips & Tricks, Thought Leadership , 1 Comment »
This week, I was invited to write a guest article for Indezine, one of the leading blogs for “power creators” of presentations. I took the opportunity to write about the growing popularity of audio-only online presentations, and one of their fundamental flaws: that they tend to strip the personality out of a presentation. -MEK
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.
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Posted on February 27, 2011 by Michael Kolowich , Posted in Blog, Microsoft PowerPoint, Presentation Tips & Tricks , No Comments »
We were fascinated and amused to read a Harvard senior’s column in the Harvard Crimson this week, echoing a complaint we’ve heard from the boardroom to the Pentagon: some of the ivy-covered profs are badly in need of PowerPoint lessons.
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:
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Posted on February 18, 2011 by Michael Kolowich , Posted in Blog, Industry Trends, Online Presentation Platforms, Thought Leadership , No Comments »
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.
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Posted on January 30, 2011 by Michael Kolowich , Posted in Blog, Online Presentation Platforms, Presentation Tips & Tricks, Using Online Video , No Comments »
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.
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Posted on January 26, 2011 by Michael Kolowich , Posted in Blog, Online Presentation Platforms, Online Presentation Strategies, Thought Leadership , 1 Comment »
While 43 million people were watching President Obama’s State of the Union Address on broadcast and cable television, a small fraction of that number were watching online. But those who did saw something very different: what the White House called an “Enhanced” State of the Union Address. The enhanced version of the State of the Union is still available on-demand at whitehouse.gov, and it gives us a glimpse — but just a glimpse — of what online presentations can and should be.
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.
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Posted on January 18, 2011 by Michael Kolowich , Posted in Blog, Presentation Tips & Tricks , No Comments »
It’s all too familiar to the startup executive: the marathon of presentations — from angel investor elevator pitches to full-blown venture capital partner-meeting grillings — that are fundamental to getting money for a new venture.
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.
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Posted on January 14, 2011 by Michael Kolowich , Posted in Blog, Corporate Storytelling, Online Presentation Platforms, Online Presentation Strategies , 3 Comments »
Back in 1959, Walt Disney Studios released “Sleeping Beauty,” a pioneering animated film. Using new cinematic techniques – Technirama widescreen, the SuperTechnirama 70 film process, and a full-length live-action reference model for the animators – Disney created a film that was so alive that it fairly jumped off the screen.
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.
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Posted on January 7, 2011 by Michael Kolowich , Posted in Blog, Content Marketing, Online Presentation Strategies , No Comments »
Long ago, legendary advertising man Fairfax Mastick Cone lamented: “Our inventory goes down the elevator every night.” He was referring, of course, to the people who produced his ad agency’s creative product; without the people, there was literally no product inventory.
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.
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Posted on December 31, 2010 by Michael Kolowich , Posted in Blog, Microsoft PowerPoint, Online Presentation Platforms, Online Presentation Strategies , No Comments »
The business presentation has become a near-universal tool for selling ideas and products. More than 30 million PowerPoint presentations are given every day.
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.
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Posted on November 4, 2010 by Rusty Williams , Posted in Blog, Microsoft PowerPoint, Online Presentation Platforms, Presentation Tips & Tricks , No Comments »
It’s hard to imagine, but PowerPoint has been with us for more than 25 years. The concept, originally developed in 1984, really started transforming business presentations after PowerPoint was acquired by Microsoft in 1987. Now there are more than 30 million presentations given each day. It’s an integral part of our business culture.
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.
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Posted on October 7, 2010 by Rusty Williams , Posted in Blog, Online Presentation Platforms, Thought Leadership , No Comments »
In a world of information saturation, thought leadership is one of the few ways to be heard above the din of similar marketing messages. Thought leaders are those innovators who have positioned themselves as experts in their field by virtue of a track record of good ideas. Most of us have good ideas all the time; what makes a thought leader different is the conscious strategy to tell the world about those ideas. Thought leadership positions a company to be the first stop when someone is in the market for their services, but it does more than that. It can inform your sales staff about the depth of your services, while giving them the tools to demonstrate the value you bring with your services. Feedback from your ideas can help you more effectively identify unexploited market segments.
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