I sat in on a webinar this week facilitated by Brian Crowley with WhatWorks. Not only was he engaging and interesting but he helped me see the value in the importance of embracing technology in meetings. I am a big advocate of face to face meetings and building relationships and have been resistant to trying to incorporate virtual meetings into my coaching practice. After the one hour presentation, I am a believer that it's a viable tool if done correctly. Correctly is key. I sat in on another webinar this week that went on for 90-minutes of continuous talking by the presenter. She became hoarse at the end and did ask for questions. But it was very boring and I got very restless from the experience and caught myself wanting to look at my emails and getting up to do something else.
In order to keep people's interest and attention, you have to involve them when conducting an online presentation. People typically stayed engaged for eight seconds, that is not very long. GoToMeeting is a great web site for conducting online meetings. There are spaces for asking questions and raising your hand. Most important part of presenting is to make sure your PowerPoint presentation is clean, includes lots of pictures, only a few words per page (not a bunch of text per page) and really use it more as a guide. While presenting, include interesting stories that people can relate to.
Brian started out by asking people to write in what their greatest challenges were in presenting on-line and one thing of value they would like to get from the presentation. I ask these questions when I facilitate meetings. This gives you the ability to understand what people want and how they feel. At the end of the presentation, I always go back to what was requested and see if they were mentioned. He also said you need to interact with you audience every eight minutes, again so they stay with you. Before you present, key to do your homework on what you are talking about. If you are presenting to a client, learn about them beforehand by going to their web site, understanding their needs, hopefully talking to them on the phone or in a meeting so you can ask lots of questions about their business before you do this presentation. You can then incorporate the answers to their questions and your features and benefits.
Online presentations should typically not be any longer than one-hour, factoring in 15-minutes for questions and comments. You should share with your audience a clear objective of your presentation and what your goals are for conducting your presentation. You should also be clear on who you want your audience to be, what their roles are and know how many are in attendance. I agree with Brian in that don't start with the Agenda. Have a grabber, a quote, a short story or share a challenge that people on the call can relate to. Include a credibility statement or testimonial, your objectives and the benefit to the audience and then the agenda of your time together. Have some great pictures in your presentation which you can get from Google Images or for a small fee www.istockphoto.com. If you have an interesting story of you, include it. Live video is becoming more common to add, graphics and statistics and colors as well. Your audience is going to be made up of people who like data, people who like story, pictures and colors and people who just like simple bullet points so you want to make your presentation applicable to each type of personality. If you are including video of yourself, have a white background and dress professionally, looking at the camera lens NOT at yourself on screen.
Most importantly is asking questions or ask for comments sprinkled throughout your presentation and stop and go through these (allow a few minutes of presentation for this). If your audience is large, then respond to common questions being asked or something really unique that is relevant. Obviously manage this time. At the end make sure you include your credits, review back what some key points were talked about including what people requested to learn, go over any "next steps" and ask for any final questions.
Check out the resources I mentioned above and seriously consider the value of presenting virtually. My next step is to start using this valuable tool for presenting and to start playing around with video.
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