The Virtual Meeting Coach

Okay friends, here we go. I’ve been promising some new material for The Virtual Meeting Coach Show for the last several weeks. I’ve got a window of time today to post the first in a series of conversations I’ve been having with virtual meeting pros. The series is called Virtual Meeting Masters and I intend to use it to provide you with cutting-edge advice from the pros so that you can become a “virtual meeting master,” too.

I’ve been talking with people who fully understand the tremendous potential of virtual meeting tools, web conferencing, online meetings – whatever you want to call real-time dialogue with your coworkers, clients, customers, suppliers, students, patients, and other people who you’re working with.

Hunting up these folks and finding new ways to capture our conversations has been a blast! Thanks in large part to the ingenuity and persistence of my partner-in-crime, Tom Carroll, of Evolutionary Learning, we have a new kind of video format for you to enjoy along with some high-quality audio-only podcasts.

This first show is a short, powerful conversation with best-selling author Sharon Drew Morgen. Sharon Drew just released a new book last week on Amazon called “Dirty Little Secrets: Why Buyers Can’t Buy and Sellers Can’t Sell and What You Can Do About It.”

I’ve been following Sharon Drew’s work for many years now and this is, without a doubt, the best book she’s written. It couldn’t be more timely. The book elegantly many things we all need to bear in mind as we work together to help each other move ahead in this crazy economy.

Sharon Drew is famous for helping people speed up the process of long-term or complex sales but the real wisdom she has to share in this particular book goes far beyond sales. She understands the process of change and her way of looking at change makes it clear how we can either help or hinder people we’re working with as they make their best decisions about incorporating new solutions into their systems.

Whether you’re looking to speed up the sales cycle on a complex sale, train or coach clients in new ways of doing things, or boost the productivity of distance workteams, there’s a lot for all of us in this conversation. I hope you enjoy it. If you like it, by all means, pick up a copy of Dirty Little Secrets. You can get one here.

As always, we like reading your comments and requests for future shows.

Coming up next… a fascinating conversation about providing telehealth care using live virtual meetings.

Multimedia learning doesn’t happen by chance. It’s not about entertainment and it’s not about “creativity.” It’s about using words and pictures in quite specific ways to ENHANCE cognition and memory.

If you’re going to use slideshows in your virtual meetings and web conferences – and you don’t want to put people directly to sleep – it’s crucial to understand and master the basic principles of multimedia learning.

Jeff Brenman’s 2008 winning Slideshare show, “Thirst,” does a masterful job of demonstrating the key principles of cognitive theory of multimedia learning that Richard Mayer and Ruth Colvin Clark have been researching and writing about for the last two decades.

As you watch Jeff’s show, notice not just what you learn, but how the show itself affects your thinking. It’s truly remarkable and Jeff deserves all the kudos he’s received!

If you’re already persuaded of multimedia learning theory and hungry to put it into practice, you’ll want to grab yourself a copy of my friend Cliff Atkinson’s handbook, “Beyond Bullet Points,” and get busy using the organizers and strategies he offers to enhance the effectiveness of your sales and instructional presentations.

Beyond Bullet Points provides solid background on multimedia learning theory and then goes on to help business and educational speakers start putting it to work right away.

If you’d like to see an example of the Beyond Bullet Points strategy at work, you can also take a look at this little slideshow I made in February, 2008, to support my application for a distance learning position at the college in my new hometown. It’s short and sweet, but the architecture of the show is pure “BBP.” I never intended anyone beyond the hiring committee to look at it, but it was favorited by the CEO of Slideshare a week or so after I hosted it on Slideshare. So now it’s been viewed by several hundred folks. (I hope they’re having a laugh! Maybe they’ve learned something…) The “architecture” of the Beyond Bullet Points thinking is right up at the surface in the show.

Enjoy! And, as always, I’m genuinely interested in your thoughts and comments…