Episode #227: Presenting Online Forever

This pandemic will blow over soon and we can all get back to normal. What will that “normal” look like though in the presenting world. CFOs have pulled their green eye shades down and sharpened their pencils and realised the company can save a truck load of dough by attending business and industry conferences virtually, rather than in person. I am on the Board of the International Dale Carnegie Franchisee Association. Normally (that word again!) we would travel to our Owner’s Meeting in some pleasant locale and gather the faithful from around the world in June. We had to do it virtually last year and had the biggest turnout of participants ever and saved a fleet of truckloads of money for the Association and the Franchisees.

Will we do them virtually now? That is a good question and like a lot of organisations, is a hot topic under discussion. Companies won’t be so keen to spend big money on internal meetings anymore, because the economics is unassailable. Face to face won’t necessarily go to zero and the perfidious online platforms will continue to plague our lives into the future. The term “hybrid” is getting tossed around with expansive abandon, as we explore constructs such as some people online and some in the room arrangements.

How do we present in these situations? There are people in front of us and people beaming in from their homes, workspaces, cafes, the beach or wherever takes their fancy. As the presenter are you in the room or online? Are there multiple presenters, so there is a mix of presenter locations underway? The complex business of presenting is only going to get even more complex.

This is really the Age of Distraction and those beaming into the sessions are completely free to escape from us with no compunction, shame, accountability, or grace. Bosses worried about leading people without line of sight, once the great diaspora to our homes took place. They should be more worried about company meetings being held online and how much engagement is going on with the troops. The bottom line is it is not only not going away, it is about to become more diabolical. Technology will evolve, but the burden on the presenter just escalates exponentially.

After a year of everyone being on Zoom, Teams, WebEx or whatever, do I see people mastering the medium? Sadly, I don't. I still see people who are still placing their laptops on the desk in front of them, rather than raising the height of the camera to eye line. I found the box set of the Harry Potter movies I bought many years ago for my son is the perfect height for elevating the camera and elevating my ability to release audiences from peering up my nostrils.

Do I see people engaging with the camera? Or with the faces arranged about five to 10 centimeters below the camera on the main screen? Everyone is looking at the faces on the screen when they are talking, rather than talking to the camera. Yes, it is perplexing to have that gap. Yes, it is a flaw in the tech, because your brain automatically directs you to the faces rather than to the lens. It means though that when we are in the presenter role, we have to override our brain and keep telling ourselves, keep looking at the lens, keep looking at the lens, keep looking at the lens.

True, we can't see the reactions, but that is not so different to presenting when the stage is flooded with lights and the audience are in a deep pool of darkness in the distance and you can't see anyone's face.

The other basic thing still missing, even after everyone has become a veteran of online meetings, is energy in the presenters. The screen mediums rob us of about 20% of our on-screen presence. So, we have to at least ramp things up by that factor, to just tread water. Given people are easily prone to multitask in the background, we need to lift our energy even further to engage them. Do I see people doing this after 12 months of experience? No, they babble on in a flat dull voice, with no presence and little energy. The presenting role is set to become even more fraught. If we haven't even mastered the basics, how are we going to handle substantially greater complexity? Time is short. “Tech waits for no man”. We have to shift our mindset and shift it right now.