2020 Gave Us All a Platform (or Five) and They’re Now ‘Evergreen’

Unless you were living off-grid under a rock, you’ll have struggled to miss the ‘Zoom-ification’ of how we work and collaborate. Even gran and gramps raised their game and joined the Zoom party.

What does this tell us?

That Zoom, Crowdcast, Slack, and Google Slides (to name a few) are no longer just nice-to-have ‘work tools’. They’ve become ‘evergreen’ platforms we’ve integrated as part of the furniture and part of the way we engage and present to our audiences.

Think you know your way around Zoom? Check out these 5 tips to harness advanced Zoom features.

Going Online Meant Re-thinking How We Deliver Screen time Value.

In 2020 Missing Link’s presentation-training Academy went full-blown online—and we quickly realised the need to switch up how we deliver training online vs offline. Now, instead of putting participation into a prezzo-induced coma, we set some light homework Academy members can soak up in their own time. This means shorter online sessions packed with tons more value. Interaction beats monologue, while boredom and screen fatigue are kept at bay.

Find out how you can slay the boredom in the screentime you share with others during your own presentations.

Presenting Online & Offline Are Different Skill Sets

‘Should I look at the screen, or the camera? How can I tell if they’re looking at me?’ Sound familiar? Presenting makes tips like ‘make eye contact with the room’ irrelevant. Keeping people engaged via video presentation platforms means upping our prezzo madskills.

Chat Engagement

When using platforms like Zoom to present, use the chat to your advantage. Drop relevant links and ask questions that promote discussion. Chat engagement enriches screen time for everyone and lets you keep the presentation flow while your audience gains value from itself also.

Creating Polls

Another great way to raise engagement with online presentations is by creating polls. This helps your audience think about topics presented from different angles via a two-way feedback narrative that can help you steer or change the direction of presentations, instead of following a linear routine.

We’ve Learned How to Power Up Presentations

While some of us are still getting to grips with online presenting, others have discovered presentation powerups, like the noise-cancelling app Krisp, to blow the audience’s minds and bring the ‘surprise and delight’.

Prezi Video

Many of us discovered the power of Prezi Video that places you right inside the actual content you’re presenting, seamlessly. You can get Prezi Video for platforms like Zoom, MS Teams, YouTube, Slack, and tons more.

Advanced Screen Sharing

Advanced screen-sharing via platforms like Zoom let us find new gears of engagement to bring real sophistication to presentations. For example, sharing just one portion of the screen, sharing sound only such as audio clips, or sharing content from a second camera.

Working Remotely Means Working Smarter, Not Harder ‘Smart top, pyjama bottoms’.

Our smart-casual WFH uniforms symbolise how we now think about work. For many, being in the 8:30 meeting together, sleepily clutching our lattes, is a thing of the past. And this means finding new ways of working.

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” —Abraham Lincoln

Abe clearly understood that ‘smart’ not ‘hard’ often means taking time to sharpen your tools and create the right structure to get better outcomes when you finally get down to work.

In 2020 we learned exactly that lesson of how creating collaborative workflows using tools like Monday, Notion and Loom, plus tons more, helps us overcome the challenges of not being able to work face-to-face in real-time sharing the same hours.

Now Fire Up Your Presentations in 2021

What a year it was. 2021 will be the year when we put the lessons of 2020 to good use to make ‘surprise and delight’ an absolute given in our online presentations. Want to keep growing your online-presentation skills? Find out how here.