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Loading...Original content by AlexAnndra Ontra and James Ontra
Enhanced by Geetesh Bajaj
In the last part of this Presentation Management series of posts, we explored sharing and presenting options. In this part, we look at the last three aspects of a presentation’s life cycle: social engagement, reporting, and updating.
Social Sharing
PowerPoint is going social!
– Kristin Shevis, Chief Customer Officer for Clarifai, exclaimed back in 2018, when we first explained the social capability of our Shufflrr app.
It’s like Facebook or Instagram except the subject matter is your presentation content instead of your vacation pictures. (Yeah, I know, I’d prefer to see sandy beaches over org charts any day.) Users can follow, like, rate, comment, and converse about files and slides.
Here are some more aspects of using social engagement:
- Social provides spontaneous feedback in The Wheel, helping to improve the content’s quality for its next evolution.
- When you are collaborating with colleagues, you can see their comments directly on the slide or the file they affect, and then you can respond. Permissioned users can also see the conversation thread, so everyone can understand the context of the file and see how and why it evolved to its latest iteration.
- On an enterprise level, users can give direct feedback to their presentation team about the content in real-time. They can write a quick comment about what’s good on a slide, or bad, or how a client reacted in a meeting given 15 minutes ago. It helps the presentation director assess the quality of the content, what’s resonating in the field and why, and provides direction for edits and updates going forward.
- Social also provides a means to give input and share knowledge among the entire group, rather than waiting for that next big status meeting. And let’s be honest, by the time that status meeting comes around, you’ve forgotten about that slide anyway.
That’s why presentation management has commenting and other social features built-in, to keep the feedback loop continual and timely.
Reporting
Reporting makes presentations smarter. It gives you real intelligence about what’s working and what’s not. Data can be tracked across multiple variables: slide, file, user, group, time frame, and action. Actions are whatever you can do with a slide or file, such as upload, download, delete, update, view, share, broadcast, comment, like, rate, etc. You name it, it’s all tracked and time-stamped. Then, you can customize reports against any of these variables.
The reporting gives you real information, based upon which you can make real decisions. It helps determine what files and slides are used most often, by whom, and presented to whom? What are your most popular products? What messages have your clients been exposed to? And what have they actually purchased? From there you can determine best practices and encourage those practices across other members of your team.
Case Study: Charter Communications
Charter Communications used reporting to cut the fat. The presentation team used to create brochures, rate cards and long-form decks for every single business category across 91 local markets.
When the presentation team looked at their usage reports, they learned that their team of 1,500 reps barely used any of that content. They were successful without it.
As a result, the presentation team cut down the material they created to just one three-slide deck for each category. They stopped wasting time and money creating content that wasn’t needed. And the reps got a smaller, better-organized, library of content that was easier for them to search through.
The value of feedback in presentation management multiplies when the quantitative data in reports is combined with the qualitative feedback from social. A data log will tell you that a file was never used. But a comment from a user will tell you that the slide is butt ugly, and they are embarrassed to show it. The product wasn’t bad, just the messaging. And now you know how to fix that slide, and give your team better content. Feedback and analytics give a current and ongoing view of your marketplace.
And that brings us to…
Updating
Now that you have all of this great information about what products and content need to change, it’s useful and efficient to make the change once, and know that everyone in your organization will receive the updated version. It also helps to retire old, out-of-date, discontinued content. Ever sit in a meeting where your colleague pulls up last year’s pricing? Or worse, products that your company no longer sells? I guess he didn’t get the memo. With enterprise updating, you don’t need a memo. It just happens, automatically.
As Bob Davis of HealthTrust Purchasing Group notes,
We are always rewriting. Our account directors come back from a meeting with feedback and suggestions, and we go right back and rewrite the slides. We are always working on our slides.
With slide updating, he doesn’t worry that someone is using an older, outdated, wrong version.
With slide updating, there is a genealogy that occurs in presentations. One parent presentation begets children. When a slide is reused, dragged, and dropped into a newly created presentation, that new presentation becomes a child.
At U.S. Bank, one parent slide can exist in over 300 different presentations across the company. When the presentation director in the home office updates that one parent slide, all 300 versions get updated as well. That’s efficient, productive, compliant, and consistent messaging.
The easiest way to incent a change is to start with what’s familiar. The elements of presentation management are already familiar. We all know how to edit and create decks. Some of us are better at it than others, but in business, we’ve all made at least one presentation. We all know how to search through a network or a website to find content. Visualization and better search takes the frustration out of that process. We know how to share files on YouTube, Dropbox, and a million other formats all the time. That’s nothing new. We spend hours commenting and liking on social media, so it’s not a stretch to do the same with your presentation content. And finally, in this age of big data, we are relying more on metrics to see what’s trending, so we make smarter decisions going forward.
In business, we give presentations every day. The elements of presentation management are not new, but presentation management is a new approach to how we treat our content and value presentations as an enterprise marketing asset. Presentation management simply makes presentations better.
In the next post of this series, we will look at how presentations are the stories for business.
Presentation Management Series: All Posts
All posts from the Presentation Management series are listed on this page, Presentation Management: The Entire Series.
Quiz
First, try and answer these questions. Feel free to read the post again if needed. Then, scroll down to below the author profiles to find the answers.
Q1: How can users provide direct feedback to their presentation team about the content in real-time?
Q2: Reporting will not only track who is using which content, it guides better content and messaging decisions going forward. Is this true or false?
AlexAnndra Ontra, co-founder of Shufflrr, is a leading advocate for presentation management. She has been providing presentation technology and consulting services to global enterprises for over 15 years.
At Shufflrr, Alex advises Shufflrr clients through the process: from trial to content architecture, through the launch, training, and then on-going software upgrades. She’s hands-on. She is a leading expert in presentation management strategy, implementation, and adaptation.
James Ontra is co-founder and CEO of Shufflrr. His 30-year career has focused on the highest profile presentations for world class companies. His clients have included: American Express, Bloomberg, Epcot Center, Mercedes Benz, NBC Olympics, Warner Bros. and many more.
His vision and strategy have been driving Presentation Management to become a recognized communication discipline. James combined this passion with technical development to build Shufflrr. Presentation Management is smart communication strategy.
Geetesh Bajaj is an awarded Microsoft PowerPoint MVP (Most Valuable Professional), and has been designing and training with PowerPoint for more than two decades. He heads Indezine, a presentation design studio and content development organization based out of Hyderabad, India.
Geetesh believes that any PowerPoint presentation is a sum of its elements–these elements include abstract elements like story, consistency, and interactivity — and also slide elements like shapes, graphics, charts, text, sound, video, and animation. He explains how these elements work together in his training sessions. He has also authored six books on PowerPoint and Microsoft Office.
Quiz Answers
A1: On an enterprise level, users can write a quick comment about what’s good on a slide, or bad, or how a client reacted in a meeting given 15 minutes ago. This sort of feedback helps the presentation director assess the quality of the content, what’s resonating in the field and why, and provides direction for edits and updates going forward.
A2: This is true. Reporting makes presentations smarter. It gives you real intelligence about what’s working and what’s not. Data can be tracked across multiple variables: slide, file, user, group, time frame, and action. Actions are whatever you can do with a slide or file, such as upload, download, delete, update, view, share, broadcast, comment, like, rate, etc.
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