Last weekend I attended the Microsoft Community Connection event at the Microsoft Office in Charlotte, NC. It is primarily an event for MVPs, RDs, few Microsoft Employees and Community Influencers to get together and connect with each other. I was lucky enough to get a chance to participate in this event as a Community Influencer.

Charlotte is 400 miles and 6-7 hour drive from Birmingham – and I guess since I was so pumped up for the event I made it to Charlotte at ease. The return journey was not fun though – owing to a crash in the Interstate which stalled the traffic for close to 2 hours – and I ended up reaching back home past midnight. However attending this event was worth the drive as I gained lot of valuable insights during this 2 day event and also had unlimited fun.

Day 1 was a full day of soft skill training by Johan Magnusson where we learned about how to make effective training videos – which is a growing trend these days. He talked about how to improve your personal impact, applying a framework for effective training video design, common mistakes made in the training videos and recommended tools. And if that was not enough, we were also divided into 3 groups and by the end of the day all of us shot and recorded our own training videos. That was so much fun!

Did you know this?

The average attention span for humans has dropped to 8.25sec, as compared to the average attention span of a goldfish which is 9 sec.

These number shows how critical it is too make an impact upfront when you start making your training videos, and let it stand apart from the 100’s and 100’s of videos in YouTube.

I made lot of notes during the session, but the 3 key takeaways for me while making training videos in future (hopefully) are —

• Keeping in mind the Target audience and having a strong Opening/Close statement.
• Training Video Modality – Basically how you want your training video to be delivered — Narrated Slide-deck, Storyteller with slides, Demo, TED Talk, Panel Discussion and Acted Scenario
• Training Framework Types  — Problem/Solution , Compare/Contrast, Breakdown by Category, Chronological Order and 3T Model

Later in the evening, we had the Welcome Party at TopGolf and that was so much fun – amidst all the interactions and showcasing your Golf and Dancing skills 🙂

Day 2 started with a Keynote and sessions from Joe Darko and his Team. They provided useful insights into the MVP Program.

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We played an interesting Ice Breaker game – ‘Diffuse the Bomb‘ and apparently after multiple explosions, we were finally able to diffuse the bomb.

We had some super cool TED Talk style presentations from the MVPs and Community Influencers.

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I started for Birmingham after lunch, so missed out on the sessions in the afternoon and sadly on the below pic too —

Great Event and very nicely organized by Joe Darko and his entire Team. I had some awesome discussion and interaction with multiple folks who I plan to be in touch through social media & hopefully meet them again in some conferences.

Categories: Conference