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

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.

In an interview published in yesterdays' NY Times, "Meetings, Version 2.0, at Microsoft" Steve Ballmer describes what a meeting with him is like at Microsoft. 

As he describes the "old way", many can relate to the typical way that meetings are delivered across organizations every day - someone delivering a PowerPoint presentation in which a room full of listeners follow the presenter's path to the conclusion.  Is this really the most productive way?  Neither presenters nor listeners maximize their valuable time together that could instead be used on informed discussion and interaction. Time is money, spending face-to-face time on information delivery is very costly.   Read about his version of a better meeting. 

The Brainshark leadership team holds its weekly meetings in 2.0 style - but different from Steve Ballmer's approach, we deliver Brainshark presentations to update our peers on each of our functional areas, and we share them with each other the day before the meeting.  The updates provide operational results and progress reports, and raise discussion topics that should be covered as a group.   Compared to Steve Ballmer's flat PPT decks that don't have the presenter's voice to explain, clarify, and paint a picture; I think that would make our approach a 3.0.   In this way, we can start preparing and thinking about important topics before walking into the meeting; instead of spending costly meeting time simply delivering information.  Try this new approach for your next meeting; and let us know how it goes.

The funny things in life have a kernel of truth and the funniest have the whole cob. A friend of mine sent me this video by Don McMillan. I want you to watch it and enjoy the laughs and pay attention to the underlying lesson. The common abuses to which he pokes fun, are those that we see everyday....multiple times a day. To quote the great Thomas Jefferson, "We hold these truths to be self- evident..." Not all presentations are good presentations.

Laugh & Learn and have a Sharktastic Day!

One of the most frequent requests I hear from clients is, "Do you have any Best Practices to make our presentations more effective?" As the Director of Customer Success, I take this question very seriously and as a Software as a Service (SaaS) Company, Brainshark does as well. The answer is in fact, "Yes". Over the past 8+ years we have gathered many best practices and have incorporated this content into a series of Best Practice tutorials which you will find on Customer Connection Online (CCO). We decided that not only is it valuable for us to assimilate and distribute this material, but it would be of great advantage to all users if you - the Brainshark user community could have a place to share and comment on best practices.

So....Welcome to the Brainshark Best Practice Blog. Our goal is to provide a forum where we can learn from one another and discuss the best practices around such topics as: images, audio, slide design, presentation mapping, reporting and evaluation, animations, graphics, attachments, questions, video, podcasting and anything else about which you might inquire. We will provide this Shark Think Tank and we invite you to jump in and share your thoughts, experiences and methods of success (or failure) so that together we will develop the best practices for communicating efficiently and effectively.

The first item I would like to share with you is that we recently held a SharkTale contest. A SharkTale, (in case you do not already know) is a success story. We asked you to share stories where Brainshark either helped you communicate successfully or helped you be more successful in your job.  The response was tremendous.  We received over 100 SharkTales.  We have posted the winning entries on CCO.  If you are looking for a Sharktastic example of how people are using Brainshark to be successful then please take a moment to visit our Customer List and take a look.  Then come on back here and let us know what you think.

Pat Kelly
Director of Customer Success