I was recently asked to give a presentation for AMSE on how Agorapulse can help their members leverage social media marketing. As I started to build out the presentation and think about what I wanted to say, I realized that I didn’t want to deliver another boring full slide presentation, or just another talking head.

Not this:

And definitely not this:

What I wanted to get to, was this:

Folks could see my full slides, unhindered by a clunky, poorly-positioned picture-in-picture camera. They see my face and, more importantly, my body language while I’m presenting. And there’s space for additional information or branding above and below.

I’m going to share with you the steps and tools I used to build this out, but first have to give a huge shout out to Stephanie Liu who inspired and helped fine-tune this approach. She used a similar format for her presentation at MDMC which completely floored the attendees. Not only was it spectacular, she stood out from the rest of the presenters - myself included - who merely utilized one of the first ho-hum approaches I illustrated above.

Tools Needed:

1. Presentation App (Google Slides or Powerpoint or Keynote)

2. Ecamm Live (Mac only, sorry!)

3. Canva or Easil

Step One: Deck-Building

Since this is designed to share a presentation alongside your talking head, you need a deck. If you’re used to presenting off the cuff, with no slides, this is an opportunity for you to expand your repertoire and dramatically increase the amount of information and impact your presentations deliver.

I generally prefer to use Google Slides for my presentations. It’s cloud based, has all the features I need, and can easily import or export to or from various formats, including PDF. If you’re already using Powerpoint or Keynote or something else and prefer it, that’s fine! Not only can you use any presentation deck and software you wish, this approach also resolves the issue some of you may have faced when going into full screen “present mode” and no longer being able to see anything else on your single monitor.

The presentation I created for this session was fairly last-minute, but fortunately we have a set of brand guidelines and graphic elements like the waves you see above which makes creating on-brand assets on the fly quite easy.

For my initial presentation, I kept the deck in Google Slides - not in present mode, just open on my secondary screen - but I ran into issues scrolling through the slides. While I was talking, whenever I’d scroll to the next slide, Google Slides wanted to jump ahead more than one slide, making for a more technically flawed presentation. I’ve since tested and found that downloading your deck as a PDF and using that document works better. You can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to select the next slide with complete control.

Step Two: Virtual Camera

Normal virtual presentations are delivered using streaming software like Zoom where the presenter shares their screen and slides, and may or may not have their face appear as a picture-in-picture overlay.

That’s not what we’re doing here.

Instead of sharing a screen in Zoom (or whatever app you’d like to use), we’re selecting an entirely different camera. 

Ecamm Live’s Virtual Camera.

If you haven’t already, purchase and download Ecamm Live (sorry, this only works for Mac users!) and open the app. Ecamm’s interface is built around a central window that shows what your audience will see (your output), along with additional windows for things like sounds, comments (the app is designed to broadcast to social networks like Facebook), and scenes.

What we’re going to build now is a scene.

First, instead of your camera, you want to select Screenshare in the top menu bar:

For myself, I chose my secondary display and had my presentation loaded up on my laptop’s screen while I use an external monitor as a primary screen. If you only have one monitor, that’s OK, just select your main monitor and position your windows accordingly.

The idea here is that Ecamm will be showing your full screen plus a picture in picture camera view of you, but a custom graphic is going to hide the messiness. Here, let me show you how it looks without the overlay:

There you can see the entire “Preview” app (Mac’s PDF viewer) complete with the other slides of the PDF file. The black around it is my screen’s desktop which Ecamm automatically hides.

To turn your camera on, go to Options -> Show Picture-In-Picture. Then, below that, you can adjust the PIP camera shape to be wide, classic, square, round, or tall like mine. I really liked the symmetry of using a tall video feed alongside the slides of the same height. You’re welcome to use whatever look you prefer!

You can now re-size and position your PIP camera, as well as your shared screen, to achieve your desired size and positioning.

Finally, click on Output and make sure that Virtual Cam is enabled. This will allow other apps to “see” Ecamm as an alternate camera. When in Zoom or Google Meet or Streamyard, you’d go to your settings, edit your camera, and change from your normal webcam to use Ecamm instead. As soon as you do, your audience will see what you see within Ecamm’s display window!

But wait, you still need an overlay! That’s next!

Step Three: Overlay

Let’s be honest. My graphic design skills are pedestrian. So I will be the first to tell you there’s likely an easier or more elegant solution to creating this graphic. But ultimately what you want is a graphic that will go over your entire Ecamm screen, but have transparent cut-outs where your face and slides are to be seen.

Using Canva or Easil, start with a new blank graphic that is 1280 x 720. I saw that at a basic level, I could build my graphic by using two horizontal blocks at the top and bottom of the graphic, and then three vertical blocks to go on either side of the PIP camera and slides.

I placed those approximately where I thought they needed to go, downloaded with a transparent background, then dragged and dropped it into Ecamm. I positioned and stretched the overlay to fit the screen and made note of where I needed to adjust each of those squares, then repeated until I’d perfectly matched the cut-outs in the graphic to the important elements within Ecamm.

Once I had the basic elements right, I played with the color and added the bottom information, to achieve this graphic look:

(I kept the cut-outs a solid color instead of a transparent background so you can see them.)

Once you get the hang of the technique, as I did, you can then dream up a more synergistic integration of your overlay and presentation. For instance, I might have used a different color for the overlay and instead of building one or both waves into the presentation, built them into the overlay. 

And, with Ecamm, you can build a series of different scenes making it incredibly easy to smoothly transition from full camera to full slide to camera + slide. 

What If You Need A Script?

The obvious challenge with coming up with a presentation on short notice is that there’s simply no time to memorize what you want to say. If the topic is one that you’ve covered generally many times, you’re probably comfortable with talking points or speaking from the slides. But if, as was the case for me, you’re presenting material you know but have never presented together before, you’re going to need a script.

One option is to use a teleprompter, and there’s a nifty gadget that lets you slide your iPhone into it and mirror the text near your camera. This is great for maintaining constant eye contact.

But I don’t have one of those.

Instead, whenever I need a script or text prompts or an outline, I use Evernote to write out what I need, and then pop that note out into its own window. I can then resize that window to be as small and as close to my camera as needed. Like this:

The top of those windows is the very top of my monitor, and right there centered is my webcam. I typically use a Logitech Brio for most recording but also have a Canon T6i on a tripod right behind it, which Ecamm pulls in natively.

Now, I can use my keyboard to move the slides forward in the PDF, and can use my mouse to scroll down the text.

A word of caution at this point. Do not simply read your text! Make sure that you rehearse your presentation many times and can add emotion and nuance to your delivery. That rehearsal will make sure you’re comfortable with the material and can elaborate or improvise as needed.

Furthermore, those rehearsals will identify issues or improvements to be made before it’s too late to do anything. In my case, rehearsing my presentation helped me spot changes to make in the wording, a slide that didn’t have a title… and an entire slide that I’d neglected to make! Plus my tech rehearsal with Stephanie revealed changes that needed to be made to the slide design to help readability.

So test this approach. You can open Quicktime on your Mac, once you’ve got Ecamm set up, and see exactly how the output will look. You can also set Ecamm to Record Only and run through your presentation then watch or even share the recording.

All of these steps combined will help ensure that your next presentation is a winning one! 

Mike is a Content Marketing Practitioner - a title he invented to represent his holistic approach to content marketing that leverages blogging, social media, email marketing and SEO to drive traffic, generate leads, and convert those leads into sales. He is an award-winning Blogger, Speaker, and Author at The Social Media Hat, and Brand Evangelist at Agorapulse.

As Brand Evangelist, Mike works directly with other social media educators, influencers, agencies and brands to explore and develop profitable relationships with Agorapulse.