There are times when you quickly want to share your screen.
And good as they are, tools like Webex, GoToMeeting, or TeamViewer aren’t things that you can setup quickly and complete your task.
Of all the tools we’ve seen, we like Screenleap a lot and use it quite often.
If you already didn’t know about it, Screenleap is simple and fast to set up and gets the job done quickest among alternatives. And for the most part, it is free.
However, there are situations when screen-sharing is not the ideal solution. Like, when all you are looking to do is present a document (like a sales pitch or a project progress report) to a remote audience.
Screen-sharing could kill the experience with low resolutions and laggard transitions if the bandwidth on either side is low, more so when you are presenting to multiple audiences.
You really don’t need to share your screen here. A slide-casting tool would be more useful in this case.
Something like Parallelo-Lite.
A simple and beautiful Chrome Extension, that lets you Upload > Share > Present, to one or to many, in a jiffy. And neither party needs to download any software.
Here is a screenshot.
This extension is now available in the Google Chrome Store.
Everything you need to know about Parallelo in 3 mins.
What is it
Parallelo gives you insights and tools to make the perfect virtual sales pitches.
It will tell you which prospects to focus on, when to call them, and enable you to present to them instantly even from your smartphone.
Why is it needed
Most first sales pitches are virtual (not in person), and for that reason they are tougher to make an impact.
However, insights into prospects behaviour (if presented easily) and a set of sales productivity tools can improve the odds of success.
Parallelo combines mail-merge, open alerts, document analytics, and slide-casting into one nifty solution..
And it does it, without burning a hole in your pocket.
What’s different
We understand there are a lot of tools available in the market.
We are sales folks and our differentiation comes from our focus on sales people. That results in a more intuitive workflow, and features that sales folks easily relate to, like our Pipeline View shown below.
So simply, what’s different, is the experience.
Who uses it
Our clients are Services companies that are into Training, Consulting and such, whose sales methods are heavily dependent on pitch decks.
A partial list of clients is here.
How to use it
Here is the tour of the App.
How can I try it?
With a 15-Day Free full feature trial. Then plans start at $0.
Yes some part of Parallelo will continue to be free.
It was on Justin Wilcox’s marvellous website called Customer Dev Labs that I first saw some sentences Twitterized.
WTH is Twitterized?
Twitterize: Dressing up key lines in your blog post so readers can tweet them instantly.
Like that.
Why Twitterize
Typically, we put sharing buttons at the side or bottom of the post. Like this.
There is some default text attached to those buttons (like the title of the post), and the un-shortened link to the post. Like this.
But let’s say you’ve said something important in your blog and your reader reckons that is what he’d tweet about, instead of the title of the post.
In order to do so, he has to shorten the link to create some space, and type in the sentence again, or at least copy and paste it. Now imagine doing all this on the mobile phone. How many of times out of 10 you reckon your reader’s going to do that?
What if instead, you did all that hard work for your reader? What percentage increase in twitter shares would you get?
I got a 63% increase for this blog. Yes, I discovered from experience that –
This simple hack can make your readers tweet 63% more.
If you have tens of thousands of visitors every month, the Reach and Return from those tweets could be massive. And the cost ZERO.
OK, not zero since you need invest some time in doing this.
So, here's how you do it
And here is the code to dress up your tweet on your site.
I mention two important tips in the video. I will reiterate them here.
Don’t surprise the reader
The text that goes out as a tweet should not be different from what the reader intended to share from your post.
Otherwise, what’s the point right? The reader will re-think about sharing it. It helps to –
Treat your readers like shoppers. Learn to cut friction & time to make them tweet more
Now go ahead and click on the twitter bird. You see how the text above and in the twitter box are almost alike. If you felt like sharing this, the tweet text doesn’t surprise you.
On the other hand, if this hasn’t incentivised to share it, then having a different text altogether will most certainly not.
Land the visitors in the context
The second thing to remember is when someone reads the tweet and clicks on the link in the tweet, they land in the vicinity of the text in the post.
Since what is tweeted is not the title of the post but a particular sentence in the post, your visitors are likely to be hooked to your content faster if they are able to see the text they read in the tweet sooner.
I explain this point in the video above at 0.50s onwards.
Conclusion
That's it. I hope this twitter hack is useful. If you try this, please come back here and let others know how this or some other twitter tip has helped you get more on Twitter.
-- If you ever attached a document to an email and wondered how the recipient engaged with it, you will like Parallelo.
