“Wow, that baby looks just like his mommy! Same haircolor, same smile.”
“That young man is a great baseball player, just like his father. His dad led his team to the Little League World Series in 1985, and it looks like Junior might do the same this year.”
“Has anyone ever told you that you have the same weird sense of humor as your dad?”
“You have such a strong soprano singing voice. Your mother does, too. In fact, there are a lot of talented singers in your family.”
It makes sense that we should inherit traits from our parents. After all, we are literally created from DNA passed down to us from our father and mother. From a genetic standpoint, the parent–child relationship is unavoidable.Sometimes it’s a good thing, as when a child inherits a certain talent or skill. Other times, it can be bad, as when a child inherits a genetic defect or disease.
There’s a similar parent–child relationship with Presentation Management, except it’s more direct and, as long as content admins do their job well, it’s only ever a good thing.
Here’s how it works.When you create a presentation using a structured slide library, every new presentation is, by definition, comprised of duplicate slides, called “child slides,” from the published slide library. The original slide in the library is the “parent slide,” and the relationship between parent and child is an important aspect of Presentation Management.
While every child slide will reflect changes made to its parent slide, each child can be tracked individually. The full history of every child slide is available, so if a slide is used three hundred times, you can track exactly where it was used. You can see that it was used thirty-eight times in HR presentations, forty-five times in sales presentations, and so on. At the same time, because changes to parent slides are always reflected in child slides, every update made by content admins is reflected in every presentation throughout your organization.
Let’s suppose you have a slide that provides an overview of your company, and in that slide, you refer to yourself as “an international company.” For rebranding purposes, company leaders decide to change that phrase to “a global company.”
“We have to roll out this change of phrase to the entire organization,” they say.
To do this, a change is made to the parent slide. Up until now, that overview slide has been used 225 times in presentations throughout your organization in all kinds of contexts and for all kinds of reasons. That means there are 225 child slides contained within various presentations. However, as soon as you make the change to your parent slide, as soon as “an international company” becomes “a global company,”the text is updated in every child slide, and every user gets a notification about the update.
At the same time, every parent slide maintains an ancestry of data that can be accessed with analytics and reporting, and that information becomes critical business intelligence about what’s working and what isn’t. You know which slides are being used, when, where, and by whom, which slides are being updated and which are not, which slides get reused frequently and which do not. All of this information creates a knowledge base like nothing you’ve had before. As you track the genealogy of your slides, you gain a clear understanding of how your global organization is communicating, and you can adjust accordingly.
One Big, Happy Family
Imagine being able to click on a slide inside of a presentation and instantly see who its parent slide is or, if it is the parent, how many children it has produced. Imagine being able to see exactly who made each of those child slides and where they currently reside and how many times they’ve made an appearance.
In a sense, the parent slide provides the DNA that transfers to each of the child slides. Of course, this relationship can be spun out to additional generations. For example, there might be a grandparent slide, which is used to create parent slides for specific groups in your company, who then create child slides from them for their presentations. No matter how many generations there are, however, they can all be tracked precisely. It’s a big, happy family of slides where everyone gets along.
And remember, when we say slide, we’re talking about all of your PowerPoint files, every single piece of content in your library—pictures, video, charts, graphs, white pages, PDFs, everything—because every piece of content is automatically formatted as a slide, ready to present. Indeed, we could use the terms “file” and “slide” interchangeably here.
Put another way, it’s a content management system for your presentations in which every file is part of a big, happy family with a parent–child relationship. If you create a meme and place it in your library, you will be able to track every time it is reused (i.e., all of its children): who used it, where it was used, how it was set up, and the context in which it was used.You’ll be able to track how people responded to each child.Did they buy the product? Did the presenter follow up with another emotional slide that led to a sale?
Through this intergenerational slide analysis, you can understand the effect and impact of every slide on a global scale, and you’re able to continually edit parent slides to make them more efficient. Indeed, the very purpose of creating child slides every time someone uses the parent slide in a presentation is precisely so you have analytics about which slides are being used and how effective they are.
You can click on any slide in your library and see its entire ancestry: who its parents were, where it came from, if it was duplicated, how many times it has been shown, who showed it, whether or not it was in front of a client. Was it altered? Which presentations was it a part of? Which salespeople are using it? How long did a client look at it? If a salesperson sends the same presentation to ten different clients, you can see how much time each client spent on each slide in that presentation.
It’s an incredible amount of data that provides tremendous accountability for the activity of each slide. You get insight into the chain of custody for each slide and 100 percent data integrity about who did what, when, and where, which enables you to figure out which slides are best and which components of each slide are most valuable. And if each slide is a scene, as we said before, you can determine where each scene belongs in order to create better storytelling.
If a salesperson is going off in their own direction, you’ll know it. In fact, you will be able to help everyone get on the same page, pointing to the same horizon and sailing to the same destination with their presentations.
All of this data allows you to continually tweak and improve your slides, as you learn over time what works and what doesn’t. Of course, that process requires careful reporting and analysis, which we’ll talk about next.
