Online PowerPoint Presentation.com

A key element in producing an influential online PowerPoint presentation is tailoring it to your audience and effectively presenting the material. Content is what drives your online PowerPoint presentation. It’s easy to get lost in the fancy multimedia features that PowerPoint offers, however fancy graphics and animations are no substitute for quality content. Without it, you’ll quickly lose your audience.

A good online PowerPoint presentation should follow this structure:

• Attention-getting opener
• Brief overview of the topic
• Describe what your audience needs, that is, the problem
• Explain how your solution meets that need
• Tell how your audience can implement your solution - that is, action steps
• Brief summary and conclusion

By organizing an online presentation into this six-step structure, you can ensure a logical flow that everyone can easily follow even when you’re not physically there to deliver the presentation and make eye contact with your audience. The material in each step must be simple and organized. Create a separate outline to use as notes, so you’re not reading directly from the online presentation. By concentrating on your text in outline form, you can easily write down your ideas, see the flow of the entire presentation at once, and move ideas from one place to another so they flow more logically.

Openings are the toughest part for most presenters. Like most impressions, you have less than 15 seconds to make a good first one. Many presenters have different styles for starting their online meetings. Some open with a joke or anecdote to calm there own nerves and some start talking immediately to cover up their anxiety or to project confidence.

In an online PowerPoint presentation, you usually can not directly see your audience, so the non-verbal cues that you would find in a standard meeting don’t apply. Open with a personal story that reflects your humanness. Your opening line is the most critical line which should connect with the audience.

Again, since you can not make eye-contact with your audience, you need to speak naturally and in a friendly manner. Reading directly from your notes or slides will quickly lose the attention of your audience. Speak as if you are merely having a conversation with individuals, who happen to be in a group. Speak in short, concise sentences, pausing frequently to really connect with individuals. Open the online meeting to questions at the end of each topic, or when presenting material that may be difficult to understand.

Use humor based on your own experiences and limitations as a human being. In this era of political correctness, jokes can easily offend or get you in trouble. Personal stories are limited to you and are often endearing. If the audience feels that they can connect with you on a personal level, they are much more likely to feel they can relate to the information you are presenting.

It’s usually pretty simple to tell when someone is speaking to an online PowerPoint presentation that someone else has put together. You may hear or see expressions of surprise or puzzlement or even comments that a graphic is especially good. You can have someone else prepare your slides and even have someone else manage the online meeting, but you have to own the presentation as if you created it. When you are completely familiar with the presentation and are comfortable working through the slides, you become free to connect with your audience and stand out as a presenter.

While online PowerPoint presentations will not take the place of communication skills, it can be a great tool for enhancing and improving presentation skills. Through practice, repetition and hard work, you can learn to be a great presenter by studying and using the right tools. Mind you, that the best speakers and presenters are the ones who are able to speak in a way that is most congruent with their own personality. The more authentic you are on your subject and to your audience, the more effective the communicator you are. The strength of online PowerPoint presentations and webcasts are that they give you the flexibility to use your own style and clearly get your message across to your audience.

The phrase “in conclusion” is used too frequently and often without actually being at the very end of a presentation. “In conclusion” is a signal to your audience to start paying attention again and make sure that they receive the key take-away messages that they might have missed while checking their email or paying their bills while only half paying attention to your online PowerPoint presentation.

Too many presenters falsely signal the end of their presentation with this phrase and the problem is they rarely actually conclude with a concise trailing statement. I’ve been in webinars and seen online presentations where the speaker has said “in conclusion” nine times during his presentation. If you really want to annoy and lose the attention of your audience, say “in conclusion,” and then keep on going for another ten or twenty minutes.

The best thing to do is simply avoid the phrase “in conclusion” altogether.  If you have a well organized online PowerPoint presentation that focuses and repeats your key messages, your audience will have absorbed that information by the time your presentation ends. Leave your audience with something more thought-provoking, or if the online meeting was more light-hearted, use something appropriately humorous. You want to leave your audience looking forward to your next presentation, not dreading it.

Message retention is the most important take-away in any online PowerPoint presentation. Your entire presentation should revolve around only a couple key messages. The universal rule in message retention is repetition.

Start off your online PowerPoint by telling them what you are going to tell them, second, tell them, and finally tell them what you just told them. While you’re telling them, tell them over and over again. While repeating the exact same thing word-for-word will drive your audience insane, you can instead make an important point and use several different illustrations to drive that key message home.

If you want the audience to remember the important points in your message, you have to make each point in 3-6 different ways. According to one study, if you make a point only a single time, by the end of your presentation, just 10% of your audience will remember it. If you repeat a point as many as six times, retention then jumps to 90%. Without repetition, 40% of your audience will forget almost everything you said within 20 minutes of your conclusion. Within 24 hours, 70% of the audience will have forgot almost 100% of your message.

When participating in an online PowerPoint meeting and communicating via teleconference, there are ground rules that all participants should abide by. Physical cues and facial expressions that assist in conveying your message in person are not available during a teleconference.

Unlike physical meetings, where it can be easy to slip in without disturbing the meeting, most teleconferencing services have an audible notification when someone else joins the teleconference. The meeting then usually pauses for that person to identify who they are and can be annoying when the meeting has to stop for each person that joins late. Plan on logging on 15 minutes before the start of the meeting so people can introduce themselves and the meeting can start on time. These same ground rules apply for video conferences.

Be aware of background noise. If you have dogs barking, or noisy traffic outside, it can be quite disturbing to the rest of the participants in the meeting. If you are in a noisy environment and can not help it, use the handset and not the speaker phone to reduce this noise as much as possible. The “mute” button can be used to prevent background noise, however the pause for you to turn off mute before you can answer the question prevents the conversations from flowing freely. Use the mute button only if you have to. When you do participate in the conversation, state your name and be sure to speak clearly, so the rest of the meeting participants can identify who is speaking. If your phone system has “hold” music or information when you put a phone line on hold, be aware that if you press hold during your teleconference, the entire meeting will have to hear that until you return.

It is your responsibility to pay attention and fully participate in online meetings and teleconferences. Turn off your cell phones and PDA. Don’t browse the web or check your email. Treat the teleconference and its participants with the same respect and attention you would an actual meeting to get the maximum benefit of the technology.