Pre-recorded presentations; a better experience for you AND your audience?
February 10th, 2010 Filed Under Education, Faculte, Faculte Story, Presentations
For a student – and for most professionals – being able to give a good presentation or pitch is a key element of success.
Some elements can be learned through reading theory; how much text should you use per slide? How many slides are appropriate? How should your slides be structured? You can even read theory about how you should walk, talk, stand and dress, in order to make the right impression on your audience.
There is one thing, however, that only comes with experience; the knowledge of how you react to holding a presentation. Will you be able to stick to the script? Do you take detours; and where do these detours take you? Will you keep a fluent pace, or will you let your nerves get to you? Even when you are well prepared – and experienced! – your nerves can play tricks on you, and you end up rushing through the whole presentation, skipping several important points – or spending all the dedicated time on the first few slides, thus never reaching your conclusion. Not to mention all the unnecessary uh’s and ehm’s that tend to jump out of your mouth when you are nervous.
For the fall semester 2009, the Master of Science and Engineering Management Class at Marquette University used, for the first time, Faculte’s Broadcast Studio for their final Presentations. Approximately half of the groups chose to create and pre-record their presentation using Faculte, while the rest distributed powerpoint slides only. All presentations were posted on a class website, and some of them were Presented live.
Instead of me telling you how the experiment went, I will let the students do it in their own words:
“In the future I would attempt to use faculte first rather than using powerpoint.”
“I enjoyed the Faculte presentations much better than the non-faculte presentations. The Faculte presentations seemed to flow better.”
“The overall process significantly added to the quality of the presentations. If students/teams used this for all their projects, additional quality gains would accrue.”
Clearly both the students and the Faculte team were pleased with the results!
When I talked to Professor Polzcynski right after the live presentations, he had made a couple of observations that I found particularly interesting. Usually, with my theatre background, I have always claimed that “being live, in person, on stage, always gives the best results”. However, I think the Professor proved me somewhat wrong.
First, he told me that in one of the groups all but one student were traveling through work. The one student being present not an accustomed presenter, and strongly disliked being in front of an audience. Imagine his relief that their whole presentation was already created, and all he had to do was click a link and press play!
The second observation the professor shared was this: When you do a recording, you have the chance to review your work. This means that a) you write a good script and prepare well for the recording – you will actually have to listen to your own voice! and b) you re-do it if it is not good.
This resulted in the groups using Faculte having presentations that were within the dedicated time, following a comfortable pace, explaining all important points, not de-touring into unimportant details – not to mention, without the uh’s and ehm’s.
The professor said that all the presentations were good – but in the groups that used Faculte, there was not a single incident of student’s nerves or unpreparedness getting in the way of the presentation.
Knowing how you react to holding a presentation comes with experience – and I still believe that being present, in front of your audience, gives a good result. However, in using Faculte for your Presentations, you can relax! Be your charming self next to the screen, and let your nerves kick in when it is time for the questions after the presentation.
Unless, of course, you have prepared another Broadcast, with answers to all the questions you might get. Then you’re all set.
Click here to see the student’s Presentations
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Your Faculte – Your Brand!
January 28th, 2010 Filed Under Faculte, Faculte Story, New Features, Presentations
One of the things I appreciate most about working in a start-up company is that one of our main focuses is Feature Development. This means that a lot of the changes that appear with every new deployment are visible – this time around, incredibly visible!
Our latest invention is developed with larger organizations in mind; preferring to use their own brand. They want their employees or affiliates to see their Company Brand, and not the Faculte Brand, when they are in the content creation process. With the changes to our Branded Templates, that is exactly what they are able to do.
The feature is of course there for every Premium Account to use, large organization or not – providing a nice way to re-decorate your work environment! Personally, spending hours on our Platform every day, it was such a relief to be able to change the color of my background, header and footer. Yes, my boss hated the bright pink. No, I don’t really care. (Okay, fine, I cared enough to change it to purple.)
To change the whole look and feel of your Premium Faculte Account, go to Settings and Branded Templates – and go ahead and create your personalized style. The changes are reflected right away, making it a simple and immediate process.
We all hope you will enjoy the new feature, and stay tuned – there are more changes to come. Our developers are doing an amazing job!
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Your feedback matters!
November 24th, 2009 Filed Under Faculte, Faculte Story, New Features, Presentations, Video
Over the past weeks and months, our faithful customer base has given us the most valuable thing a young start-up can get; they have given us their honest feedback. Yes, sometimes it hurts, but we have kept our ears open and listened.
Today, we launched the first of a larger series of customer-requested changes. Our development team have been focused, and will keep focusing, on what YOU want and what YOU need. So please, everybody, keep the honest feedback coming! It is the only way to make our product perfect!
You told us that being able to add background music to your broadcasts would make them even more professional. So we added the Audio Background feature. When you edit your broadcast, go to Preferences and select Audio Background. We have given you a variety of music loops to choose from, and we do hope you will find your favorite amongst them! The selected Audio Loop will play continuously, without pausing in between the pages – even if the rest of the content is loading.
You told us that you’ve started having a LOT of files and broadcasts, and it is hard to manage them. We want you to create a lot of content – so of course we want to give you the possibility of managing it easily! Thus, we are now releasing Labels – so you can easily administer and access the files and broadcasts you want.
You told us that you love being able to add webcam recordings to your broadcasts, but that the first second of your recording – the one where you look at the timer, realize you’re recording, smile awkwardly, draw your breath – was so difficult to avoid. So instead of giving all our customers acting lessons (which may have been equally awkward?), we have now released Video Trimming. When you hit Record, and the countdown starts, just draw your breath and relax. You can trim away the first second of the video anyway!
There have also been several changes to your home page:
We hope these changes will make you a happy customer!
We promise to keep the improvements coming – if you promise to tell us what you want!
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How to turn a lifeless PowerPoint into a lively video
September 28th, 2009 Filed Under Faculte, Presentations, Video
Imagine this. You have to train a sales rep on a new product offering OR you need to educate new hires on your company culture and inner workings. How would you do it? Let me guess… a PowerPoint Presentation is the first thing that comes to mind. Well isn’t that exciting (note sarcastic tone). Ok, Ok, don’t be embarrassed… most people will think of PowerPoint as their go-to tool. There always seems to be this love-hate affair with it. We know its easy (relatively) to create and is synonymous with a presentation. But we also know that it can be excruciatingly boring and tedious to go through both for the producer and viewer.
Now think of video. Go on… visualize a video. Most likely it’s much more entertaining than a PPT. So why don’t you use video instead? Oh it’s time consuming? Oh and expensive too? Nonsense!
When people think of video they either think of professionally produced hollywood-style masterpieces or low-quality user-generated chatter on YouTube. For training a sales rep or onboarding new hires, video just seems like too much.
That really shouldn’t be the case. Producing video for business should be as easy as creating a PowerPoint. In fact, it should be easier! That was our central theme when we presented at last week.
Now, I’m not asking you to toss those PowerPoints out the window and start from scratch. Think of your PPTs as a head-start. You have content to work with! Great! Now I’ll give you a few tips to turn them into videos. Start by uploading your PowerPoint into our Broadcast Studio. That itself will make it available online and allow it to be played like a video. Now for some tips to make it really feel like a video:
Narrate over as if you are presenting to an audience
The key here is to not read your PowerPoint. Talk over it hitting on some key points, but feel free to make your talk more free form. Also be mindful of the time you spend on each page. From experience, 15-20 seconds is great to aim for. Of course some pages will just have too much information to fit in that time, which leads me to the next tip.
Annotate (Draw, Sketch and Doodle)
You can increase the attention span of your viewer through movement. That’s where you take the pen tool in the Broadcast Studio and underline keywords, draw lines as callouts, draw little arrows, exclamation marks or circle things.
Use transitions that fit your content
I create stories through PowerPoints and use the wipe transition to give the story a timeline effect. Similarly, you can choose different transitions that turn your PPT into a narrative.
Record yourself through your webcam
Humans are social creatures. We learn better and are more engaged when there is a real person talking to us. Add videos in between pages to mix things up and change the flow. I recommend at least having one opening video introducing the content and a closing video to wrap things up.
Use music and draw to it
Who says you have to talk? Some pages may be a diagram or self-explanatory. Try uploading a short music file and just drawing over your content to the music.
All these 5 tips can be done directly in our Broadcast Studio, so there are no more excuses! Next time you think PowerPoint presentation, stop immediately. That will limit you in so many ways. Always, always, always think video.
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