The art of telling your story

September 30th, 2009   Filed Under Storytelling  

A good story is not necessarily about great deeds and intriguing action – it is your motives and passion that makes it worth listening to.

“Two tomatoes were crossing the street. The first one got over, but a car hit the other one. The first one shouted Come on, ketchup!”

I guess you’ve heard that one before, huh? And – even though I have heard kids tell this joke with amazing passion and laughter in their eyes, causing me to laugh heartily – I cannot claim anything but: This is the most told and most not-funny joke in history.

In one of my storytelling classes a few years ago, we were given the following assignment: Tell the tomato joke. Tell it as a story; tell it like you mean it; tell it to thrill your audience. Impossible?? Not at all!

What if the first tomato is a small, scared kid tomato, while the other one is an obnoxious, annoying, large bully? Or what if these tomatoes just escaped from the tomato farm, running for their lives to avoid being slaughtered to ketchup? Or what if the hottest girl tomato ever is waiting for them on the other side? Or what if this road is a four-lane highway filled with monster trucks?

The story remains the same; two tomatoes crossing the street, one of them being squashed by a car – but the motive driving the story will lift it to a whole new level.

Take a look at your company’s story. It might look simple and boring at a first glance – but there’s always something beneath the surface. Which “what if’s” can you find? Which motives can drive your story? Which passions can you emphasize, making it worth listening too? I promise you, if you look close enough, you will find the motives that will drive your story from a common joke to a thrilling work of art.

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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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We have officially launched!

September 22nd, 2009   Filed Under Faculte  

It has taken weeks and months of hard work, and now we’re finally here:

Faculte has officially launched!

Thank you to all existing customers for your patience – and welcome to all the new ones!

… and here’s our press release

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Life Is a Pitch!

September 21st, 2009   Filed Under Faculte, Faculte Story  

It’s day 2 of our 4-day trip to San Diego. We’re down here for this year’s DEMOfall conference, where we’ll be officially launching our company and product, Faculte’s Broadcast Studio.

At DEMO, we are to pitch our company on stage in front of a crowd of fellow businesses, media, press and investors. Independently we’ve developed pitches for each of these audiences like a press release, investor presentation, product demo video and information to help our sale guys. Every time we make a pitch, we get to showcase our own product. Our pitch is how effective you can make your pitch through Faculte.

Preparing for the DEMO on-stage presentation was no different than any other pitch we’ve had to prepare. We faced yet again the same challenges that everyone faces whenever they set out to create a pitch:

DEMO handles part of the last challenge. They have assembled over 500 people to give us no more than 6 minutes of their time on stage. Our job is to captivate this audience with a moving speech and a powerful product demo.

Here are the lessons we picked up in our last few weeks of preparation:

Lesson #1: Unless you’re an experienced Orator, don’t have someone else write your script word-for-word.

You know your content and subject matter the best. Unless you have a masterful script writer, your writer won’t know how to write for your voice. I wrote the first draft of the script for our CEO, Maher, but it just didn’t sound right and he stumbled. He had to make it his own. You need to take it upon yourself to just get in front of a camera, start recording and talk your way through a few practice runs. The more times you rehearse, the more your speech will solidify itself and become ingrained in your head.

Lesson #2: Humor works well, BUT it’s always a fine line to walk

We all want to be funny. It lightens the tension for us, makes for a more entertaining pitch and keeps the audience interested. However, a lot of the time our humor is simply OUR humor, either an inside joke or overly contrived. If you want to add a bit of humor, make sure you field test it by doing a full run of your pitch to someone completely new to it. We’ve thrown in a subtle joke into our pitch. We only knew it worked, when we got laughs from strangers. Don’t forget to field test it!

Lesson #3: A pitch is a performance, BUT you’re not a very good actor

With a pitch, you want to emotionally engage the audience like great film or theatre. When on stage, you might use role playing or have planned dialogue between two people to emphasize a point. Be cautious of trying to be too much of an actor. Be sure to pick roles that you play every day. If you try and deviate too far, it will end up looking forced and unnatural, which is just plain painful to watch. In our pitch, I play the role of the marketing manager who has to make last minute changes to our pitch on request of the CEO. Guess what? That is my role. So it wasn’t much of a stretch! ;)

Lesson #4: Practice, Practice, Practice!

Do I have to write the word practice more times? Grab your colleagues, sit them down and make them listen. Just be wary of the feedback you get. Not all of it will steer you in the right direction and can actually complicate the process more. Choose your practice audience for their ability to give educated feedback based on their experience.

Lesson #5: Drive home one strong message, not five weak ones

Pick one central theme. Open with it. Stress it in the middle. Close with it. There is always  too much to say and too many points to cover. Use this central theme as your filter mechanism. If a point you want to make doesn’t directly connect to the theme, scrap it.

The DEMO conference will be streaming live on their website starting tomorrow. Click here to go to the live stream: Faculte’s presentation is at 10:00 am on Wednesday, September 23rd. Tune-in to see us on stage and let us know what you think of the pitch!

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Version 3.0 is released – and we are out of Beta!

September 9th, 2009   Filed Under Faculte  

The day we’ve been waiting for and working towards the past few months is finally here. Yesterday, we released version 3.0, and with that we’re out of Beta! This is very exiting!

With the new release we have a whole new set of features designed for business needs – the Premium Features. We now have a pricing plan, and those who choose to sign up for or upgrade to one of our paid Premium Accounts can now brand their playback pages and widgets, track their viewers’ email address, secure their broadcasts by using our contact list, and last but not least, have accounts with multiple producers where you can collaborate on both assets and broadcasts!

We are very excited and proud to make this big step and offer what we know businesses have been craving for a long time. And this is just the beginning, we’re not ready to lean back yet! We still have a lot in the works to make Faculte the best online multimedia communications platform designed for business needs.

Let’s dive right in and get you acquainted with our new Premium Features:

Branded Templates

When you have a Premium Account, you can brand the page that opens when your viewer clicks the shared link. You can also brand the player or widget that you embed on your website or blog. Add your own logo, change the background color, add a header image, footer text and links to your web pages. Now you can make the experience a complete match to your brand!

Branded Template example

Advanced Tracking

With a Premium Account we take tracking views of your broadcasts one step further. In addition to tracking number of views, sort them by date, source and organization, you have access to your viewer’s email address directly from the stats. That means you know exactly when a certain person has viewed your broadcast. This is perfect for following up on a prospect, ensuring that an employee has viewed your training material or knowing that a new lead has just registered to view your content.

Advanced security and contact list

Our contact list is very practical for sharing a broadcast – you can choose from a pre-made list instead of writing the email address every time you wish to share a broadcast. You can also group your contacts, so if you want to share a broadcast with let’s say your marketing department, you can select the “marketing department” list, without having to remember everybody’s name and email address.

The best part of this Premium Feature is: You can restrict access to one, several or all contacts! This means that only the viewer with that particular email address can watch your broadcast, and prevents your link to be shared with anyone else. So you can use Faculte for sensitive content without being worried that someone will forward your email.

Sharing Access Contact List

Collaboration

You can now have a Premium Account with multiple producers. This means you can create a broadcast with powerpoint slides, I can do the narration over the slides, our sales manager can add a personal webcam recording  and our marketing manager can create the branded player for the broadcast – without having to download anything, without having to fight over the same username and password, and in our own preferred place and time. I can give you access to all the files I have that you need and allow you to duplicate or edit my broadcasts – and vice versa.

If you have any questions regarding our Premium Features or Pricing Plans, please use the contact form in the bottom of our web pages!

On behalf of the whole Faculte Team, I thank our existing customers for their support and enthusiasm and welcome both the old and new customers to try out our new Premium Accounts. And if you have a special business need or ideas for great new features, let us know!

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