I have given, organized and attended quite a few presentations online. It is very convenient that you can do a session without traveling. But it can be tricky to get your point across to the audience. A lot harder than if you are in the same room with them and look them in the eye. These are some of the lessons I learned and that I would like to share.
I have mostly used Lync and Skype for Business for my online meetings and presentations, but most of these lessons and tips are applicable to other tools as well. I use these tools, for example, for training sessions with clients in other countries, knowledge sharing sessions with my colleagues (which I discussed in a previous post), and I have attended and presented at online conferences. The more formal and important the presentation, the more important that you take heed of the 10 tips below.
1. Test beforehand if the online presentation tool works on your computer
If you have never used Lync or Skype for Business or the Webinar tool before, check if it works on your computer, your network, through your firewall and the firewall of the organiser. In short: check if it works for you in the desired situation.
In our lunchsessions, we had a guest speaker who had never used Lync before. We did a test run a week before his presentation and found out that he ran into serious difficulties when he tried to install it on his computer. So after several attempts to install Lync on his computer or getting it to work in his browser, we just ditched Lync for this meeting and switched to his favorite online presentation tool. We have also had some surprises with the demo of another guest speaker: the demo would only work if he switched on his VPN to get a secure connection to his own network, but that blocked our Skype for Business.
So test it, and do that early enough to be able to switch to another tool if needed.
2. Make sure you know how the tool works
Find out beforehand how you can mute and unmute yourself, share your desktop or your slides or whatever you want to show using the selected tool.
We fumbled a bit when Microsoft changed Lync to Skype for Business. Where has the ‘Share my desktop’ option gone? That was an internal knowledge sharing session, so no big deal. But you don’t want to look for buttons during a digital conference.
So spend some time familiarizing yourself with the tool that you are going to use.
3. Ask someone else to keep an eye on the chat
As a presenter, you want to focus on your presentation: tell your story and show your demo in a clear way. Without any distractions, that doubly distract the audience in an online session.
Sometimes we see that one attendee is having difficulties with the audio. When the presenter is handling the chat window, this stops the flow of the presentation entirely. A moderator can check if the other attendees have lost audio as well and recommend, for example, the audio-less individual to enable sound or re-enter the session.
So ask a colleague or organiser to keep an eye on the chat window, deal with practical questions and relay questions that would get lost otherwise.
4. Ask a colleague to listen in and warn you if anything goes wrong
As an online presenter, your connection with the audience is a lot more tenuous that as a ‘physical’ presenter in front of a live audience. If your audio drops, or if your video drops (your shared screen), than you may not even know that you have lost your audience.
I have attended an international digital conference where a presenter lost his audio. Nobody could hear him anymore. Fortunately I was in the same building as him, so I could run to the meeting room where he was sitting and warn him that he had to take action.
So ask somebody to attend the session online while being in the neighbourhood physically, so that they can easily warn you.
5. In big sessions, mute the attendees
Online sessions with many participants can get very messy: people speaking at the same time in a meeting room is feasible, but in an online meeting it is a disaster. And if any of the participants suffers from some background noise, that will annoy everybody.
I’ve been in plenty of sessions where you could hear someone typing or coughing or talking to another person in the room. This is very distracting and has to be avoided in online sessions.
So if you have many attendees, configure your Skype for Business meeting (or whatever you have) to mute all attendees. If anybody wants to say something, they can use the chat window or you can unmute them for a specific contribution.
6. Use a good microphone
It is more difficult to understand somebody if they are not in the same room, because you don’t get their non-verbal communication. Also, a voice through a microphone is always less clear than a voice in real life.
Many of us have attended online sessions where you had to strain your ears to hear the presenter, if you could hear him or her at all: too faint, bad quality, words disappearing. Very frustrating and tiring.
So if you are presenting an online session, use a good headset and talk right into the microphone of that headset.
If you have a mixed session with online and offline participants, where the participants in the room are also asking questions or making comments, you need something like a RoundTable/Polycom for 360 degrees of microphone. If you just use a headset or the microphone of your laptop in that case, the online participants can not understand what is being said by the offline participants in the room and that is very frustrating.
7. Open the session early and test if it works
Take your time to set up your computer, connect to the network, open the Skype for Business session (or whatever tool you are using) and test if it is really working as you expected.
I have attended plenty of online meetings and presentations where we started late because of technical issues. This is also true for ‘classic’ presentation in meeting rooms with faulty beamers of course. The worst issues were usually in sessions with a mix of online and offline participants, where the beamer, the audio and the shared screen would go wrong independently…
So set everything up at least 15 minutes before you start the session. You need to have enough time to fix problems or ask technical support to fix them for you. Ask a colleague who is not in the same room if they can check if they can hear you and see your screen. If you have a mix of online and offline participants, check if your test colleague can also hear people talking at the other end of the room (i.e. if your RoundTable device is working). If you don’t want your attendees to see your tests (in formal sessions), you can configure your Skype for Business meeting to let attendees wait in the meeting lobby until you allow them to enter your digital meeting room. For informal meetings, I usually let everybody see my tests, because then I don’t have to remember letting them in…
8. Be careful of open mikes
With these microphones, you do not immediately see who can hear you.
We have all heard of politicians’ bloopers when they speak ill or people without realizing that they are doing so in front of an open microphone. Fortunately I have never witnessed any really embarrassing situations in online presentations, but it is still a pitfall. Especially if you are about to start a mixed session and only one colleague has arrived in your meeting room. Be careful what you are gossiping about with that one colleague, because there may be ten colleagues who have just joined online and who are listening in…
So assume that other people are listing and that a recording is running unless you are quite sure that this is not the case.
9. Take into account that the shared screen may be slow
When you share your screen in an online presentation, the visual part tends to lag behind: the online attendees see your cursor move seconds after you have moved it.
I gave a training session to a lot of online participants from all over the world; the cursor was a least 3 seconds slow and I had to be very careful of how I moved my mouse. And we once had a meeting with people that had a slow internet connection where it took even longer; we had to wait for them to tell us if they had actually seen the cursor reach the button we were aiming for – I hope I never have to experience that again.
So move your cursor slowly. Don’t move it around a lot. Just move it slowly to where it has to be. Wait a moment before you click anything. For important presentations with a lot of participants, ask a colleague to sit next to you as an attendee, so that they can signal to you if you need to slow down.
If the session has a video component showing you as a presenter, you need to be careful not to move yourself too much or too quickly either. That would be distracting and it can also disrupt the video signal, which can’t keep up.
10. Don’t forget your online attendees in a mixed session
Mixed sessions can be tricky, with offline participants who are with you in the room as well as online participants who have joined via Skype for Business for example.
Our knowledge sharing lunch sessions always have a mix of participants who are at our headquarters and particpants online who cannot make it to the meeting room. Especially if there are many participants in the room, presenters sometimes forget about the online particpants: they start to point out things on the beamer screen with their hands instead of their cursors for example.
So stick with your computer and your cursor. Don’t move around in the room and point with your hands. Somebody has to keep an eye on the chat to see if there are any questions from the online people, especially if you have muted all attendees. Unmute people who have complicated questions or remarks – talking is easier than typing.
For any presentation, you need to prepare your story, prepare your demo, speak slowly and clearly, and use all the regular presentation skills. But if you present to an online audience, you need to do a bit more. I hope these 10 tips will help you with that.