We all know how it goes in a traditional presentation – you stand up at the front of the room, you go through your slideshow, you talk. Eye contact, body language, and delivery skills are major factors in your success.
But how do presentations work when your audience isn’t in the same room – or maybe even in the same time zone – with you?
The Virtual Audience
Virtual meetings, presentations, and webinars are becoming increasingly commonplace as businesses globalize and virtual teams work together across great distances.
Presenting to virtual audiences brings both new opportunities and unique challenges for the modern presenter. It can certainly save on travel costs and helps to ensure that far-flung participants are all on the same page and have access to the same information. Web-based presentations can also often be recorded and distributed to individuals who were not present for the session, or archived for future use.
As businesses continues to globalize, webinars and virtual meetings are quickly becoming one of the most common ways to share information, present data, or ensure alignment among geographically dispersed teams. Schools are also beginning to turn to online seminars and lectures to accommodate the schedules and location needs of working students with families, making continuing education more accessible and convenient.
However, the online presentation certainly has its challenges and drawbacks, especially for those who are new to the medium.
Challenges of Virtual Presentations
You may be connecting with your virtual audience via video chat with a webcam, using a virtual meeting or web conferencing platform such as WebEx or GoToMeeting, or leading a webinar that combines live onscreen action with slide decks. Whether you’re on Skype or WebEx, the idea is that you can transmit information to the audience even though they aren’t physically present. However, that lack of physical presence can become an issue in several ways.
Depending on the platform, your audience may not be able to see you at all, which means that traditional delivery techniques using eye contact, gestures, and body language to help communicate confidence and generate engagement are off the table.
The warm, connected sense of rapport that a presenter strives for in a live setting can also be compromised in a virtual situation. You may be able to address questions or connect with individuals if you have a fairly small group involved in the conference. However, if your audience is quite large – and with this technology, you can potentially reach many more people than you could in person – it may become impossible to interact with every individual audience member.
The inability to interact with and personally engage audience members leads to yet another major challenge – keeping the audience’s attention! Remote audience members may tend to multitask. If the presentation fails to capture their interest, or if they have other priorities, they may have other windows open on their screens as they continue to work during your talk – or they may simply wander away to handle other tasks while the conference continues without them! This may lead to audience members missing important information and compromise their understanding of your message.
For presenters, another major concern is the relative inability to tell how the talk is being received. In the absence of direct audience feedback, it may be impossible to know whether you are speaking to a rapt audience or one that is completely disengaged. Building in some interactive material is one potential strategy for involving the audience, but it may not always be a practical approach.
Finally, there’s always the possibility of a technical issue derailing the entire process. If you or your audience lose your internet connection or start experiencing lag, it can be very disruptive. Common problems include audio and video that aren’t synced, or audio that becomes garbled due to a weak connection. If the webinar is being recorded and then broadcast, these issues can be addressed, but during a live presentation they can be catastrophic.
Simply being aware of these potential pitfalls can help you create your own safeguards and strategies to counter the challenges of presenting virtually. Keep watching this space for some suggestions and best practices to rise to the challenge and keep your virtual presentations from getting derailed.
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Baker Communications offers leading-edge Presentations Training solutions that will help we address the goals and achieve the solutions addressed in this article. For more information about how our organization can achieve immediate and lasting behavior change that leads to success during presentations in any setting, click here.
