Sometimes, the hardest part of a presentation is getting feedback.  So much time and energy is spent preparing for your conferences and presentations. You know your slides backwards and forward, you've done a mock presentation, revised, and practiced again. When it's all over and your conference is just a memory, you now have to sit back and wait to find out what people thought.

Sure, requesting an online survey after the conference is over is a great way to get feedback. There are a few snags to getting feedback this way.  Your audience is busy and while they fully intend on giving feedback for your presentation, it might take them time to be able to submit their thoughts. It could be days or even weeks after your conference is over and you want to get feedback while things are still fresh.

Have you given any thought to asking for feedback while the conference is in live?  Most web conference applications provide a way for you to ask for feedback through polls and allow asking more than one question.  You can update your poll from "How do you feel about…" to "What is a subject you would like to see more about" with a couple of key strokes and you can get feedback instantly. There's no waiting, all the information is still fresh, and the web conference tool will store your poll results as well, so you can go back and look up to see the results later on.

How important is instant feedback when you're having a conference? Do you want to know right away the things that need to be adjusted or corrected, or are you more of the kind of person who prefers to wait until after you're done to get feedback so as not to have any distractions when you present?

Description: If done right, web conferencing with PowerPoint can do amazing things!

It had to come eventually, but we're now at the end of our three-part series on the proper use of Content, Visuals, and Media to create excellent PowerPoint slides that grab attention, deliver the main message clearly, and highly augment presentations as a whole.

Web conferencing is, I think, the best medium to really get the most out of PowerPoint.  Not only is everyone right in front of their screens, able to see each slide perfectly, but they also have their computer handy to follow any links you put onscreen, or download materials you wish to share.

Take a look at this YouTube video that has tips for making the best of graphs and visuals.  Now, there are three things I'd like for you to glean from this video:

1.  Everything you put on a PowerPoint slide should be tailored to best convey your main message.  If this includes cutting out most of a picture to leave exactly what you want the participants to see, then so be it.  If increasing clarity means that graphs are made to be considerably less complex, so much the better.  If a slide has to be broken up into two—or more—slides to increase visibility, I say that's great.  Remember, you don't have to have a limit on how long a slide is shown, or how many slides you have.

Oh, and the best way to grab, retain, or regain attentions is go to the next— and different looking--slide.

2.  This video was on YouTube, but it and any videos you have or create can be placed on a PowerPoint slide!  A few slides into the beginning of a presentation you can announce that the CEO wanted to say hello, then you advance a slide and press 'play.'  Or, instead of describing a certain machine at work—or showing slides very fast with a picture on each—you can let your video explain all.

Video is eye-catching, but don't discount a slide with a picture and a sound file on it.  Get to the slide, press play, and let the exact words you want them to hear flow out.  It probably doesn't need to be said, but the picture should be appropriate for the sound file.

3.  The main point of this company's PowerPoint video was to get you to pay to attend their web conference seminar on improving presentations.  And they did this by showing a few minutes worth of their presentation as an enticement.

And you can do the same with your own products.  Hold a web conference for some potential clients and show your PowerPoint presentation.  Make sure to record everything.  Then pluck out sections with valuable information, and put them together in a PowerPoint video to put on YouTube.  You get some exposure, but more important, the leads you receive from it are informed and motivated potential customers.

I hope this three-part series on punching up PowerPoint helped more than a few people turn out stellar presentations.  Was there something I didn't cover that you hoped to see?  What subjects would you like covered in our future series?  Leave us a comment and we'll do our best to accommodate.

We're now in the middle of this three-part series on getting the most out of PowerPoint using Content, Visuals, and Media, so let's press on.  What first comes to mind when you see the word, "Visuals"?  (I thought of photos.)  Though pictures are in the visuals category, they don't make up its entirety.

Since I brought them up, it would be good to mention that pictures do speak volumes and can be a welcome addition to any PowerPoint slide… if done correctly.  Pictures are like content; they must be surgically chosen.  And where the right picture can do wonders for communicating to your participants, the wrong picture can distract them, or even lower their opinion of you and your message.

You can't go wrong if you put one picture per slide, taking up all the space—captions don't have to always go underneath; place the words where they'll make the most impact.  Pictures of people are good, but crop tight from the chest up for individuals, and show some background and scenery for group shots.  Double-check to make sure the right person is showing at the right part of the presentation.  Product shots are good, and buildings too if appropriate.

If ever in doubt, not using the picture you're waffling over is probably the better choice.

But pictures aren't all there is to visuals.  The slides themselves can make or break a bid for participant attention.  Go through the first ten slides or so of this eye-popping PowerPoint presentation.

Pretty cool, eh?  You'll have noticed that they used color to manipulate mood, and sizes of slide elements to call attention to information.  I really like how they used reoccurring graphics as a sort of bullet-point system.  Nothing is worse than seeing the same layout and font, slide after slide, with nothing changing but the information.  (It puts me in mind of white stripes in the middle of the road at night: hypnotizing.) The one critical mistake on this powerpoint is the size of the text. 

But when people see a familiar graphic from a few slides before, they are eager to spot the differences, and quickly learn that these particular slides will be their guideposts for the rest of the presentation.

What visuals are you using to spice up your PowerPoint slides?  How do you like the series so far? 

Next up: Media

I've seen more than a few PowerPoint presentations.  I've experienced some so boring I counted the slides instead of reading them.  And I've seen slides so difficult to read, I found myself blinking coquettish starlet.  But then, every once in a while I get wowed by a stellar PowerPoint presentation.

To really get to the heart of the matter, I'm going to make this little PowerPoint discussion a three-part deal covering Content, Visuals, and Media.  In this first part, let's talk about how content makes those rare PowerPoint gems so great.

Content is what you want your participants to know, to have in the front part of their brains as they return to the rest of their day, and what they think about throughout the week.  However, the strength of content also contains its weakness.  Details, minutia, supporting arguments, and anything else besides your main point serve to drag a presentation down into mediocrity.

As a result, content should be surgically chosen.  What exactly is the main point?  What details are absolutely necessary to support that point?  Only include content that answers either of those questions, and leave out the rest.

"It's not vital information, but it's still important!"

That statement is the grease on the slippery slope that has spawned so many bad PowerPoint slides.  Remember, YOU are the focus of the presentation and PowerPoint is your support.  Show the main points and tell the little details and supporting arguments to your participants.  Everything else gets put into a handout for later reference.

Less is more.  Your presentation can contain tons of data, but your PowerPoint presentation should only bear a fraction of it.

Next up: Visuals

Having to host conference calls on the fly can be hard enough and now you've been put in charge of planning a major event. If you've never planned a major conference before, or if you're just not sure where to start, remember the basics:  who, what, when, and where.  Once you’ve defined the generalities of the conference, here are a couple of things that can help to make your next event extra special.

Seek out someone who's knowledgeable in the field you're hosting your conference and find a way to get them involved.  A lot of people are more than willing to throw their hat into a ring for a good cause or for something with a good enough message.  Do some research, find out someone who would be willing to take a little bit of time out of their day and speak at your conference. Having a guest speaker will boost the interest in the conference and provide you better over-all interest, and give you a higher number of attendees as well.

Practice Makes Perfect

Doing a run through can make the difference between a great conference and a good conference.  Know your materials and how you're going to flow through them. If you're using a web conferencing platform instead of just audio, familiarize yourself with the platform before the conference begins.  Get with a customer service rep at the provider and go through a demo.  They are there to answer your questions and help your conference run as smoothly as possible.  Go through a mock conference with a co-worker and make sure that you know the different facets of the service provider you have chosen to use.

Have a Back-Up Plan

Everything should go as smooth as silk as long as you're prepared, but just like that old cliché says, you should expect the unexpected. Computers crash, PowerPoint's fail, and no matter what you should be ready for it. Plan ahead for the conference by sending out the slide show (if there is one) as part of a participation packet so that attendees have it in front of them and if something happens, they have a hard copy. It will also encourage them to read through the slides and prepare questions in advance.  As much as you want the conference to go well, so do they.

Will you use these steps to prepare for your next conference call? Am I missing something important? I’m sure there are a lot of quick and simple things that you can do to plan your next event and make it special. Comment your thoughts here and tell me how you plan for a great conference.

I don't know about you, but I've had more than a few jobs over the years.  Some jobs were consulting, others permanent, but they all had one thing in common: no matter my background and resume, there was a ton of learning to do in the first few days and weeks.

I know that most conglomerate companies have good training or orientation programs, but personally, my experiences have ranged from simple and straightforward self-education to frustratingly lacking in direction and support.

It used to boggle my mind—not sure exactly what that entails--at the quagmire a new hire had to wade through to get up to speed.  A great college education is wonderful, but it's just a foundation.  The industry has changed since the textbooks were written, and even if up to date, every company does things their own way.

And speaking of industry changes, what does an employee do about a process they've done for ten years, only to find they are woefully behind new methods and technologies?  I've never seen a job description yet that includes budgeted time and resources to keep someone up to date.  I know they're out there, and probably some even mean it.

A big issue is training costs and time, but there's a good solution.  A web conference could make it possible for an employee to go over manuals and training materials with a new hire, days or weeks before they are to step foot in the building.  In fact, one employee could do a training teleconference for an hour twice a day with an unlimited amount of new hires.  They wouldn't have to mess with setting up a training room or distributing handouts.  Talk about a time-saver!

Here's a cool thought: use a web conference to have a new hire “follow” an employee! The employee would just share their desktop with the new hire.  The new hire could watch them work all day long without the annoyance of squeezing another person into a cubicle.  And if the new hire had a question, they could simply type it out in the chat window so as not to disturb the employee.

Have you used web conferencing for a “follow-along” before?  Leave a comment and tell me how it worked out.

Growing up, my brother and I always watched the Jetsons.  It was set in 2062 and when I was seven, that was a really long time away, but now, in 2009, we're staring down the barrel of about 50 years.  Watching some old episodes this weekend brought back some memories and also made me think about how things have changed. Invention is often propelled by convenience, cost, and creativity. In 1991, a group of researchers wanted to save pointless trips to the coffee pot, so they set up a web cam that would broadcast the current status of the pot (and catch the person who didn't reload the machine after getting the last cup).

It was such a simple idea and look at where it's brought us. Web cameras are almost a staple of any office set up.  It's used for anything from having important seminars to being able to have a "face to face" conversation with a far off family member. It makes you think, where can it go from here? Is there anything that we could use video conferencing to achieve that we aren't doing yet?

Blink-182 is currently on a concert tour that is taking them all around the world and right into your living room, by offering a webcast. It made me think of the power of web conferencing to change the whole way things are done. Can you imagine never having to leave your house again to see your favorite band in concert? I am no stranger to the science fiction movies that show people in 3-D environments. Imagine embracing that technology 100% and the way it can change the world.

Imagine being a doctor and having to do a medical procedure you've never done before. Of course, as a medical professional, you want everything to go smoothly. Picture yourself video broadcasting the surgery live to the most world renowned brain/heart/knee/etc surgeon in the world and announce what you are doing it as you are doing it, thus letting you learn from the best. Apply skills like how you are holding the scalpel at the wrong angle, make adjustments that won't only help what you are doing right then, but for all future surgeries.

I usually hate going for the cliché but the possibilities are endless when it comes to the powers of conferencing. It's already reaching out and bringing families together as well as saving business' lots of cash on travel.

Where are you planning to implement video conferencing in your business? 

Conference calls, web conferences, video conferences… they make business so much easier, don't they?  And at their most basic, they are easy to setup and easy to run.  So if a no frills, simple conference call is easy, then does that mean a complex one is hard to do?

The answer is a quiet, dignified, "No."  Putting the extra touch and polish on a conference call is easy with a little forethought.  To get you started, here are a few ways to accent your next conference call:

Guest Moderator – Hiring an average speaker for a meeting or presentation can be costly; especially if they have to travel far to you.  With conference calls, travel isn't necessary.  And because a guest moderator only has to talk on the phone for an hour or so, their honorarium is much, much less.  Lower costs for you and less inconvenience for the guest means you are able to hire a much wider range of people including celebrities and industry superstars!

Why Not Add Video – Let's say you have two offices, one on each coast.  You're planning a meeting between them from their respective conference rooms, each circled round a speaker phone.  Obviously, you could make this happen with a simple phone call, but let"s improve on that.  Start a video conference, have a laptop and webcam at each table, and hook up the laptops to large monitors.  Now you don"t have two disembodied groups anymore.  Instead, your two offices are talking—and seeing who's doing the talking—as if they were just across the hall from each other.

PowerPoint Pizzazz – Among other things, web conferences have a singular feature going for them: you can put the contents of your entire laptop in front of any and all of your participants at the same time.  You can share a design—or video, website, graph, document—and they can study it as if it was on their computer… because it basically is.  Showing your participants something is much more powerful than telling them about it.  And that power is available in each and every web conference you do.

Carefully compared to a lecture in an auditorium, a web conference is only somewhat different.  The audience can't see you, but they can hear you very well.  And much like an auditorium, you can have documents, graphs, and video placed in front of the audience's eyes with perfect timing.  The content of your presentations—both in a web conference and an auditorium--can be greatly enhanced by visuals, but what if your visuals are subpar?  Will your presentation be greatly affected?

According to Dave Paradi, poor visuals can only lessen the impact of an auditorium presentation.  Paradi's example entailed a lecture by an esteemed academic and expert in his field.  While the studies and conclusions were well researched and told to the audience clearly, the visuals were poor and not used very effectively.  However, Paradi says that the content of the presentation was well received by the audience anyway.

Paradi's conclusion is that "great content will trump poor visuals."  The audience will leave informed and enlightened, but not to the extent they could have been.  For a lecture in an auditorium, I agree with Paradi.  When you stand in front of an audience, you are the presentation, not your visuals.  Your words—and body language—can only be enhanced by pictures, video, and such. 

For a web conference presentation, I disagree completely; great content can be sunk by poor visuals.  After all, in a web conference there is only your voice and visuals to drive the presentation.  If the graphs are confusing, the pictures blurry, and the documents not spell-checked, the participants can be greatly distracted from what you're saying.

However, I do like Paradi's solution, and it's even more effective for web conferences: create the presentation and the visuals separately.  Don't fire up PowerPoint and use it to create your outline and main points.  Don't look for pictures to talk about. 

Leave all but a blank page to write your presentation, and only afterwards find great visuals to enhance the content of your web conferences.

I had a chance to speak with Mike Stelzner, author of Writing White Papers How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged, about a recent webinar he hosted, the Social Media Success Summit. The live online event spanned over a month and brought the brightest minds in social media marketing together and they never even had to get up from their desks.

"Social media happens to be the hottest thing on the planet," Mike stated. His summit brought together some of the biggest names on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter and demonstrated the benefits and uses of these social networks to grow the buzz about your small business.

The most unique part of this event? It was a virtual conference. "It's a great way for me to impart a lot of knowledge on a lot people." Mike is absolutely right, virtual conferences can reach a large or small group of people worldwide. Mike was kind enough to give some tips for the business or individual looking to get involved in webinars on a small scale, or even the larger scale.

Have a helper
When you have a presenter, they should be able to be focused on just that, presenting. Assign someone else to keep an eye out for incoming questions, to sort through them if you're prescreening, as well as someone to field any connection questions. 

Speak live in a way that will sound just as great on a recording.
Be mindful that this seminar will be available for people to listen to at a later time. Maybe they missed the first day of your seminar; maybe they missed the last day, or maybe they are just interested in writing down some of the smart things you said. Either way you want to make sure that everything is going to translate into a recorded format while you're doing the live conference.

Keep your audience engaged
"Something as simple as a poll question can really get people engaged." Ask your participants their opinions. 'Would you do this?' 'Is this something you would like to see more of?' Make your participants part of the conference and not just quiet observers to keep them excited about the topic and more likely to come back for the next event.  Encourage them to interact with you via Facebook and Twitter. This will help them stay engaged and will give you instant feedback.

Provide different options to encourage questions.
Instead of just offering your guests or clients the old fashioned voice submission for questions, allow them to submit their questions via email, chat, or text.  It's not always an easy thing to get people to open up. Have some questions ready yourself in the event that you might not get any questions submitted. "When it comes to taking questions that are live, you can run into some real technical challenges if you're not familiar with the platform. So I always believe in having a backup plan in place, and maybe even some back up questions."

These are just some of the tips that Mike was nice enough to offer, and I hope that you apply some of them to your next virtual event or conference call. If you'd like to find out more about Mike Stelzer, you can visit him on Twitter, @mike_stelzner.