Episode #182: Zoom Meetings Starts From Hell - Part Two

In Part One, we looked at planning our first impressions on-line, the importance of rehearsing the presentation, dealing with the tech and having an opening which grips audience attention immediately. The potential damage you can do to your personal brand doesn’t evaporate, just because you are now in the virtual meeting world. No one cuts you any slack, just because you are now broadcasting from home. We have to treat the on-line environment, just as we would the in-person occasion. The only real difference is that the on-line presenting world is rife with less control, more tech issues and wholly, as opposed to partially, distracted audience.

We can be adding to the distraction factor ourselves. When there are multiple presenters, the tech must be savagely brought to heel. The curtain goes up, we start the presentation, but where does the camera automatically focus? If one of the presenters is unmuted and shuffling papers, then they will suddenly appear on screen, even though they are not aware of it nor ready to go. The inscrutable tech searches for sound and then synchronises with the camera views, capturing whoever that sound originated from. The camera view can become quite chaotic, as each person’s inadvertent sound contribution has the audience view flicking from one person to another, without mercy. From a viewer point of view, this chaos is distracting. It diminishes our perspective that these experts being rolled out, are actually competent experts.

As mentioned in Part One, have a slide of the event up on screen and keep the presenters in the background until needed. The host should be muting everyone and no individual’s camera should be turned on until the host gets the proceedings underway. The host introduces the presenter with both voice and a slide detailing the key points of their resume. We would do this in a live presentation when we were gathered in a room together, so why not do it on-line as well. The host then throws to the presenter, who comes on camera and audio for the first time. As mentioned last week, most presenters have their laptops on a table, so the camera is peering up their noses. Raise the height of the camera so that it is eye line. This is hard, but whenever possible, don’t talk to the screen, rather talk directly to the camera.

Also replicate this control environment for the Q&A at the end. This can be quite comedic, as the control of the tech is lost and the camera and audio are flying around between all of the presenters who are not unmuted and on camera. The same rules apply. The host takes the question and then passes that question on to the appropriate expert, instructing them to come on camera and answer it, before submerging them back into silent invisibility.

One thing I dislike with Q&A sessions is that you can only lodge your question through typing it into the Q&A section or the chatbox. Now we are in the hands of someone designated to convey what you have written to the expert panel. Because they are more intelligent than us, they often decide to rework our questions into their own concoction and present that to the speakers. This is very annoying because usually they have missed the key point or have switched the nuance of the question.

Question handling factotums should read the question as is, ignoring the inevitable typos, but keeping to the key import of the question. The host often asks the first question. Sadly, rarely are those questions intelligent or probing enough. They usually palliative, lazily accepting motherhood statements as is and adding little to the proceedings. Broadcasting that you the host are actually dim or dumb, isn’t all that good for the personal brand, so be careful when questioning speakers.

If using slides, please spare us the slide deck from hell presentation. Bad presenters are consistently bad presenters and all of their horrible habits are replicated in the virtual world. They bridge across from their real world debacles, bringing them faithfully to their virtual stage. I was attending a webinar the other day and the Japanese presenter had the most dense slides you can imagine. Laughably, one slide had as the backdrop a Robinson projection of a flat world map, with information on where they had their company branches. Confusingly, over America they placed the Europe information and over the Europe map, they had their American data. How hard can it be to visually line up your branches data to match the background map? How much credit do we give to a company claiming to be professional, who can’t even rise to the most basic of intellectual challenges?

Speaking in a supremely boring monotone, I have noticed is not just a Japanese on-line presenter monopoly. Often we are getting experts to give us presentations on the legal, taxation, HR, business and health issues associated with the current Covid-19 crisis situation. These experts are notorious for putting all their eggs into the data dump and specialist knowledge basket and none in the communications, soft skills area. Their dullness of delivery, in a funeral tone, assaults us during their data overload from hell content unveiling. They are always like this but it is made so much worse in the on-line environment. Streaming video on small screens and dubious audio quality take bad and transform it into horrendous.

People on these webinars are employing content marketing concepts during this crisis to show their value to potential buyers. In many cases, they are revealing incompetence instead. They fail to approach the on-line medium with a professional presentation mindset. The tech issues are the fault of the platform provider. The way the tech is used however rests with the presenters.

Here is a thought to get your head around - on-line audiences are usually vastly larger than what we would normally cram into a room to hear a speaker. Telling the assembled on-line masses you are clueless is not the outcome you seek, but often the outcome you get. It doesn’t have to be that way.