You may have a billion dollars in an account.  You may keep a ton of gold bullion in the vault.  You may even have 51% controlling interest on the Board.  But if you walk into your bank wearing a black ski mask, you’re not going to get the treatment you probably think you deserve.

We all know perceptions matter a great deal, and in a crisis situation, probably more so.  I read a tongue-in-cheek blog post listing crisis handling advice using real-world events.  Of course the point is to learn from other’s mistakes and do the OPPOSITE of each tip.

The main theme though is proper, clear, and honest communication will help avert a problem turning into a crisis--or a crisis becoming a disaster.  But while the bad examples in the blog post concern companies with larger than normal bankrolls--think BP--not all companies can get out to wherever and call a press conference.  And anyways, sometimes the scalpel is better than the sledgehammer.

We may not have millions for spin-control, but audio, web and video conferencing is the advantage for the rest of us.  As soon as a problem arises, we can have a conference call with everyone involved, from the CEO to the poor employee in the trenches.  We can get to what really happened, find out exactly what our customers think, know our resources, and discuss strategy with ideas from everyone at once.

And once we fully have the facts, we can have a video conference, getting our face in front of everyone affected.  We can use a web conference to illustrate and demonstrate exactly what has happened, and what we’re going to do about it.  We can let customers and everyone else air their grievances in the conference call and we can acknowledge their feelings and reassure them personally at the same time.

We can make all of this accessible to all--families, local businesses, the media--showing openness, acceptance of responsibility, and the will to do what’s right.  All of this can be done immediately through conferencing, no matter where any of our leadership, experts, employees, customers, or press are in the world.

Less is often more, and in PowerPoint, less is almost always more.  It’s more clear, it’s more simplified, and more conducive to getting our point across.  The king of “less” these days seems to be Takahashi Masayoshi, whose extremely zen style of PowerPoint slides caught the attention of Japan and the world.

We’ve talked about the concept of “less is more” before regarding PowerPoint, and we used Takahashi’s style as an example a few times too.  This time around, we’re going to focus on the part of the Takahashi Method that uses text as visuals.

It’s actually the catalyst of the Takahashi Method.  In the beginning, he had to give a short presentation, but didn’t have access to PowerPoint, photos, or even a graphics program.  So with text as his only option, he thought about how he could get his point across in a meaningful and memorable way.

What he did was take as few words as possible--and short words at that--and make them huge.  On each slide, one word filled the screen.  By doing this, the words stopped being text, and became visuals.  

If we were to do the same thing for our web conferences, each of our slides would be a title screen, a main point, a visual, a guide, and a message.  They would be read and understood instantly, and not take our participants attention away from us.  Our PowerPoint would be what it should be: an effective support to our presentation.

I really thought that I wasn’t old, but in my Junior year of college, I remember the first time I ever saw a student bring a laptop to class to take notes.  The teacher was hesitant to allow it but, “As long as you don’t play video games during the lecture, I guess it’s okay.”

Well check out this video of the modern college classroom, and one of the futures of learning:

How cool is that?  College students using Twitter to effectively outlearn the normal educational structure.  We can make similar strides in our audio, video and web conferences as well using short-message contribution systems.

Twitter is a great system for getting the thoughts, comments, and questions of a vast amount of people that wouldn’t normally be possible if gathered in the typical conference call Q&A style.  With a lot of participants for example, there just wouldn’t be enough time.  And what about shy people?  We might never hear from them verbally, but they’re typed contributions could be invaluable.

And it doesn’t have to be Twitter per se, there are private twitter-like programs out there.  Or, if you add a web conference to your conference call, you can use the chat feature.  There’s also instant messaging, and programs like Google wave, which allows emails, text, and IM to join a chat conversation.

The point is that by embracing and utilizing non-traditional communications mediums in our conference calls, we can look forward to much more effective collaborations.  And why not integrate Twitter and the like?  After all, it wasn’t too long ago that the simple conference call was itself a non-traditional communications medium.

One of the most important lessons gained growing up is learning from your mistakes.  An even better one is learning from other’s mistakes.  That’s what this blog post is about; spotlighting some poor design choices for web conference slide presentations, and suggesting what to do as an alternative.

First up, slide animations.  Movement catches the eye and can make a plain slide look pretty snazzy.  But that’s how it looks on our computers.  When sent over data lines to our participants, what is free-flowing to us may be choppy or frozen to them.  And of course, Murphy’s law dictates that something freezes on the worst possible frame.  Leave out the animations, go for a sweet looking still-photo instead.

Transition slides are a great concept... in theory.  Why wouldn’t we want have an empty slide with just the next topic in big, easy-read letters?  But what actually happens during the presentation when we get to these transition slides?  Most of the time we either skip quickly past them, read the title and go, or feel we have to do a long introduction to justify having that slide.  

Instead of introducing a section with a transition slide, it’s better to have a slide that has the section title, but includes other information on it as well.  This lets us inform and orient our participants without slowing down the presentation.

Wipes and dissolves are like fun noises on a new phone or computer that sing out whenever we do something: they get old fast.  But having a slide spiral out to reveal the next slide can be more than annoying on a web conference.  It can be detrimental as well.  What may work fine on our computers may not be so pretty on someone else’s.  And like animations, the desired effect could be lost in transit.

Here’s something else to think about.  We often go back to other slides to answer questions or revisit points.  It doesn’t look too good if it takes us forever to go through two or three slides because of all the star-wipes.

These are some of the mistakes we’ve learned to avoid.  What others would you add to the list?  Leave a comment and tell us about it.

Last week we talked about the importance, the make-or-break nature of the endings of presentations, lectures, meetings, etc.  Building on that, I found a great idea on the PowerPoint Tips Blog about using a visual slide for an effective summary and ending.

We already know that people learn faster, remember things better visually.  So it naturally follows that at the end of a web conference we should turn the PowerPoint back on to show a slide that summarizes the entire conference.

And what should be on that slide?  More pictures than text naturally, but we should carefully choose graphics that emphasize what we’ve covered rather than entertain, and organize them as we organized the conference.  For example, if the first main point of the conference is a spreadsheet action item for a specific person, then we could show a graphic of a spreadsheet with a picture of the person superimposed on it.

With just a glance, the person and the spreadsheet needed are now cemented in everyone’s mind.  To be most effective, we would want to keep the number of main points and their summary visuals down to five or six.  Any more than this will decrease the impact.

The PowerPoint Tips blog post goes through the summary slide creation process step-by-step, explaining exactly how to create a good looking and effective web conference summary.  If you decide to create a summary slide, we’d love to see it!  Take a screenshot and put the link to the picture in the comments section.

It’s all about the details, success is.  Or to put it another way, “for want of a nail the kingdom was lost”.  Let’s look at one--often overlooked--part of web conferencing that can run off potential customers long before they hear anything we have to say.

As pointed out by Ken Molay in the Webinar Blog, if done incorrectly webinar registration can “stink.”  To demonstrate his thoughts, he details a recent frustrating attempt to set up a webinar.   The sticky point was the non-user friendly terms of use that he and his participants would have to accept before beginning the webinar.

It’s actually funny in a tragic way.  The tiny scrolling text box could only be read a couple of lines at a time, but when Molay pasted the terms into a Word document it was thirteen pages long!  (And even the act of cutting and pasting was a struggle).  

He put himself through that ordeal because he didn’t want his participants—or himself—to commit to something blind, and felt that regardless, his participants shouldn’t have to deal with it at all.  Almost inevitably, after all that work he ended up choosing a different webinar provider.

Now Molay was the organizer; can you imagine what potential customers must think when they have to jump through such hoops?  And what about the other info boxes they have to fill out, are there too many questions asked, confusing directions, or awkward interfaces?

These are the questions we need to ask as we get ready to put on a web conference, especially when it’s an “Everyone’s invited, just sign up!” type of event.  We should make sure that registration is a simple process for our potential customers, perhaps even informative…

Because we want them to join us, not navigate away to other, more simple pursuits.