A webinar audience is a special challenge. They are at work. Therefore, your presentation must answer the question: How does this benefit me? Otherwise, they will go right back to work. Ideally the slide should illustrate your idea in a word or an image. A slide should be easy to comprehend and command immediate interest; it’s a dramatic way to use content and keep your audience engaged. Otherwise, when each new slide comes into view, the human reaction is to start reading them. The more complex the slide, the greater effort your audience must make, fracturing their attention even more. Your slides will be understood visually, with the bulk of your audience’s attention on you, the speaker.
For inspiration, look at the master, Steve Jobs. There’s a micro-industry devoted to appreciating the power he brought to his presentations.
Good to Great author Jim Collins provides another perspective, the hedgehog principal, which can apply to webinars just as it does to transforming organizations. He says, “All good-to-great leaders, it turns out, are hedgehogs. They know how to simplify a complex world into a single, organizing idea—the kind of basic principle that unifies, organizes, and guides all decisions.” This is a wonderful way to consider how you build content in your webinar. You verbally provide the content, and the slides help your audience to understand the organizing principle, the value-added.
The best companies use an independent creative agency to provide what your colleagues may be unable to offer: brutal honesty. A creative agency can review, and/or create a style guide, and offer presentation guidelines to help your webinar slides avoid interfering with the spotlight, which should be on you.
