I remember when I first posted a video online. It was probably 1998, and my video production clients had just started inquiring about how get their shiny new video on their shiny new website. Those postage stamp-sized videos were 280 x 210 pixels and blazed along the mighty Internet super highway at about 38 kilobits a second. The clients clamored to see them, but rarely could straight away. “You need to get that plug-in and then restart your machine. Oh, you’re on a mac, you need this other plug-in and we need to encode it differently. We’ll offer two versions…at least.” Online video was more an exercise in patience than content consumption. Everyone wanted online video, but there were myriad road blocks, from bandwidth to delivery systems. It’s incredible to think how far things have come in 15 years.

Relentless competition pushed the online video industry to achieve great things. Competition is great, for sure, but, frankly, at some point, monopoly can make life simpler. When Flash became the powerhouse of rich media creation and delivery, it just made development easier, period. Sure Silverslight showed up and RealMedia has always been strong in closed settings, like universities, but by and large you could count on users to have a recent version of Flash player so they could see your content. For us, and our clients, last few years have been hassle-free. We’ve been creating Flash-based presentations—well designed, narrated, animated, including embedded videos–for public consumption, will much success. Even issues with accessibility have largely been tackled by Flash so our government clients are on board with Flash as a delivery tool. Federal clients are not early adopters of technology, I realize, so bear with me as I move with them away from the fossil that is Internet Explorer 6 to where this post is going.

This post, and our clients, are going mobile, to tablets and phones, and without i-naming names, the big boy in that space doesn’t like Flash (or Flash’s parent, Adobe). Federal clients that were forever locked to PCs and Internet Explorer are not only adopting more varied devices, but I also find that they are more eager to make their content available to the myriad devices used by their audiences. It’s a little bit like being back in 1997 again. Instead of Mac or PC, RealPlayer or Quicktime, it’s Android or iPhone, HTML5 or Flash. As I’m working through how I can give my clients the content they want delivered to as wide an audience as possible, I find myself heading back to my roots; to video.

What was once so hard to deliver is becoming the easiest. With amazing delivery services out there, like Limelight and Vimeo, to name a couple we use, it’s easy to create one video that is available across most—dare I say all—devices. Rather than develop a multimedia presentation in Flash, mixing narration, animation and video, why not just build the whole thing in the edit suite and deliver one big video?

One glaring reason is interactivity. Stand alone video is linear, so interactivity would be tricky, if not impossible, without some surrounding interface (HTML or Flash) or controlling mechanism (like a DVD player). Aside from that, though, if your content is linear, stand alone video might just be the answer.

Mind & Media’s Chris Ammon explains how you can develop e-Learning courses that keep your audience in their seats and awake.  Learn about what details  you should consider when building a course and why your old college professor may have taught you the most important lesson of all.   Watch Now.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend a superb webinar hosted by the Young AFCEANS, Bethesda Chapter. Jeffrey Levy, EPA’s Director of Web Communication, provided wonderful insight on how his agency used a mix of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 to promote Earth Day in 2008 and how he’s taking those techniques and elevating them in 2009. He offered some interesting suggestions for how to build traffic and promote the mission of an agency/organization through widgets, podcasts, Flickr photo contests, and viral videos. I’d encourage those interested in more effectively reaching out to the public in cost-effective ways to check out his presentation and attending the next seminar in the YAFCEAN webinar series .

“Can you put my PowerPoint presentation online?”

This is something I hear over and over from prospective clients. Seems like such a simple question. Based on what I see on  the internet, it seems many folks say “yes” and then take the client’s PowerPoint and put it up on the web. There it is, in all its glory for visitors to open and look at. It looks just like it did when it was created. No audio narration. Many times, no notes to give you an idea of what the speaker might say. Was  the client’s purpose met? What was the desired outcome?

So, back to the question: “Can you put my PowerPoint presentation online?” I believe I understand the motivation from the client. They probably spent many  hours creating this PowerPoint, or even paid  someone to create good content. They don’t want to see that content go away, just because their budget was cut and they can’t travel to present this information. For these and other great reasons they now want to use the Internet to deliver their message or training.

My answer is that I can take your PowerPoint presentation and the content you have and repurpose  it so it is effective as an online product. Because presenting and learning online is different from presenting and learning in person, you have to consider what the return on investment should be when you put it online. Tom Kuhlmann, an online training expert, talks about this in his blog on measuring the ROI for online learning. He explains that you need to align the course or presentation outcome to measurable goals. I couldn’t agree more.

When you are standing in front of a group presenting a PowerPoint, you can measure success by gauging interest via audience body language, questions, and engagement, or by talking to them after the presentation. You are physically there as the expert and teacher, receiving audience feedback and adjusting your presentation on the fly (such as answering questions). But when you put your PowerPoint online, you need to consider how you will measure success in the absence of a live presenter. Tom suggests:

1. Finding a metric you can use and
2. Making sure the metric is meaningful

This requires that you know how to  measure online success, which is different from measuring classroom success. Sometimes success is measured simply by the number of  people who accessed  the content. Other  times success is measured by how many people successfully completed “check-on-learning” activities within the content, such as quizzes or interactive exercises requiring them to demonstrate learning. Reaching your desired outcome through these meaningful metrics is only possible when you follow best practices for online presentation and learning, like “chunking” information into smaller segments to get the audience to focus better.

So, the ultimate answer to the original question is that a client should consider what they are trying to accomplish by putting the PowerPoint online. Also that when you repurpose  PowerPoint content for the Web, you  should be prepared to modify it so it is effective as an online product. While  this may disappoint many who hoped to  just put  their PowerPoint  online as-is, I think most people understand that the Web is a different medium. Having something that effectively gets your message, brand, and intent to the right audience and inspires them to take the measurable action you wanted is worth the price of converting the PowerPoint to an online product.