Episode #189: Today's OnLine Presenters Are Demented One Dimensionals

Webinar and after webinar, I see presenters delivering such substandard efforts that I quiver with fear for the personal brand damage they are doing to themselves. Once upon a time, they might be showing fifty people they were unprofessional, but now the online meetings can have hundreds in attendance. Camera up the nose, talking down to what is on screen, not looking at the viewers, waffling away in a demented monotone, being all at sea with the broadcast platform, using delusional, inpenetrable slide decks and somehow expecting we can unravel the florid mess on screen - the list of virtual presentation misdemeanours goes on and on.

I laughed the other day, when the expert panel had been thrashing around before the start, getting organised and vaguely trying to work out how to do polls, to get the show on the road. At sixty seconds to blast off, one of the host geniuses suddenly realised they had all been naked to their audience, in their pathetic pre-show glory, for the last fifteen minutes of online presenting preparation vaudeville.

Organisers need to plan carefully for the start of the programme. First impressions are quickly formed and are unforgiving. If you come across as unprofessional, then the audience will be reluctant to accept your subsequent professional contribution. This is show business folks, so carefully craft what happens when the curtain goes up. The impresario planning element needs a lot more work for the preparation. What about the post show review. I doubt anyone is doing the latter, because they keep shovelling out the same drivel.

The amateur hour, one way, passive delivery is also very droll. They each speak in turn, we listen and we are commanded to get our questions into the chat or the Q&A box at the end. The formula is always the same. After months of experience with the medium, you would think presenters would be wanting to push the tech to its limits. Nope.

They are timorous types, trapped by the nerd eminence grise armies at Zoom, WebEx, Teams, GoToWebinar and all of the other not quite satisfactory platforms out there. Yes, the tech platforms have their limitations, but the presenters are falling well within the boundaries of the commonplace, rather than pushing hard against what is possible.

Online presenting is different to physical room environment. Live venue audiences give speakers visceral feedback through body language, eye contact and energy. Online, all of that is masked, hidden, contorted and mainly unfathomable. Therefore, we really need to engage the audience with the tech tools available. But you never see this being attempted by the speakers.

During the talk, we can get a raised hand, a green check or a red cross, smiley face emojis of bewildering variety or a simple one word comment in the chat. But we never ask for it. We can also get members of the audience to comment during the talk, as we can unmute them and seek their reaction. It is still all very much an “us and them” affair. The erudite panel are over here and the punters are over there. No fraternisation among the ranks allowed during online parade.

Why should it be like that? This is a different medium and it needs extra effort to get audience engagement. We should be using all the reaction tools at our disposal. Polls are good for humour, self awareness and real time information dissemination, but these tools are used with such sparing pluck. It reveals what a bunch of dilettantes we have in charge of these mighty organisations and what a gauche group of amateurs we have running the show. The organisers are doing a pretty poor job and they are failing their presenters at every turn. When the presenters are clueless on the tech possibilities, the host has the job of educating them.

The engagement tools exist, yet no one makes any effort to learn them first, before launching forth with their webinar effort. The hosts of the programme need to take the presenters through what is possible for them and lead them to the understanding that they can employ these tools to be more effective communicators in this medium.

Every four to five minutes of a talk, there should be some interaction with the audience in the live venue world. Well that rule applies just as much in the on-line world. All you need to do is plan for it. Let’s scope out beforehand at which points it makes sense to get some feedback from the audience. Waiting until the end is outdated, old school.

We are all in the multitasking like demons on speed world now. If the online speaker isn’t getting engagement, then the audience remains oblivious to their message. There is a lot of flame and quite a bit of smoke being put about in the webinar world today, but precious little light. The punters who turn up online are not online. They are doing something else at the same time, on the internet, with their email, with their papers, their phones. All the while, the expert panel are bumbling along in the background in their mind-numbing, monotonous monotones. Organisers in Japan, please be more professional and release us from this online webinar hell.