Webinars: watering down the wine

I wonder how much water you would add to a glass of wine before you couldn’t taste the wine anymore.  I expect that if you have a big, bold red wine it would take more water than if you have a lighter white wine. This analogy can be applied to webinars and presentations. In my opinion, webinars are watered down versions of presentations. Many of the important nuances of human communication are missing in a webinar, like body language, facial expression, the interactions between audience members and even the discussions at the coffee break. The presenter cannot gauge the audience’s response, nor can the audience fully “hear” the enthusiasm of the… Read More

Continue Reading

Is your presentation a futon?

  A couple of years ago I was explaining two of our medical imaging products to a hospital administrator.  I mentioned that one was a “dedicated” system for specific procedures and the other one was a “multipurpose” system.  She immediately commented on the multipurpose system, “Oh I see, it’s like a futon!”  I asked her what she meant and she said it’s in-between, like a futon, “Not really a couch and not really a bed.” A lot of presentations visuals that I see are like futons – not really a document (not enough detail) but not really presentation visuals (too much detail); they are caught in-between. While “multipurpose” may work… Read More

Continue Reading

How to SUCCES fully present your Turbo Encabulator.

The other day I received a link via Twitter for the original Turbo Encabulator movie on YouTube     (http://tinyurl.com/3z52s4x). It is worth watching; it is just under 2 minutes long. According to Wikipedia the movie was made in 1977, but the original technical description of the Turbo Encabulator appeared in 1942.  For those of you who don’t know (like I didn’t) what the Turbo Encabulator is, it’s a fictional machine and the presentation describing it is completely full of technobabble. I have been to presentations that sound a lot like the Turbo Encabulator presentation; I may have given presentations like it too.  The extensive use of technical jargon (technobabble) in a… Read More

Continue Reading