Webinars and Online Meetings as Public Speaking

Whether in an online class, a Zoom interview, a virtual meeting with your team, or a public webinar, knowing how to present information online is a key skill for the modern world, a skill that incorporates public speaking knowledge.

Webinars

A webinar presenter uses video conferencing tools to present information to an audience. Presenters in a webinar often provide information through slides.

In addition, webinars typically provide the audience opportunities to interact with the presenter through something like a chat or poll.

In his book 10 Steps to Successful Virtual Presentations, Wayne Turmel identifies four broad categories of virtual presentations:

1. General Information Webinar: A session where the presenter shares information about a subject, service, or product. This is similar to an informative speech.
2. Sales Demo: A session where the presenter is describing attributes of a product to an audience who are considering purchasing the product.
3. Training: A session where a presenter is explaining how to successfully complete a task or process or how to use a product such as software.
4. Team Meeting: A session where a presenter is facilitating a meeting among colleagues working together on a shared task.^[1]

Turmel offers the following suggestions about how to successfully put on a webinar. You’ll see that they are the same types of suggestions for offering a speech online:

• Identify your objectives for the presentation. Your objectives will guide you in developing the content and structure of the webinar.
• Learn the software platform you will be using for the webinar.
• If you are working with others to develop the webinar create a project plan identifying who will do what and by when.
• Create an agenda and content outline (main points) for the webinar. Build in places during the webinar for Q&A with the audience.
• Create visuals such as slides that support the content.
• Rehearse the presentation, making sure you are comfortable with the software platform and being able to do things like switch from talking to the camera to presenting your slides.
• Present the webinar.^[2]

The following video discusses how to create and host a webinar.

Dealing with Webinar Questions and Answers

In many platforms, you can collect questions from your audience using a chat tool.

Two common strategies for handling questions are to:

1. have several short breaks between presenting content where you do Q&A (often using questions posted to the chat)
2. wait until after you present all your information to answer questions

Unless your webinar audience is fairly small, it’s usually better to handle questions using chat rather than having audiences ask their questions via audio because people’s microphones or audio settings may not always be working well. In addition, some audience members may use question time to go off on a tangent unrelated to the topic of the webinar or use the Q&A time to dominate the session with a long, involved statement or question that all audience members may not interest all audience members.

In his book 10 Steps to Successful Virtual Presentations, Wayne Turmel suggests presenters do the following when answering audience questions:

• When you answer a question from the audience, regardless of whether the question comes from a chat tool or audio, repeat the question so everyone can hear it. This helps your audience know what the question is and it also give you a chance to think before you answer the question.
• Go slowly when you answer questions to make sure you aren’t rushing and instead are taking time to answer the question correctly.
• Try to finish your answer by tying the answer back to the primary goal or objective of the webinar so you reinforce how the answer relates to the reason they are attending the webinar in the first place.
• Ask the person who asked the question whether your answer addressed what they were wanting to learn.^[3]

Online Meetings

If you are leading an online meeting, there are ways to engage participants so they participate productively in the meeting.

Likewise, if you are participating in an online meeting, keep these same strategies in mind as ways you can increase the quality of your own participation.

Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Justin Hale and Joseph Grenny offer the following suggestions for getting people to participate in virtual meetings:

1. The 60-second rule: First, never engage a group in solving a problem until they understand  the problem. Do something in the first 60 seconds to help them understand the problem. This works much like an attention-getter in a speech. You could provide an anecdote or startling statistic, for instance, that appeals to the experiences of your audience or that taps into their emotions. Help your audience understand the problem so they are more likely to engage with you.
2. The responsibility rule: To get participants to be more than just observers, create an expectation of shared responsibility early on in the meeting. The next suggestion provides one example of how to do that.
3. The nowhere-to-hide rule: There’s a phenomenon social psychologists have called diffusion of responsibility, which basically says if everyone is responsible, then no one feels responsible. In virtual meetings where it is easy to just hide rather than be an active participant, diffusion of responsibility is all too common. To counteract it, give people tasks that they can actively engage in so they have to be active, responsible participants. For instance, provide a problem that can be solved quickly, assign people to groups of two or three, and give them a place like a breakout room of chat to communicate and come up with a solution.
4. The MVP rule: Here, MVP stands for Minimum Viable PowerPoint rather than Most Valuable Player. The idea behind this rule is if your goal is engagement, mix facts and stories rather than overload the audience with slide after slide of bullet points. Choose the least amount of data or information you need to put on your slides to inform and engage your audience. In other words, keep the number of slides you are using to an absolute minimum so your audience isn’t overwhelmed and will be more likely to listen to you.
5. The five-minute rule: Don’t go longer than five minutes without giving your audience another problem to solve, question to answer, or opportunity to provide feedback through something like a poll. If you don’t keep up a constant expectation of meaningful involvement, your audience will retreat back into the observer role.^[4]