Do you have your remote presentation game down?
It’s been a while now since Covid19 hit and we all made the move to working, meeting and presenting remotely. Some of us have made the transition to presenting remotely successfully and others – maybe not so much. Here are 5 questions to ask yourself to determine if you need to “up” your remote presentation game.
- Do you have a Zoom Studio from which to stand and present?
I recommend standing when you’re presenting – yes, even in a remote environment. Standing allows you the full benefit of both your body’s energy and your diaphragm. Plus, in a live in-person presentation you would (should) stand, so why not for a remote one? Therefore, you need a place where you can put your laptop or camera so that it’s at eye level. My Zoom Studio is in my kitchen. It still needs to be propped up, but a kitchen counter is higher than a desk or table making it easier to accomplish. (dirty secret: mine is propped up on a box of wine – yep.) Make sure that you are looking at the camera – not at the thumbnails of your audience members. Only by looking at the camera will your audience feel that you are making eye contact with them.
Be sure your face is well lit. This means having light coming from in front of you. I stand in front of a window, which is ideal. You can also put a bright lamp directly in front of you, or purchase a ring light and set that up in front of you. The more light on your face the better.
As far as your Zoom studio background, it can be interesting, but it should never be messy or distracting. Remember, you want the audience’s focus to be on you and your presentation, not on a messy closet or weird piece of art.
2. Are you getting to the meat of your presentation quickly?
When we were delivering presentations live and in-person we had the luxury of giving a longer-than-necessary introduction or two or three. It was what I like to call ‘audience abuse’; introductions that we “all about us”, that our audience couldn’t care less about and were forced to listen to because they couldn’t escape. We were holding them hostage – politely, but still. In a remote environment the audience can flee at any moment. In fact, they can make it appear like they’re there, but in reality they’re surfing their phone, or getting something to eat, or talking with their spouse or significant other or roommate or child or cat. You get the idea.
In a remote presentation, you must get to the meat of the presentation, aka what matters to your audience, as fast as possible. You want them to know right away that you’ll be speaking about what they care about, not in five or ten minutes – but now, right at the beginning. You want your audience to be riveted, not daring to take their attention away for a second, and the way to do that is to make your presentation about them and what they’re interested in, and right from the beginning.
3. Have you given your presentation structure?
Being an audience member is hard work. Being a remote audience member is even harder. Distractions (as outlined above) are everywhere and non-stop. At the same time, many of the cues we get in a live in-person presentation are missing, or harder to see.
We can help our audience a LOT by giving our presentation structure. I love the rule of threes, I refer to it as magic, (the simple idea that humans love threes; Three Blind Mice, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, three strikes and you’re out, etc.) If we organize our content into three buckets and label those buckets for our audience, we give them a big boost in the understanding and remembering of our presentation. Perhaps there are three big problems that you’re solving, or three parts to your solution. If you’re giving any kind of update presentation you can easily organize your information into past present and future buckets: here’s where we were, here’s where we are, here’s where we’re going. This organizing makes your presentation easier for you to retain and deliver as well.
4. Are your visuals (slides) truly aids for your audience?
This is where most presentations fall down. Before the pandemic you could get away with slides that really only acted as speaker notes for you. Why? Because your audience would either read them and ignore you, or if you are a dynamic presenter, listen to you and ignore the slides. Humans cannot read and listen at the same time
Whereas in a live in-person presentation your audience pretty much had to stay put and either listen to you or read the slides, in a remote presentation they can split! Especially if you’ve sent your slide deck ahead of time. Why stay and read? They’ve got better things to do.
Make your slides truly visual aids for your audience. How? They need to be image based; charts, graphs, icons, photographs. Ideally, your visuals should be synergistic components. They should help you explain your message in ways that you alone cannot. And they should animate; you should give the information to your audience one bite at a time, so no one gets distracted or lost.
5. Have you practiced OUT LOUD?
The only way to know you’ve got all of this right is to practice your presentation OUT LOUD in slide show mode, clicking and talking. Don’t be discouraged if you only get to about slide 3 the first time through. Of course you’re stuck! You need a transition between your very short introduction and your first big idea. You may get stuck again and again (I do). Maybe a slide needs more animation, or needs to move to another part of the presentation, or needs to be deleted. Often you’ll have to stop and think of what you want to say. Better now than in front of a real live audience. Once you’ve got the pieces in place you really only need to practice maybe 3 or 4 more times. DO NOT memorize your talking points and DO NOT READ. Reading sounds like reading. Snore. (and remember, they can easily go to sleep – they’re probably not far from a couch or bed….)
Ask yourself these five questions. If you can’t answer in the affirmative, you probably need to up your presentation game. The good news is that other than question #1, all of these things will serve you well when we get on the other side of the pandemic and we’re presenting live and in-person again. Either way, you’ll be heard, and be NAILING IT.
Remote, live in-person or a hybrid; these things are critical to a successful presentation.
Yes, the presenting world has changed, and no, it doesn’t look like it’s going back to the “old” live and in-person format any time soon. More likely, we’ll next be navigating presenting in a hybrid format, with some of our audience in person and others attending remotely. No matter what, these five things remain critical to a successful presentation.
AUDIENCE FIRST: Nothing matters more than the audience. They know it, and in order for you to be a successful presenter, you must know it to. From the time you begin creating your presentation you must turn your focus 180°. Focus not on what you want to tell them, what you want them to know, all of your very-important-stuff (which, p.s., they could care less about), but instead, focus on what they care about, what they worry about, and what their knowledge level is in regards to your subject. NOTE: If they don’t think your subject is relevant/urgent/important to them, you must begin by illustrating this relevance/urgency/importance very clearly.
DO THE HEAVY LIFTING: It is not your audience’s job to untangle the spaghetti of your content. Neither is it your job to edit your content for relevance while you’re presenting. This is all stuff you need to do ahead of time. Determine what the main point of your presentation is and stick to it. Organize the content around it, and vigilantly edit for irrelevancy.
BESPEAKING THE AUDIENCE’S LANGUAGE: No, it won’t make you look like a super-smarty-pants subject matter expert to throw around 8 syllable words and insider acronyms. It will only make your audience feel stupid, which feels bad, which has a ricochet effect. Feeling bad needs someone to blame. Who made them feel bad? You did. Now they feel bad about you. Way to go. Nix the jargon words and acronyms and talk to them in language an eight-year-old or eighty-eight-year-old can understand.
MAKE YOUR VISUALS AIDS FOR YOUR AUDIENCE: Your slides should be a synergistic component. They plus you should be exponentially more effective in getting your message across than either of you could alone. No visual should ever be self-explanatory. If it is, then there is no need for you, the presenter. Think “Show and Tell”. Show the visual (chart, graph, icon) and explain to the audience what they are looking at.
PRACTICE OUT LOUD: This is non-negotiable. There is no way to be a truly effective presenter in any format without practicing out loud. In your head does not count. Trust, me, you’ll sound like a genius in your head. Once you actually start clicking and talking, however, it’s a different story. Create the pathways between your brain and your mouth. Practice more than once to get your long-term memory involved as well. Come presentation day you’ll feel confident and well-prepared, and it will show.
No matter how you find yourself presenting; remotely, live and in-person, or a hybrid of the two, follow these five rules and you’ll be NAILING it.
NAIL your next remote presentation. Here’s how.
Although Covid19 has meant changes to all kinds of work, presentations, while done remotely, still need to happen and happen effectively. So how does presenting remotely differ from presenting live and in-person, and how do we adjust ourselves and our presentations accordingly?
First, recognize that we do need to adjust, especially if we’ll be using visuals like PowerPoint, Keynote or even Prezi.
Why? Because whereas in a live in-person presentation, our physical presence and (possibly) charismatic persona could overcome a crummy slide deck, when we present remotely the slides take center stage. If you are seen at all, you’re in a tiny box on the right side of the screen; possibly along with a few other tiny boxes with people in them. A distraction to be sure. Add to that the ease with which your audience can be enticed to look at or do something else, and compelling visuals become even more critical.
Now the question is, what makes a compelling visual?
They don’t require reading: A successful visual does NOT require the audience to read. Why? Because we process language, both written and spoken, with the same part of our brain; the phonological loop. Here’s how it works: when you read something, your inner voice reads it to your inner ear. When you hear someone speak, your inner ear processes what the speaker is saying. The same processor does both of these things, but it cannot do both at once. When you present your audience with lots of text on a slide (bullet points) and then you talk at the same time, you’re causing cognitive overload. You are short-circuiting that processor; it cannot make sense of your message. Oh, and we can’t remember what we can’t understand. So that’s a fail.
In a live in-person presentation your audience can choose to ignore your slides and focus solely on you. Or, if you don’t have the good fortune to be super compelling, your audience will read the slide and then surf their smartphone until the next slide appears. Giving a remote presentation you don’t have the ability to command their attention the same way. Your slides must be the compelling thing.
So if the slides don’t have tons of text, what do they have?
Think ‘show and tell’: Remember kindergarten? Your classmates showed you their new doll or truck or sibling and told you all about what it was. This “show and tell” method works because it uses another processor; the visuospatial sketchpad, or the inner eye. The inner eye works to process images while the phonological loop is processing language. They work so well together that their outcome is retention upwards of 80%. That is a WIN.
They have the “huh?” factor: NO slide should make sense on its own. Every visual should require you, the presenter, to explain it. Think about it, if the audience is looking at something they can’t figure out, they are going to sit (undistractable!) waiting eagerly for you to explain it to them. You’ve piqued their interest – perhaps even shown something that is counter intuitive (creates cognitive dissonance = “huh?”) and their brains are urging them to stay focused and hear what you have to say to resolve this dissonance. Now you’ve got ‘em eating out of your hand.
They give you the info in bite-sized bits: Especially because we’re giving this presentation remotely, we want to be sure we don’t lose anyone along the way. Use animation (subtle ones like Fade or Appear, or a directional one if that’s connected to what’s being conveyed) to give your audience the information one bite at a time. This also adds to the compelling nature of your presentation. They can’t get ahead of you, so they can’t turn away.
They’ve been PRACTICED OUT LOUD: Let’s face it, a big reason you are using tons of content on your slides is because you think you need them for speaker notes. Here’s a news flash; if you practice out loud, your visuals will be memory clues for YOU! That’s right, you’ll see the visual and you’ll be able to retrieve the associated content from your long term memory. And, you’ll look like a presentation superstar.
Take a deep breath. Click through your current deck and think about how you can make your ideas visual. Charts and graphs are terrific visuals, as are icons to represent things and ideas. Depending on what industry you’re in photos and video (short!) work well too. Give it the thought it deserves, put a new presentation together and practice it out loud. You’ll be heard, and get results.
