Updating

Now that you have all of this great information about what products and content need to change, it’s useful and efficient to make the change once, and know that everyone in your organization will receive the updated version. It also helps to retire old, out-of-date, discontinued content. Ever sit in a meeting where your colleague pulls up last year’s pricing? Or worse, products that your company no longer sells? I guess he didn’t get the memo. With enterprise updating, you don’t need a memo. It just happens, automatically.

As Bob Davis of HealthTrust Purchasing Group notes, “We are always rewriting. Our account directors come back from a meeting with feedback and suggestions, and we go right back and rewrite the slides. We are always working on our slides.” With slide updating, he doesn’t worry that someone is using an older, outdated, wrong version.

With slide updating, there is a genealogy that occurs in presentations. One parent presentation begets children. When a slide is reused, dragged and dropped into a newly created presentation, that new presentation becomes a child. At U.S. Bank, one parent slide can exist in over 300 different presentations across the company. When the presentation director in the home office updates that one parent slide, all 300 versions get updated as well. That’s efficient, productive, compliant and consistent messaging.

The easiest way to incent a change is to start with what’s familiar. The elements of presentation management are already familiar. We all know how to edit and create decks. Some of us are better at it than others, but in business, we’ve all made at least one presentation. We all know how to search through a network or a website to find content. Visualization and better search take the frustration out of that process. We share files on YouTube, Dropbox, and a million other formats all the time. That’s nothing new. In business, we give presentations every day; the elements of presentation management make them better presentations. We spend hours commenting and liking on social media, so it’s not a stretch to do the same with your presentation content.

And finally, in the age of big data, we rely on metrics to see what’s trending so we make smarter decisions going forward. The elements of presentation management are not new, but presentation management is a new approach to how we treat our content and value presentations as an enterprise marketing asset.