We're geared up to deliver a great product release on Saturday November 21. With new features making it easy to personalize content and manage communication preferences, we're certain you'll find something you need!
In addition to the features we announced in our recent newsletter, there are some other changes I wanted to share with you.
First, for those of you looking to track additional data on your users, you'll be pleased to know we've added 6 new custom fields to the user profile. These can be used when adding or editing a user profile, and can be populated when bulk uploading users.
Next, we've made it easier for you to add questions that retain the look and feel of the presentation you are working on. Now when you upload a presentation, we'll look to see if it contains a slide background design. If it does, we'll automatically add that background to your question background library. In addition, once you choose a question background in a presentation, we'll remember that choice and continue to use it for additional questions added to that presentation.
We hope these little 'extras' will make your experience with Brainshark that much better - enjoy!
Kristin
In the first half of 2009, the Brainshark Customer Community team visited customers in San Francisco, New York City, Toronto, Houston and Dallas. Our primary objective of these city tours is to provide customers the opportunity to meet one another and share your stories. Recently, we've switched the format of the meetings by sponsoring lunches and adding both Brainshark and product update details to the gatherings. We've also extended our visits an extra day to make ourselves available to you for onsite visits. The feedback has been very positive from those we had lunch with this September in Charlotte, Atlanta, Omaha and Lincoln. And it's been rewarding to see people exchange business cards and schedule follow up conversations.
The last two lunches for this year will be in Hartford (CT) on Tuesday, November 10th and Denver (CO) on Wednesday, November 18th. Invitations will be coming out in mid-October.
Click here to register
At the October 7th Customer User Group meeting, we received nominations for next year in Phoenix, Houston/San Antonio and Chicago. I am thinking of Minneapolis and Toronto as well, but would love to hear your suggestions! Please feel free to comment or reach out to me.
Hello from PPT Live in Atlanta. I have been having a great time meeting the fine people down here. I have had a couple of chances to meet folks and get some pictures taken which you can check out by watching my presentation below. Just in case you are wondering the music is called Jump the Shark and was created by my friend Mark.
Have a Sharktastic Day!
Tibby
Earlier this week we hosted a web conference that covered the key elements of multimedia presentation design - scripting, slide design and narration. I was fortunate enough to be joined by Marshall Makstein from eSlide and Jordan Rich from WBZ and Chart Productions. A replay will be posted in this blog next week, but I wanted to post the portion I discussed which was the Best Practices for script writing.
Script Writing is challenge for many folks but I came up with 10 tips to help you build a great script and a successful presentation. I hope you enjoy it and you have a Sharktastic Day!
Not taking advantage of Brainshark's completion criteria? Why not?! It's easy to set a minimum bar of how much audio your viewing audience is required to listen to, how many slides they must view, as well as what score they must achieve on examination questions. Authors can easily set completion criteria right from the Presentation Properties tab.
So now that we're all excited about completion criteria - let me tell you about how we've made it even better! We now offer a completion indicator that can be displayed on the Brainshark player, so your viewing audience is aware of their progress. You can even choose to share with them the details of their progress, either by making the new indicator a link to a summary of their completion status, or by using our branching feature to link to their results when complete.
We invite you to check out these great updates available on September 11 (as well as a shiny new 'Users by Folder' report) by viewing the following Brainshark:
Enjoy the updates - and keep that feedback coming!
Kristin
The July issue of Armed Forces Journal has an article about everybody's favorite topic, PowerPoint. You have to love the title and then reflect on the pot-shots taken. The author is a recently retired Marine with 30 years experience and is pursuing a doctorate in history at Oxford. His key point focuses on decision-making and its implications when briefings are done via PPT.
I found the most telling comment was.... "Further, it is an accepted reality that PowerPoint presentations - particularly important ones - inevitably are disseminated to a much wider audience than those attending the brief. We have created huge staffs and they are all hungry for information. This means most of the people who actually see the brief get an incomplete picture of the ideas presented. Some briefers attempt to overcome this by writing whole paragraphs in the briefing notes portion of the slide."
Imagine if the Marines had Brainshark! In their voice, the briefer could provide a context for the visuals which would result in greater consistency of message within the chain of command. Think about using Brainshark to move your organizations decision-making process along. Click here to read the article.
Have you heard the news? The latest release of Brainshark is now available! We're so excited to continue to offer improvements and enhancements to our product.
For this release, we introduced the "Add a Photo" feature, making it easy to enhance you presentations with a variety of photo formats. We've also improved the handling of document slides, making it easier for your viewers to seamlessly review your content.
With these great improvements, as well as updated reports and video enhancements, we think you'll be as excited as we are! Check out the latest enhancements by reviewing the Brainshark below.
Enjoy!
Kristin
Last night American Express (NYSE:AXP) reported (during their quarterly earnings call) a record corporate travel decline of 42%. This was well below analysts' expectations of 20-30% decline. Further, The Q2 corporate travel data also marks the fourth consecutive quarterly deceleration. The AMEX data referenced above is a dollar amount and does not equate perfectly to the quantity of business trips being taken; however, analysts believe the two will generally correlate directionally. Their takeaway is that "corporate travel is anemic with no convincing indications of stabilization". This should come as no surprise to any of us. As I spend time talking with our customers (Brainshark has over 1,000 customers representing nearly every industry) I am consistently hearing that travel is shut down. Managers are being told by their bosses to get creative and find new ways to communicate and get the job done.
This is not a bad thing. In the past we thought nothing of running to the airport at a moment's notice to go visit a client or prospect. There was practically no consideration to the excessive costs in terms of time and money (not to mention massive carbon emissions) - that was just the way it was done. But the deep recession we are facing changed all that fast. Luckily we have the internet and a number of very good collaborative technologies that allow businesspeople to communicate, share, present, sell, market, support and train - without the enormous cost and hassle of travel. On-demand presentation solutions like Brainshark, plus web conferencing, video, telepresence, mobile devices, social networking are outstanding tools to "get the job done" fast and efficient. It also lets us spend more time with our families, which is something we can all appreciate.
Don't get me wrong. There are instances when sitting face to face in a business meeting is essential. We just don't need to do that all the time.
I'd like to hear how your company is using alternatives to solve the challenge of travel restrictions.
Regards,
Joe
Below is a wonderful presentation created by Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design. It appears in her slide:ology blogand the reason I share it is because it lives and breathes best practices. Nancy uses rich media to tell an impactful story in less than 3 minutes. The blog entry is about a unique story board method that helped Nancy bring the story to life. The aspect I appreciate is the forethought of the audience impact of the design. All too often, in business we skip this aspect. Sales and marketing content can be designed around what we want to say instead of from the perspective of what our audience will likely hear. Her presentation follow my 4C mantra of being clear, concise, consistent and compelling and that is because it is designed and delivered with the audience in mind. Click on the image below and scroll a little bit the blog to watch the presentation - you will be glad you did.
Have a Sharktastic Day!