J- shuffled in and out of the living room, listless and bored. As part of a 9-week simulation of real life in school, she and her classmates had been assigned jobs. Her job was to be an accountant, and the tedium of checking dozens of pretend tax returns had long sunk in. W- had encouraged her to use a calculator, so at least she didn’t have to multiple all those figures by hand, but there were still so many numbers to verify.

My geek sense tingled, as it does whenever there’s an opportunity for a quick win through automation. I coaxed her back to her homework. “Come on, let’s set up a spreadsheet,” I said. “That way, you don’t have to redo each of the calculations or worry about getting things wrong.”

We brought up OpenOffice.org Calc. She was still lackluster, so I took the lead in creating the spreadsheet. I asked her which tax return we could use as a model, and she picked hers. We started filling in the formulas, checking her work along the way. (We found and fixed an error in her tax return, too!) Then we tested the spreadsheet on a few other tax returns she had manually done, and she used it to check the rest.

Result: Not only could she verify a correct tax return in less than a minute, but she perked up and started having fun with it. She made a pile of correct tax returns and a pile of incorrect ones, with sticky notes pointing out the deficiencies. She still doesn’t want to be an accountant again, but at least she knows that tedious tasks might be automated away.

The next time J- finds herself doing tedious calculations or verifications, I hope she thinks about how much faster, more reliable, and more enjoyable the spreadsheet was compared to calculating things step by step, and perhaps invest time into learning how to automate whatever she needs to do.

How do people learn how to automate? It’s such a time-saving skill, but it doesn’t seem all that common. Maybe people are intimidated by spreadsheets and programming languages, and that fear of losing more time keeps them from gradually building the knowledge they need to save lots of time. If we can show J- and other kids the benefits of automating, maybe that light at the end of the tunnel will encourage them to learn. If we expose them to the methods for automating tasks, such as putting calculations into a spreadsheet, creating keyboard macros, or writing short programs, maybe they’ll realize it’s not scary – and maybe they’ll start modifying or creating new tools.

In my experience, working with new automating frameworks is always slow and somewhat frustrating in the beginning. It helps that I don’t usually need or want to automate everything right away. I break things down into small things, small wins. I might start by figuring out the most time-consuming parts and automating that 10%, or automating the most common operations. As I become more familiar with the tools and the process, I automate a little bit more, and more, and more. Eventually I might even create a tool that other people can use, like the way my Community Toolkit for Lotus Connections is off and running.

The hardest thing, I guess, is knowing where to start. I run into that problem a lot, because I work with lots of different technologies and frameworks. It’s like looking for the end of a tangled piece of string. That can be hard to find in the confusion, but once you do, you can start unknotting the mess. I want J- to be able to think: ah, this has to do with calculations, maybe I can get a handle on it by using a spreadsheet, putting in manual steps if needed.

How do you use teachable moments to encourage people to automate?

2011-03-29 Tue 21:09

Paul Gillin invited me to do a tweetchat on the professional and personal value of blogging yesterday. When I brainstormed some of the things I’d like to talk about, I ended up with a big list: not just the value I get from blogging, but also tips for how you can build that too. I hope you enjoy this blog series!

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1. ROI

Blog your work to increase your return on investment or effort by remembering more effectively and by reaching more people.

How much time do you spend solving problems similar to what you’ve encountered before, answering questions you’ve already answered before, or remembering information you need to solve new challenges? Take notes and save that time.

How much time can you save other people if you share your notes with them? Are there other people in your organization, client base, or network who could benefit from your solutions? Share your notes.

Tips:

• Invest the extra minutes in taking and sharing notes in order to increase your ROI.

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2. Questions, updates, resources, and serendipitous conversations

One of the challenges of blogging is that you don’t know who’s going to read it. That’s also one of the advantages. When you ask a question, you might be surprised by who answers it – perhaps someone you wouldn’t have thought of asking. When you post an update, you might make an unexpected connection with someone else, and learn about resources you might not have discovered on your own. When you talk about something you’re working on, you might end up in a serendipitous conversation with someone who can make use of it or help you with it. It’s the online equivalent of the lucky hallway chat, except with a lot more people in the virtual hallway.

Tips:

• Make it easy for people to discover your updates or even subscribe to them.

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3. Connection

If you add personal touches to your professional blog, you can make it easier for potential clients and coworkers to connect with you through common interests. Write about why you do the work that you do and what you love about it. Write about your other interests, too.

Tips:

• Don’t be afraid of bringing your personality to your blog. Use it to connect with people.

Example:

• Maybe people really are generous with their wisdom

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4. Reputation

Blog your work to build your reputation. When people read about what you’re working on, they learn about your skills and get a sense of who you are as a person. The next time they come across a challenge that looks like it’s a good fit, they might think of you and refer the opportunity to you. Particularly if you’re starting out, sharing your knowledge will help you build your network and your reputation.

Tips:

• Use your blog to demonstrate your skills and your character.
• Invest time into building thought leadership through blog posts, articles, and presentations.

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5. Jobs and careers

A blog can help you look for a great job or plan your career. Use it to explore your strengths and figure out how to communicate them. Use it to think about what kinds of companies would be a good fit for you, and where you would be a good fit. Use it to connect with people and ask them for help. Use it to reflect on where you want to go with your career and what kind of value you want to create.

Tips:

• Don’t beg for a job. Use your blog to communicate strength, passion, and professionalism.
• Build a network of mentors and friends. Connect with people and ask them for advice.

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6. Accountability and transparency

Blogging is a great way to make public commitments and hold yourself to them. You can use this for both personal and professional goals..

If you speak on behalf of a company, then you definitely need a fast way to respond to any issues that come up. With the speed of conversation on Twitter and blogs, you can’t wait for press releases. Establish this channel before a public relations crisis comes up. It’s better to admit a mistake and work with people on resolving it than to stonewall.

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7. Culture

Whether you’re an executive or a newcomer, you can influence the culture of your organization through what you share. When you share what you know through your blog, you encourage a culture of knowledge-sharing. When you add a personal touch, you contribute to a culture of human connection. When you show that you aren’t afraid of making mistakes and learning from them, you develop a culture of growth. This can have a powerful effect on your organization, both online and offline.

Tips:

• Consider the fit between how you want to write and what the existing culture is. Be prepared for differences, and modify your approach accordingly. For example, if you want to shift your surrounding culture to share more, anticipate and address people’s concerns.
• If you’re a leader, take the initiative in demonstrating the kind of company culture you want to encourage.

 

Paul Gillin invited me to do a tweetchat on the professional and personal value of blogging on March 3, 2011 (2pm-3pm EST, #infoboom). When I brainstormed some of the things I’d like to talk about, I ended up with a big list: not just the value I get from blogging, but also tips for how you can build that too. I hope you enjoy this blog series!

You might feel awkward in the beginning, but trust me, all that writing practice from your blog will pay off. Blogging is a great way to figure out not only what you want to say, but how you want to say it. Better communication skills will help you at work and in life!

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1. Writing

• Blogging helped me fall in love with writing. I got frustrated in school, writing book reports and essays that didn’t really matter. When I started blogging, I discovered the joy of writing for myself and others. It turned out to be a lot of fun, and now writing is one of my favourite activities. It pays off at work, too.Tips:
• Practise outlining or mindmapping your blog posts. As you get better at planning your posts, you’ll be able to write them more quickly.
• Review your old posts and revise them. Figure out what you keep writing about, and summarize or update your posts.
• Read lots of blogs to get a sense of the kinds of blog posts you enjoy reading. Emulate different styles and challenge yourself to try different techniques.
• Don’t let perfectionism stop you from writing. Your blog posts may feel like rough drafts, but you’ll get better at writing over time.

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2. Visual communication

Whether you’re writing a professional blog or a personal blog, it can be good to add visual interest through photographs or drawings. You can develop an eye for images and visual communication by including Creative Commons-licensed photos or stock photos in your posts, appropriately attributed when necessary. You can also take your own pictures or draw your own illustrations, adding more of a personal touch to your blog while helping you develop your skills.

My blog–and the presentations that grew out of it–helped me rediscover drawing. You can see the evolution of my sketches from scrawny stick-figures on a Nintendo DS to slighly-less-scrawny stick figures on a tablet PC. I’ve come to enjoy drawing, and sometimes people even ask me to draw something for them.

Tips:

• Add something visual to your blog – either something you made, or a relevant image from the Internet. (Respect copyright.)
• One way to get better at photography or drawing is to set a public goal of posting a photo or sketch regularly (ex: one photo a day). Give it a try!

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3. Presentation

If you give presentations, a blog can be an incredible resource. You can use your blog to draft and share ideas, collect material, get feedback, share your presentation, and follow up with people.

Many of my presentations have grown out of blog posts, and I’ve received a number of invitations to speak from people who’ve come across my posts. My blog gives me a place to try ideas out, refine them, get feedback, and put together presentations.

Tips:

• Post your presentations and share the URLs when you give presentations. This gives people a way to follow up.
• Post your outlines and presentation ideas on your blog, and use your blog posts to draft presentations or collect material. This will make it easier to prepare presentations later, and you can learn from other people’s feedback along the way.

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4. Conversation

Blogs make conversations so much easier for me. When I talk to people, I often find myself thinking about or referring to things I’ve written. It really helps to have thought about some things and be able to express them clearly, and I love sharing additional resources.

My blog posts have also led to all sorts of conversations I wouldn’t have had otherwise. I sometimes find it difficult to start a conversation. Fortunately, people read my blog and start the conversation with me, both online and in person.

Conversations lead to blog posts, too. There, my blog gives me the opportunity to continue the conversation, reflect on things I’m learning, and share them with a wider audience. I get to show my appreciation for the insights people have shared with me, and I get to learn from other people’s perspectives.

Tips:

• Write about things people might find useful, then blend these thoughts into your conversations where appropriate.
• Follow up on conversations in your blog.

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5. Avoiding the curse of expertise

Many people don’t want to write about things they don’t feel are their expertise. Experts are experts because they’ve achieved unconscious competence; they’ve forgotten more than other people have learned. Experts often have a hard time explaining things to other people because they’ve forgotten the details that stump newcomers. So experts aren’t really the best people who can write about things, especially for beginners. It’s better to write along the way, while you’re learning, so that people can understand and so that you won’t take things for granted.

Tips:

• Don’t wait until you’re an expert. Write while you’re learning.
• Use your archive to remember what it was like to learn something complicated.

 

Paul Gillin invited me to do a tweetchat on the professional and personal value of blogging on March 3, 2011 (2pm-3pm EST, #infoboom). When I brainstormed some of the things I’d like to talk about, I ended up with a big list: not just the value I get from blogging, but also tips for how you can build that too. I hope you enjoy this blog series!

A blog is an incredible way to connect with people. It helps people get to know who you are, what you’re interested in, what you’re good at, who you know, what you’re working on, and any entity till they got to share. Reading a blog, people can find out what you have in common with them, how you can help them, and how they can help you.

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1. Introduction

People like getting to know people. When you make a new acquaintance, you might look them up on the Internet to find out more about them. Likewise, people look you up to find out more about you. A blog can be like your self-introduction. Your about page can include a short biography, and your blog posts can provide further details for people who want to know more.

Make it easy for new acquaintances to find your blog by adding it to your e-mail signature, business card, and social networking profiles. That way, people can read your blog to build on a brief introduction. As a result, a prospective client or new acquaintance might discover common ground with you. It speeds up the process of introduction, and simplifies getting to know people.

Don’t count on being anonymous or obscure. If you have a blog that you’d rather people didn’t read, you might have a problem in the future. Even systems with privacy controls can disclose data through programming errors, accidents, or malicious use. Before you post something, think about whether you can deal with the consequences of sharing it. Don’t let that scare you away from sharing, though! People are generally good, and they probably won’t hold minor mistakes against you.

Tips:

• Add a short biography to your about page. Keep in mind that this may be seen by both professional and personal contacts.
• Add your blog URL to your e-mail signature, card, social network profiles, and other places people might check.

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2. Deepening the connection

How do people go from being acquaintances to colleagues or friends? How can you develop a chance conversation at a networking event into a partnership that last years? Shared experiences and personal knowledge go along way to deepening that connection, and you can help that along through your blog.

I find this aspect of blogging really helpful. It’s difficult for me to e-mail people to stay in touch, because I don’t want to waste people’s time. I’m often pleasantly surprised to hear from people who have kept in touch with me anyway by reading my blog. I appreciate being able to read other people’s blog posts and status updates as a way of finding out more about them without getting in their way. The conversation might grow in this low-key way until it becomes a friendship.

Tips:

• Post regularly to give people reasons to come back.
• Make sure that it’s easy to subscribe to your blog through feeds or e-mail.
• Keep an eye out for people who regularly comment on your blog or talk to you about what you’ve written, and invest time in learning more about them.

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3. Appreciation

A thank-you note is good; a public thank-you, done well, is even better. When you share what you’ve learned from people and your appreciation for how they’ve helped, that builds your relationship with those people, inspires others, and reflects well on you. It also helps people confirm what they’ve helped you learn and to share that with others – a great way to pay mentors back.

Tips:

• Use your blog to show your appreciation for people. Be positive – don’t use it for passive-aggressive “appreciation”!
• When someone takes the time to mentor you, share your lessons learned if possible. That way, your mentor can check it and share it with others.

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4. Reaching out

A blog gives you both a reason and a way to reach out to people. If you’d like to talk to people but you aren’t sure how to start the conversation, you might write about those people on your blog. For example, you could share what you’re learning from them her even from a distance, and what you might want to talk to them about. Many people regularly search for their name, and they might come across your post and start the conversation. It’s an interesting way to meet book authors, thoughtleaders, and other people active on the Internet.

Don’t expect a response, but be ready in case people reach out. Who knows? Maybe you can even ask a question, and maybe people will share a quick answer. It can pay to ask.

Tips:

• Show your interest, but don’t be creepy. Yes to admiration, no to stalking.
• If you reach out to people through e-mail, you can mention your blog post about them as a way of sharing what you’ve been learning from them.
• Look for something of value that you can bring to the conversation, even if it’s a really good question. Don’t reach out just for the sake of getting an e-mail from an A-lister, and don’t beg people for a link back from their blog.

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5. The great conversation

Around the world, lots of conversations are happening through blogs. Someone posts an idea. Others write blog posts linking to the first post and sharing their thoughts. Yet others write blog posts following up on those posts. Along the way, people comment on blog posts, share their reactions on Twitter and other social networks, and talk about posts in person or through e-mail.

Participating in the conversation is so much better when you have your own blog. You can write longer posts in it, and you can build an archive of your thoughts. If people think your thoughts are interesting, they can explore your blog to find out more. If your thoughts are sprinkled in comments on different blog posts, it’s harder for others to get that sense of you.

You’ll still want to reach out to other people through commenting on their blogs, of course. Many blogs can automatically detect blog posts that link to them, but it’s nice to leave a comment summarizing your thoughts and thanking people for the inspiration. Don’t make your comments all about you, though! When you’re commenting on people’s blogs, it’s like you’re chatting in their living room. You wouldn’t want to make the conversation all about you. Read comments on other people’s blogs to get a sense of the etiquette. Blatant self-promotion doesn’t work well. Focus on adding value to conversations on other blogs, and link to a relevant blog post if you’ve written about something in more details.

Tips:

• When you read a blog post that inspires you to think about it, write a blog post and link
• Look for blogs on topics you’re interested in. Read the comments for a while to get a sense of what the discussion is like. Try posting a few comments. When you find yourself wanting to say more, post those thoughts on your blog, and link to it. (But nicely!)

In 2009, I decided to limit my blog to around one post a day. I wrote as many notes as I wanted in a private text file, and selected only one or two to share each day.

People liked the new frequency. They found it more manageable. Instead of getting three or four e-mails or feed items a day, they got one or two.

I liked the new frequency too. I started shuffling blog posts around depending on how useful I thought they would be to others. This was generally a good thing, as I put off publishing slice-of-life posts whenever I had tips to share. Sometimes, though, I ended up with “stale” blog posts that I wanted to share but didn’t. In a medium as current as a blog, it seems weird to write about something that happened three days ago. After a few tries at keeping a scheduled queue of posts in my WordPress blog, I turned to keeping the posts in my Org file instead because it was easier to choose which post to publish than to keep shuffling dates around in WordPress.

Sometimes I’d post more than one blog post anyway. Looking at my double- and triple-post days, most of those posts followed up on conversations, and I’m glad I posted them when I did. If I’m writing something that I think might be generally useful, I’d rather blog it than keep it in e-mail. Whenever I tried to stick closely to my one-post-a-day rule, I found myself postponing responses instead of, say, copying and pasting the relevant tips into an HTML mail. Postponing responses didn’t help with Inbox Zero or quick conversations, so I often decided to just go ahead and post. Rhythm can make or break an asynchronous conversation.

Rhythm affected my writing, too. Whenever I had plenty of many scheduled posts lined up, I found myself spending days without writing. While there were days that I welcomed the extra time, it was throwing off my routines. I felt like I was binge-writing: gorging myself on writing, then putting it off until the need to write and think drove me back to the keyboard or the pen. There were very few dull days that passed without a story, a lesson, or an idea I wanted to share, so although I was trying to keep to one post a day, I itched to write more, and new items often pre-empted things in the backlog until those things were no longer relevant.

It’s a tradeoff among different people’s needs. On one hand, posting short tips frequently would benefit conversational partners as well as searchers. On the other hand, posting too frequently would give subscribers negative value. I guess the chart looks a little like what’s on the right – but what were the numbers? Would subscribers get impatient with two posts a day? At what point would searchers get diminishing returns from posts that were too sparse and quickly written? And what about what I wanted from my blog – a way to remember and share life? I found myself posting more generally useful posts about writing and blogging instead of ephemeral memories, glimpses of life – but I loved the chance connections I had when I wrote about things like burning pancakes or planting in the garden. I’d hate to become yet another generic blogger writing bland, inarguable, and impersonal tips, or to write for what I thought might be the widest use when there might be interesting things to explore in the nooks and crannies of life.

It’s a trade-off between other factors, too. Should I write fewer posts, but longer ones? I like sticking to one thought per blog post, though. Maybe I should do “reader mailbag”-type posts, but that probably still requires more of a weekly routine, and I do like posting people-related updates within a day or two. I’d like to spend some time revisiting old posts or sharing my reflections on other people’s posts. How do I fit that in around the new things I want to write about? And I’ve been meaning to move time away from writing to other activities. Perhaps I’ll be more ruthless about prioritizing what to write about, and leave other unfinished ideas as drafts in my private notes – or maybe I’ll drop hints about things I’d like to think about, in case other people can point out things they’d like to learn more about as well.

Data can help explore decisions things like this. Before I put a lot of time into figuring out whether I can set up a separate “firehose” category in my blog that gets excluded from e-mail notifications and feeds until I promote posts into the regular stream, I can find out how often I might need it, what effects it might have, and whether it’s worth looking into. Instead of thinking about this in a vacuum, I decided to conduct a little post-analysis. I wanted to know:

• How often do I post more than one thing a day?
• Am I more consistent in the number of posts now than before? Consistency is good for subscribers; you want to know that I’m not going to suddenly overwhelm you with mail/items. (Well, aside from that mail snafu I had, but things should be working smoothly now.)
• Am I writing longer posts?
• How is that related to, say, the number of comments people leave on my posts?

A little number-crunching, and voila:

The red line shows the number of posts. As you can see, I’ve gone from really spikey to a somewhat more consistent line hovering at around 30 posts a month. This means you can subscribe without fear, or check back roughly every morning.

The blue line shows that my average post length (in terms of characters) is somewhat spikey, and it seems to be increasing.  So, yes, I’m writing longer posts. It’s plotted on the secondary axis (0..7000) so that the other lines aren’t drowned out.

The green line shows the number of comments. My spreadsheet doesn’t show any strong correlations with either my post length or the number of posts, so it doesn’t look like I’m scaring people off with long posts or too-frequent posts.

As it turns out, I’m actually pretty good at keeping to around one or two posts per day. This year’s had an average of 1.1 posts per day, well within reason (and subscriber patience, I hope). Knowing this means I don’t need to spend a lot of time fiddling with this decision, although I do want to find the rough spots and figure out how I can smooth them over.

So here’s what I’m going to try next:

• I’m going to change my “normal” level to one or two posts a day instead of just one, which means I can feel less guilty when I post two or even three blog posts on one day.
• If I have multiple conversation follow-ups, I’ll combine them into a mailbag-type post instead of sticking to the one-thought-per-post guideline. This means I can get responses out in a timely way without ending up with three or four additional posts.
• I might build in more revision into my writing routines, so I can get better at writing and I can express things even more clearly and concisely. This could be the second post in a day if I don’t have any conversation follow-ups. If I’m disciplined about limiting my writing time and just doing quick descriptions of other stories/ideas I want to write about, then this could also be the time I spend reviewing those and fleshing those out.
• I’m going to try to show more of those here-and-now moments instead of just keeping them in the backlog. It’s probably inconsequential that I feel happy about the grass peeking through the patchy snow. I like it, and I want to get better at writing not only about tips, but about life. =)
• I’ll channel the rest of my darn-I-want-to-write-about-that-too frustration into drawing and other communication skills I want to practice.

Sounds like a plan.

Have you come across this blog through a search? Do you read this blog regularly? Do you subscribe to updates (thanks!)? What would make it work better for you? What have you seen working on other personal blogs?

A friend of mine is a new IBM consultant who wants to learn more about and develop a reputation in social analytics. I thought I’d share some tips on how to learn and build a reputation along the way.

Pick your field carefully. Another mentor of mine said that emerging technologies offer the best opportunities. In a new field, it’s easier to not only catch up, but even distinguish yourself. In mature fields, it’s hard to compete with people who have years of experience. Even in mature fields, though, you might be able to find niches where things are rapidly changing.

Read. Read everything about that topic that you can get your hands on. Learn how to speed-read if you don’t already do so. Don’t worry about words you don’t understand or concepts that are too complex. Gradually, as you absorb more information, more of the things you’ve read will make sense to you.

Stay up to date. Find the key players in the space that you’re working on. Check out their blogs, their presentations, their tweets – whatever you can get that gives you more information. Set up searches and alerts so that you can find new material as it gets published.

Use bookmarks to organize your research. You’re going to immerse yourself in a flood of information. Use social bookmarking systems like Lotus Connections Bookmarks or Delicious to keep track of interesting things you’ve read, and to organize resources into your own categories. That way, when you need to find something again or if you want to send someone a link, you can quickly get it along with related resources.

Collect examples of ideas being been applied to real life. If you’re interested in Web 2.0 and financial services, you need to be able to tell stories about innovative companies and the results they’re seeing. If you’re interested in social analytics, find case studies where analytics has led to increased collaboration and productivity. Learn about pitfalls and challenges, too. There’s no substitute for experience, but awareness is a good start – and that can help you brainstorm opportunities for you to get involved.

Write notes and look for ways to explain ideas in simpler terms. Summarize what other people have said. Link to resources people might find useful. Share examples and the principles they demonstrate. Share your notes on a blog. Make presentations and volunteer to speak. This helps you understand a topic deeper and build the beginning of a reputation.

What can you write about? Write about what you’re learning and why. Write about the mistakes you made and how you solved them (or are trying to solve them!). Write about how you’re learning and from whom. Write about the resources out there. Write about the things you’re finding out. Write about the connections between your topic of interest and other things you know about. Write about what you want to learn next. There are plenty of things you can share, even as a beginner.

Experiment. Can you try things out yourself? Apply the ideas to your own life and share the results. As you build credibility, you might be able to convince your team to give a new practice a try. Share those results, too. Come up with ideas and try them out. Use these experiences to convince people to let you work on projects.

Volunteer and expand your responsibilities. Make sure your manager, your mentors, and your coworkers know what you’re interested in learning or doing. Volunteer to help with projects or presentations that need to be done. Ask your manager to help you structure a way to learn on the job.

Learn. Share what you’re learning along the way. Experiment. Volunteer and expand your responsibilities. You can go from being a newbie to being known in surprisingly little time, but you need to get out there and make things happen. Good luck!

I’ve been invited to re-do my Remote Presentations That Rock presentation this February. I can’t resist improving presentations every time I give them. What do you think of this?

This presentation and speaker notes will be available at URL. (If giving this remotely: Please feel free to use the text chat to ask questions and share your thoughts throughout the presentation.)

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Remote presentations are harder than in-person presentations, but they can also be more powerful. Yes, you’re limited in terms of body language and delivery. Yes, you have to compete with e-mail, Sametime, and a million interruptions. But if you know how to work with the strengths of remote presentations, you can reach people more effectively and more intimately.

Let’s talk about the biggest challenge for remote presentations: the fact that it’s so easy for people to get distracted or to walk away. In real life, most people won’t walk out the back door. They’ll stick around long enough for you to make your main points. Online, if you lose people’s attention, it can be very hard to get it back. And it’s doubly tough because you can’t read people’s body language. You can’t see if people are interested or if they’re off checking mail, and you can’t pull them back by saying something interesting if they’ve already hung up.

You’ve got to offer people something they can’t get from reading your the slides or listening to the recording. Why is it worth paying attention to you? For me, that comes down to two things: energy and interaction.

Energy

Why should people attend your presentation? People aren’t going to come just to hear the facts or numbers. They can get that from the slides. If you’re a leader, they want to hear your confidence, maybe get a better sense of who you are as a person. Even if you’re not an executive – even if, say, you’re an IT specialist presenting a technical topic – you’ve got to bring your energy to your presentation, to show people why it matters to you and why it matters to them.

A huge part of this is your voice. You need to sound like you, and you need to sound like the presentation is worthwhile. If people give in to the temptation to multitask, your voice is going to be the only thing that can bring them back. Emphasize your key points by changing your pace, changing your pitch, pausing, repeating things. Let your message come through in your voice. Energy. Urgency. Confidence.

You’ll be surprised by how much little things matter. Get a phone headset so that you can breathe properly and so that you don’t get a crick in your neck. Stand up if that helps you get into the “presentation mode”. Have pictures of people around if that helps you remember that you’re talking to real people so that you can make that connection. Turn off the conference entry/exit tones so that you aren’t competing with (or distracted by) beeps.

Another, powerful way to share your energy is to add video. Now you might be thinking, “I don’t look good on video.” While we may never look as polished as Sam Palmisano with a video crew, it’s actually easy to look decent. Get a webcam. Even if you pay for this personally, it’ll be worth it. Find a quiet place – no coworkers on conference calls, no dishwashers going whrrr. Find a clear background and good lighting – maybe a blank wall near a window. If you have glasses, dim the light from your laptop screen so that they don’t reflect off your lenses. White shirts make it easier for your webcam to pick the right colour-balance and exposure. Practice.

It’s a good idea to tell people when you’re going to be on video. I know someone who found this out the hard way. She was giving a presentation, and then her husband walked past in the background… in his underwear! So make it clear that you’re going to be on the air, and close the door. Then you can make a much better–and more professional–connection with people.

Video can bring you much closer to people than most in-person presentations can. Sure, you probably won’t be able to do as many gestures, but people can see your facial expressions. Use them. If you step back a little, you can do some gestures.

How can you bring all these tips together? Figure out what you want to say, but don’t stop there. Figure out why it matters to you and why it matters for other people. If you can’t figure out why something is worth giving as a presentation instead of as an article or a set of slides, don’t do a presentation. Just send the information. Save presentations for where presentations can make a difference – when you want to persuade people.

End on a high note. If you’ve done a good job at convincing people for the need for action – and you’re always doing this with a presentation, even if you’re just presenting information – make it easier for them to take action by showing them what they need to do next. Don’t fade out with just Q&A. Wrap up with a quick summary and maybe a memorable tip, and make sure people know what the next actions are. If you’re doing a remote presentation, think of websites people can visit to learn more or actions people can take to commit to doing something, while they still have the buzz and energy from the presentation. This means you need to plan your time well. People have back-to-back meetings and commitments. Plan to end a little early so that they have time to act on your message before they get distracted by something else.

Interaction

This also means you need to get people’s buy-in along the way, so that when you get to the end of your presentation, people are where they need to be. This brings us to the second part of making remote presentations that rock: Interaction. Q&A. I’m not talking about the five minutes near the end that you think you’ll have for questions. You know that hardly ever happens. You run into technical difficulties. People start late. People take a while to think of their answers.

Don’t leave Q&A to the end of your presentation. Make it part of your presentation. If I have an hour for a presentation, I’ll typically plan between seven to twenty minutes of content, with the rest of the time for Q&A and about five minutes at the end to summarize and send people off with actions. This works really well. It forces me to fit my key points into a short attention span, and leaves room for the interesting part: the conversation.

How do I make sure things fit? I figure I should talk at about 160 words per minute. (I actually talk faster, but I try to slow down to 160.) If I’m planning for 20 minutes, then that’s roughly 3,200 words. If I write down what I want to say and I’m over 3,200 words, then I have to cut and simplify. Don’t start with the slides. Start with what you want to say, and make room for what’s important. If you’re trying to say too much, split it up into multiple presentations or refer to additional information that people can use to learn more.

Q&A can be much more powerful in a web conference than it is in person. In person, you’re usually limited to three or four questions. In person, people have to remember their questions and wait for the Q&A period, then line up for the microphone, say their question, and wait for your response. In person, you don’t really get a choice about which question you want to address first. Online, if you ask people to share their questions throughout the presentation using the text chat, you not only get an instant feel for where people are curious or confused, you can also pick the most interesting questions–or the easiest ones–to answer first. You don’t have to read people’s body language – they can tell you what’s on their mind.

When you’re starting out, you might want to have a moderator watch the text chat for you. If you find that you can occasionally glance at the text chat without getting distracted from what you want to say–and this takes a lot of practice–then you can even start weaving those questions and answers into the flow of your presentation. It’s fantastic when you can pull this off.

Q&A is good for people and it’s good for you. You can learn so much from Q&A. You can find out what’s important to people, and what you should include when you’re following up. If you’re lucky, you’ll end up with lots of questions, some of which you might not even know the answers to yet. Great. That not only gives you opportunities to learn more, but also to share those lessons with others. We’ll talk about this again when we talk about radically increasing your ROI from presentations.

You can still have people ask their questions over the phone. Now this is important: you should wait at least seven seconds for questions before you move on. Maybe wait even longer. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been on a conference call where the speaker said, “Any questions?” and then after a very short silence, says something like “Thank you, goodbye!” and I’m thinking, “I’m still coming up with questions I want to ask!” As a speaker, you should wait until the silence becomes uncomfortable, and then wait some more. It takes time for people to absorb what you’ve just shared and think of what else they want to learn. If you need to fill the silence, share some questions other people have asked you, or share some questions people might be thinking about.

When you’re speaking to an international audience, Q&A might be harder. People in some cultures aren’t comfortable with asking questions during presentations. You can get people used to the idea by starting off with typical questions people might ask, and encouraging people to share their questions through a text chat if they don’t want to use the phone.

If you really don’t get any questions, then you can share more examples and backup material. Flexibility pays off, and it shows that you know your stuff.

Radically increasing your ROI

Now you might be thinking that it takes time to prepare good presentations like that. It takes only a few minutes to throw together slides if you’re going to figure out what to say on the fly and you don’t mind if people forget or tune out. It takes time to plan your presentation so that you have a clear, concise, engaging core message. It takes time to prepare for Q&A. It takes time to learn how to use web-conferencing tools. But it’s a bigger waste of time if you don’t.

Presentations are surprisingly expensive. There’s the time you put into preparing it: maybe half an hour for a quick update, maybe four hours for a regular presentation like this, maybe days for a high-stakes presentation. There’s the time you spend giving the presentation. And then there’s the time people spend listening to you. Now I’m in Global Business Services, so utilization is always in the back of my mind. If I’m talking to a group of 35 people for an hour, I probably need to offer you more than $100 in terms of value, and I need to create more than $4,000 of value for IBM and our clients. Is it worth it? I want to make sure it is.

So let’s talk about radically increasing your ROI for presentations. When you’re preparing and giving presentations, how can you get even more leverage on the time and effort you’re investing? There are two parts to that: before and after your presentation. Let’s talk about what you can do before your presentation.

First: Figure out if you can get more people – and more of the right people – to get value from your presentation. It takes the same time to give a presentation to 20 people as it does to give a presentation to 200. Remote presentations make this even easier, because people don’t have to be in the same area and they don’t have to arrange for travel. They just have to dial in. This depends on the purpose of your presentation, of course. If you’re planning a small-group collaborative meeting, go ahead and keep it at six people. But if you’re sharing something of general interest, open it up. Post it on Inviter, which is this IBM service for sharing calendar events. If you’ve got a blog, write about your upcoming presentation. Post it on your Profiles board. Tell people about it. Make it easy for people to find.

Second: Share as much as you can while preparing. See if you can share your outline, your slides, your draft speech. If you’ve got a blog, write about your presentation there. I’ve been blogging my speaker notes and my slides on a blog. You’d think that would mean that people can skip the presentation because they already know the key points, like the way you might skip a movie if you already know how it ends. Instead, what happens is that people suggest ways to make the presentation even better, and then they come anyway for the energy and interaction. Result: better presentation, better interaction (because people have been thinking about things deeper), better reach, and better ROI. Share whatever you can share.

The same goes for after your presentation. When you’re giving a presentation that’s not confidential, make sure you record and share it. That’s one of the benefits of giving a remote presentation – they’re easy to record and share. It’s a few extra clicks using LotusLive Meetings, and then you can share your presentation with other people. Share your slides. Figure out if your presentation or a subset of your presentation can be shared externally. Take the extra five minutes to scrub it and share it on a site like Slideshare.net. Share your speaker notes. Share the questions people asked and your answers to them. It takes a few extra minutes and greatly improves your reach. When your presentations are shareable and searchable, they become a very powerful networking tool. And they’ll save you lots of time, too. I can’t tell you how often I refer people to my past presentations in order to help them learn something I’ve shared.

And this is where remote presentations can really help you rock. Work with the strengths of the webconferencing tools that we have, and you can really connect with people. Invest a few extra minutes to share your presentations and recordings, and you can radically increase your ROI. Use remote presentations to reach more people than you can bring together in a room, and that will pay off for you in professional and personal connections.

Here are seven small things you can do to improve the energy, interaction, and ROI of your remote presentations:

• Get these slides or my speaker notes so that you can review them going forward. (URL)
• Make your life better by sharing these tips with other people who give remote presentations.
• Volunteer for a remote presentation if you don’t already have one on your calendar. Practice will help you learn.
• Take a good look at your upcoming presentations and practice putting some energy into them. Make sure they’re worth listening to.
• Get a webcam and learn how to use it well. Figure out where in your workplace or your home you can do a good presentation.
• Cut your next presentation in half so that you can leave room for questions and answers.
• Review your past presentations for things you can share, and share them.

We’ll come back to these tips five minutes near the end of this session so that they’re fresh in your mind. I want you to be able to walk out of here with a clear understanding of how you can apply these tips and how they can transform the way you present. What’s holding you back from giving better remote presentations? What do you want to learn more about?

2011-02-15 Tue 07:58