Episode #185: Confused Or Competent Online Presenting?

The tech factor in online presenting is a juggernaut which sweeps all in its path. I was finishing up a three hour online Successful Public Speaking class, when one of the participants asked me what I thought was the most difficult aspect of presenting online. Many issues flooded my mind, but by far the most elusive of a fix, would have to be the technology. The screen with your face in it, is a tiny, little, even microscopic image, the audio is dodgy, the punters can’t get into their breakout rooms, the pre-prepared polls evaporate before your eyes. The tech God leads us astray from the fundamentals of a good presentation.

We should have divined our clear purpose with this talk. Are we here to inform people of insights, information, data, or knowledge? Are we doing this to persuade them and bring theminto the fold of our way of thinking? Are we here to inspire them to storm the barricades, to take up their cudgels and right wrongs, to become the complete person they can be? Or are we here to motivate them by using our communication skills, to have them determine they want to do something we think makes a lot of sense, and which they now desire. Depending on our purpose, the design, content and delivery will be wildly different.

We need to know our stuff. That means we bring a lot of intellect and experience firepower to the fore. We don’t have unlimited time to present and presenting online is supremely tiring for both parties, both presenter and audience. We need to strike a rich vein, unearth the motherlode and then be scrupulous about the gems we bring forth. One hour of online presentation deserves a short break for everyone.

Sharing video of your own nasal passage with everyone, by locating your laptop on your desk, is a bad look and seriously sad first impression. Yet so many people do this. Amazing. Get the camera up to eye height and then spend as much of the time as you can, looking at the camera, rather than the screen.

Online can become very one way and boring. We need to engage our audience. Most of the platforms have polling. This is always useful as way to inject humour or create deeper self awareness. Instead of disappearing off to secretive breakouts all the time, we can also use the whole room together, as a way to share ideas and insights. I am not keen on the chat box because if you have a lot of people, it starts to become a Las Vegas slot machine, with the screen information rapidly spiralling upwards out of control.

The machine adds each new chat at the bottom of the column, pushing the previous comments higher and higher, until you cannot physically keep up anymore. We had 150 people doing a Stress Management class online, broke WebEx and temporarily lost all audio and had to retreat to the chat. What a nightmare that proved to be, at that volume of punters adding their two bits worth.

Whiteboards are okay if you have a limited number of people and have time. You have to make sure the font size works too, because often the default is microscopic and you can hardly read it. We can share files which is truly dangerous. Before you know it, you the presenter, are now a slave to the slide deck. The screen is taken up by your visuals and you get a 5% share of the screen real estate, dangling in some corner, with your tiny little head rammed into a tiny box. Definitely keep your slides spartan, pare back as much content as you can and go for images which require you to explain what it means in this context, so that you can wrench back some modicum of control.

Video is the refuge of scoundrels in presenting. This applies in the online presenting world just as much as it does in the live meeting venue. Video is what the President often goes to for dross, pap and filler from the marketing department or even worse from the Goebbelian Investor Relations pond scum, propaganda merchants. It is extremely rare in my experience that the video ever significantly matches the content of the presentation or adds any value.

Presenters are invariably gun shy about rehearsing their presentations, preferring to grapple with the finer points of slide deck construction. In the online world, this is a formula for tech humiliation. Practice with the tech, until you have mastered it and then practice a bit more for when the tech betrays you, stabbing you in the back, just when you were depending on it to come through for you. You don’t need Plan B. You need Plans B, C and D with today’s treacherous tech.

When the audio crashed out on WebEx, in that infamous 150 person all singing, all dancing extravaganza, our producer quickly phoned in to re-establish audio and did a tremendous job tap dancing, until the trainer could log back in and pick up the pace again. You don’t want to be trying to work this stuff out on the fly. Practice, practice, practice.