Making an Impact with Adaptive Communication

In the March issue of the Harvard Business Review, Stacey Childress contributes an article titled 'Rethinking School' that discusses the failure of US education to keep up with the progress of other countries over the past 40 years.  However, despite the United State's dip in form, the author optimistically touts advances in adaptive learning technologies that have generated improvements in educational achievement for elementary school students in New York.  Ms. Childress describes the School of One's strategy of adaptive learning as tailoring educational content to the exact needs of each student using a combination of software of personal attention.  The preliminary results are very positive, with students in adaptive learning environments performing better than 98% of their traditionally taught peers. The logic is simple: technology-based and personalized lesson plans free teachers "from the demands of large-group instruction, a single teacher can tailor his or her efforts to the individual needs of dozens of students."  Although the idea of using software might suggest that the value of a teacher becomes smaller, the pilot programs find just the opposite.  By using software to cover more rote topics (such as arithmetic), teachers are then free to work with students on more advanced and dynamic skills such as critical thinking and problem solving. 

So what does this have to do with online presentation software?  A lot.

The SlideStacks strategy for creating more effective communication between a presenter in the audience is very similar to the adaptive learning techniques being used in these New York schools.  With SlideStacks, we make it easy for presenters to customize each presentation to the exact needs of the audience -sort of like a personalized curriculum for an individual student.  The personalization of content creates deeper audience understanding and connection to the materials, therefore fostering a more memorable and impactful presentation experience.  This strategy is in contrast to a common approach to presentations in which presenters deliver their message the same way to everyone, regardless of who is in the audience.

In short, adaptive learning has the potential to change the way our children learn in school.  Adaptive communication has the potential to change the way we communicate in business.  

Marc Siegel

Founder/CEO of SlideStacks

www.slidestacks.com

Development Update

Yesterday we received the first build of +SlideStacks! The team is in the process of testing things out and so far, everything looks GREAT. 


What does this mean for you? 


Well, it means we are inching closer to making SlideStacks available for beta testing. Stayed tuned for more information and look for a blog post in the near future with some screen shots of the soon-to-be greatest slide delivery software on the market!


~Marc


P.S. If you haven't done so already, sign-up to be a beta tester today: www.slidestacks.com

The Sales Trailer

Generally speaking, we entrepreneurs are enthusiastic when we tell people about our business.  It's easy to get excited about the details, the strategy, the features, etc. and perhaps unknowingly, we can end up talking too much to someone who just might not be that interested in what we have to say.  To combat this tendency, Craig Wortmann and his team at SalesEngine developed a useful and intuitive tool called the 'Sales Trailer' to not only focus the speaker, but also qualify the audience.  As defined on SalesEngine.com:

A “Sales Trailer” is to a business what a movie trailer is to a movie. It’s the concise but descriptive statement that answers the question you get 1,000 times a day; “What do you do?” The Sales Trailer does not answer all of the questions about your business, on purpose. It is meant to draw prospects into a well-structured conversation.

In other words, a well designed sales trailer is a teaser that induces the audience to say: What does that mean?  With this question, the audience is indicating that they want to learn more about your business, at which point you can proceed to the next step of the conversation.  To the contrary, if the audience does not respond enthusiastically to your trailer, there are basically two explanations: 1) your sales trailer needs to be tweaked or 2) the audience is simply not interested in hearing more.  If it turns out to be the latter, that's OK!  You've just qualified the audience/customer, which is valuable insight for any entrepreneur and can save you from wasting time talking to an uninterested audience.  Beyond selling, the Sales Trailer approach is also effective in a presentation setting; rather than talk in detail about every topic, try using a 'teaser' to introduce the topic and see how the audience responds.  If the audience wants to learn more, they'll ask, and time can be spent more efficiently by diving deep into only the topics that are of the most importance to the audience.

Writing a sales trailer is difficult and requires many iterations.  In fact, here at SlideStacks, after working with Craig, we've been through at least a dozen different versions that have been tweaked based on audience response.  In our trailer, we try to explain 1) what the product does and 2) what makes it unique, all without going into too much detail that might distract the audience.  For those who are curious, here's the Sales Trailer that is currently in the rotation:

SlideStacks is an online slide delivery software that transforms presentations into conversations.

The Sales Trailer is one of many helpful tools that the SalesEngine team have crafted.  To learn more visit their website: www.salesengine.com.

To all the readers and entrepreneurs out there, what's your Sales Trailer?

~Marc

Why ceding control to the audience can make you look good

One of the greatest challenges that a presenter faces is feeling comfortable ceding control to the audience.  After all, it's typical to invest hours building the perfect slide deck only to find that the audience wants to take the conversation in a different direction. When this happens, it can be frustrating. Perhaps you feel like you wasted time preparing materials (you didn't, people will still read your materials) or that the audience doesn't appreciate your knowledge about the subject (they do, otherwise they wouldn't be meeting with you).

When you feel this way, take a step back and ask yourself - why are we having this meeting in the first place? Generally the purpose of a meeting is to make a decision, so if you are the presenter, you likely hold some piece of information (data, expertise, etc) that are critical to the audience's ability to make a decision. Now transpose yourself to the viewpoint of the audience, why are you in this meeting? Generalizing again, members of the audience usually have some knowledge about the subject at hand but are looking for additional information from the presenter to make a decision. The nuance is that the audience is often looking for specific pieces of information - financials, features, competition, etc - but often before the meeting, the presenter doesn't know which topics will tip the decision scale. So how do you solve this puzzle other than trying to cover everything in a well prepared monologue?

Simple. Ask the audience what they want to know.

As the presenter, you hold the key, you have the information they need (as well as the information they don't).  Trying being direct and asking the question: "What can I tell about X to help you make your decision?".

Completely giving up control of the meeting might feel awkward at first, but the benefits are clear: important topics are discussed first, unimportant details are left out of the presentation, and the presenter looks like a true expert - a person who can field any question[ . Furthermore, the candor and directness of the meeting will save time, something your audience will appreciate and attribute to your management skills, and make your audience feel more satisfied because their personal concerns were directly addressed.
Of course, not every meeting lends itself to this strategy (group training, for example, might be more of a one-way broadcast of information), but when there are decisions to be made, using questions and conversation to get to the points that matter most can be a winning strategy for both the presenter and the audience.

~Marc

Changing the Game

A while back, a good friend of ours, Jonas Nwuke, sent us an interesting article about entrepreneurs that included this quote.  

"Some entrepreneurs spot and ride the waves of bigger trends, acting as catalysts, pushing the market into previously unforeseen territory. Others execute so well that they creatively destroy old markets as they nurture the new." 

- Sharon Greenstein, December 20th 2011 Digitopoly

There is certainly some truth to what the author is describing here; many business are started because a trend is rising that has not yet reached it's crest.  Entrepreneurs pour in their sweat (and money) to compete against vast armies of competition to build the best widget and hope that their efforts and execution turn them into the surfer that rides the wave to profitability.  But on the other end of that spectrum lies a stable industry waiting to be disrupted, and this is where we believe SlideStacks fits into the mix.  Not only are we paddling to catch the wave of online presentations, but we are also creating ripples in a more stable, 'old market' body of water: delivering presentations with slideware.  

To many of us, presentations feel stale, linear, and predictable.  We sit through endless series of slides while listening to a narrator - sometimes even after we've seen the deck in advance!  The issue is that traditional slideware forces us to go 'start to finish' through the content before we can (finally) get to the portion of the meeting where both sides actually connect and talk about what's in front of us.  This strategy is akin to throwing all of your slides at the wall to see which ones stick with the audience.  In contrast, SlideStacks is encouraging users to feel free to let the discussion bring the most critical issues to the table.  We can then skip the topics of lesser value and instead focus on what's most important to that particular audience while still supporting that conversation tactfully with slides and visuals.


Our goal with SlideStacks is ambitious: we've set out to disrupt the traditional presentations (and group meetings, for that matter) that many us regularly endure by creating more dynamic, efficient, and interesting communication between two parties.   We do this by building a technology that allows presenters to seamlessly place visuals into a dynamic conversation while displaying a greater emphasis on the interaction between the presenter and the audience.   In the coming weeks, we'll begin beta testing, and we hope that you'll join us in a revolution against boring presentations.

~Marc

Development Update

Today the SlideStacks team had a chance to check out the progress of product development and we can happily say that things are really starting to take shape!  A good portion of the core functionality has been completed (new informational website, registration, file upload, creating stacks, organizing slides, etc) and soon Epic River, our development partner, is getting to move on to the broadcast functionality that will allow presenters to share their materials over the web.  After that, we'll move on to a graphic design/user experience clean up phase.  This is really exciting news because it means we are that much closer to bringing SlideStacks to life and into the hands of users!  Thank you for all of your support this far, and stay tuned for more updates and announcements in the coming weeks.

~Marc
www.slidestacks.com

iEmpower

Last week's announcement of Apple's new publishing program iAuthor (for Mac) sparked a lively debate on the internets about the role of technology, specifically tablets, in the classroom.  While I found most of the discussion to be supportive of what many called the 'evolution' of education, I also saw within my own social network a small, but vocal group of people that chose to highlight the negatives, specifically, Apple's power to censor and profit from the creations of others. While I can certainly understand this perspective, my opinion is that Apple has found a new way to empower people to create and share their own personal works of 'art'.  Apple did this with music, then apps, and now with books - the progression makes sense.

Yes, I admit, there is a cost to doing business, and the potential for Apple to censor content is not exactly an American value, but the technology they are providing with iAuthor may also give millions of people the ability to tell and share their story using technology in a way that was previous not possible.  For example, think of elementary school teachers who could create interactive lessons, or help their students write a creative story that could be shared and downloaded by friends and family.  Or consider a small business that wants to publish a product manual or other documents via the tablet.  There are so many ways that people can use this tool to build something new or better, and it's because Apple's platform lowers the cost of business by putting technology into the hands of the masses.

By no means am I an Apple fanboy (though I do own an iPhone and iPad), but I do respect and admire how they have chosen to design their products with the 'average' end user in mind.  iAuthor is just the next step in the evolution of usable software, and the intent of products like this are worthy of emulation.

~Marc