by Nick Morgan
The third and final step in Courville’s process is to discover what you can do online that you can’t do offline. Every communication medium has its own unique strengths, and webinars are no exception. Say that in a typical workshop session, you would have participants go around and introduce themselves. That might take fifteen minutes in person. But if you have participants in a webinar type in their introductions simultaneously, it only takes a minute or two, saving you time to dig deeper into the material.
The technology exists to make webinars engaging, interactive, and worth your audience’s time. It’s just that most people don’t know enough about the software they’re using, Courville says.
“They are just used to doing things in a poor way, and they don’t know any better.” The good news is that the underused capacity of the software means there’s plenty of room to blow your audience away with a few simple improvements to the typical approach. “The bar is so low,” Courville says, “there are a lot of wins to be had.”
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Offer your audience creative value
Besides the webinar content itself, there are creative ways you can reward the participants. Consider these suggestions.
Connect the webinar to the news of the day in some way.
Potential participants will ask why they should attend a webinar, and you need to have an answer. But if you can also answer the other part of the question, “Why now?,” you can greatly increase participation. Timeliness is powerful.
Offer something unexpected near the end of the webinar.
Surprises can delight audiences and keep them hanging on for more. They are a way to make a humdrum webinar experience unforgettable.
Offer face-to-face meetings for a select few. You can do this either before or after the fact. You might, for example, offer to the first few signups a free ticket to fly to the studio where the webinar is being recorded. This step has the added advantage of providing a live audience for the speaker, and it’s fun to see behind the scenes. Get those participants to help with the visual social media.
Don’t stop when the webinar is done
Finally, here are a few pointers to follow after the webinar is done. If you want to increase the likelihood that your webinar will defy expectations, logic, and the unhappy history of most webinars and actually be remembered, then consider taking the following postwebinar actions.
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184 Specific Techniques for Specific Digital Channels Use social media to create a winner after the fact. George Bernard Shaw, when he was a young, unknown, impoverished, and struggling playwright, wrote glowing reviews of his own plays and published them under assumed names in the journals of the day. He was using the social media of his day astutely, and you can too—provided, of course, that you find real people from the webinar to say the nice things. In this transparent era, don’t try to practice Shaw’s deception. You might get caught, and anyway, as President Nixon famously said in a slightly different context, “It would be wrong.”
Think about creating short videos before and after your webinar. Just because you’re virtual doesn’t mean that you can’t video the speaker and put out the results on social media. People connect with other people’s faces, especially on video, so videos can be a powerful way to increase interest.
Start an online discussion about the knowledge and insights developed in the webinar. The webinar provides the hook and the headline; it’s up to you to keep the conversation going. You’re going to have to feed it, at least to get it started, but if you can keep it engaging, you may well begin something with lasting value.
Crowdsource everything. Follow up the webinar with polls, surveys, prizes for participation, and so on. If you make it fun, people will participate.
Give away things that will increase retention and participation.
For example, you might offer a follow-up coaching session or one-on-one call with the speaker. That kind of connection is precisely what’s missing in the one-to-many form that is the webinar.
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Offer smaller discussion sessions to participants after the webinar is over. These sessions can be with the speaker or other representatives from the organization. Small discussion groups can create a sense of insider exclusivity that is appealing to many participants.
Periodically send follow-up items of value to participants.
You can send further information inexpensively via pdf and email, but physical objects, such as letters, printed reports, and photographs, have a charm and solidity that virtual objects don’t. Take advantage of the real world as much as possible in the virtual.
As these examples show, there are many ways to spice up a webinar, and not all of them need to take place during the webinar itself.
In the end, webinar leaders need to communicate with intent, just like any other speaker or leader who needs to make the right impression on the audience. Much of what is successful body language in person falls short online; that’s a central tenet of this book. But even in the lowly webinar, you can use some of the techniques that work much better in person.
For example, one way to increase the likelihood and speed of building trust is to mirror the other person you’re meeting or getting to know. It’s a phenomenon well studied in the body-language world. We see lovers, longtime friends, and coworkers who agree on something unconsciously mirroring each other on a minute-by-minute basis. It’s our bodies’ way of telling the other person, “Hey, we’re alike, we agree, we’re on the same page here.”
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186 Specific Techniques for Specific Digital Channels You can consciously mirror the relative stranger in front of you and thereby greatly increase both the depth and the rate of trust building. It needs to be done with some subtlety and care, but it’s rare that the other person will notice unless you become hyperactive in your efforts and try to mirror every little twitch.
Less is more.
Online, via voice, all you can do is mirror the other person’s speech patterns, tone, and manner of speaking as much as possible. If a participant asks a question in a rapid-fire way, for example, you can respond in that way. Or if you hear a questioner using certain phrases, play those phrases back to him or her. Of course, using the name of your participant is gratifying for the person and increases trust. The palette is more limited in voice-only interaction, but the intent is the same.
The conscious study and use of body language for specific psychological purposes is demanding work, but the payoff is rich in stronger connections with the rest of the human race. And that goes for webinar speakers, too.
Practical fix
The webinar cheat sheet
Use these suggestions to move beyond the mediocre expectations usually afforded the webinar.
1. Share what you can beforehand to make the webinar as focused and as efficient as you can.
2. Think about creating short videos before and after your webinar.
3. Just as in a face-to-face conference, webinars should have backup speakers ready.
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4. You should also back up everything else.
5. Consider adding music to your webinar.
6. Limit the number of participants.
7. Have a buddy or, better yet, have two.
8. Start on time.
9. Have an agenda, and stick to it.
10. Announce who is on the call.
11. Because people crave conversation and collaboration, make it easy for them to do both. Create some rules, announce them, and stick to them.
12. Announce a way to involve the whole group, and periodically use this approach.
13. Be clear on w
hether your meeting is about an exchange of information or decision making.
14. Have an overarching story line to your webinar.
15. Appoint someone to be the recording secretary, if there are things to be decided.
16. Before the start of the meat of the presentation, go over expectations.
17. Never go more than ten minutes without some kind of break and change.
18. Either you or your buddy should regularly comment on what the status of the meeting is.
19. Put back into the webinar the emotions that the virtual format takes out.
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188 Specific Techniques for Specific Digital Channels 20. Keep the focus.
21. Follow up with something valuable after the fact.
22. Summarize at the end of each chapter, or part, of the webinar, and provide a tease for the next one.
23. Vary the content and format of those chapters.
24. In general, keep things a little more formal than in a face-to-face meeting.
25. Keep track of those who don’t participate, and give them a chance to do so on the penultimate break.
26. Regularly use active listening to restate questions for clarity and agreement.
27. If it’s a public conference, then encourage the use of Twitter and other social media channels.
28. If there are follow-ups to do, note those too, and notify those affected.
29. Use social media to create a winner after the fact.
30. Start an online discussion about the knowledge and insights developed in the webinar.
31. Crowdsource everything.
32. Connect the webinar to the news of the day in some way.
33. Give away things that will increase retention and participation.
34. Offer something unexpected near the end of the webinar.
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35. Offer smaller discussion sessions to participants after the webinar.
36. Periodically send follow-up items of value to participants.
37. Offer face-to-face meetings for a select few.
CHAPTER SUMMARY
• Webinars are a miserable form of communication; figure out ways to make them better.
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9.
THE CHAT SESSION
Pity poor Robert Kelly, professor of political science at Pusan National University in South Korea.1 He was mid-interview with the BBC, on March 10, 2017, just after 8:00 p.m. his time, talking about the desperately important issue of the first impeachment of a South Korean head of government. The interview was being conducted live from his home office. Kelly was nicely done up in a suit and tie, hair combed, a serious- looking wall map of the world in the background, when first one of his kids, then another, burst into the room and starting heading for Daddy. Seconds later, his harried wife scrambles in, scoops up both kids, and hurries out, trying her best to be invisible. The video clip went viral, naturally, and gave us all a good laugh and made Kelly temporarily famous.
The bit was funny for the world and embarrassing for Kelly because it mixed two worlds in the unforgiving light of a Skype linkup—the BBC and Kelly’s kids. And because he did his best to push his child out of the way. His failure to do so only added to the fun.
We debate endlessly the problems of our 24-7 existence and bemoan the intrusion of email and conference calls into our nonwork hours, but adding video to the mix creates another potential level of intrusion. One kind of mixing of those worlds, Chapter_09.indd 191
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192 Specific Techniques for Specific Digital Channels work and home, causes stress and must be managed, but the next level, which Kelly experienced, means crisis. Fortunately, in his case the world decided to laugh and move on, but he will long be known not as “Professor Kelly, expert,” but as “Professor Kelly, that guy whose kids interrupted his BBC interview.” Both sobriquets have their charms, but the latter is not consequence-free.
Balance is gone; blend is in So thoroughly have the intrusions of the digital world disrupted our old, pre-twenty-first-century existences that many people no longer talk about work-life balance. Instead, it’s fashionable to talk about work-life blend. Which basically means that you’re giving up on balance. You do one to the extreme, perhaps, and then the other. The problem is that most of those blends involve taking the phone with you to the game, or some other similar sort of ugly compromise.
Video makes it much harder to blend. As Robert Kelly found out. A little background noise on a phone hookup would have been a different thing, wouldn’t it? No interruption to speak of, and no viral video.
So why is video different? A naive response would say, “Video is different because it’s like being there in person. You can see and hear. What else do you need?” According to this line of reasoning, of your basic five senses, sight and sound are by far the most important. Taste, touch, and smell only confirm what you’re seeing and hearing.
But video turns out to be far more complicated than that.
Some companies have set up expensive whole-room videoconferencing facilities with half of a conference room in one location and the other half in some other place. When you dial up Chapter_09.indd 192
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Shanghai, then, you get a complete conference table, sort of, and a group of people sitting around it as if they were all in the same room.
Almost there is almost not-there
Indeed, for brief periods the setup almost works like that. Then someone moves, and they’re cut off from your view, but your brain is telling you that you should be able to see them. That’s curiously stressful. Why should it be?
For answers, I turned to John Medina, developmental molecular biologist, director of the Brain Center for Applied Learning Research at Seattle Pacific University, and author of the celebrated book Brain Rules.2 Medina explains, “The brain gets inputs from many sources. When one of those channels is missing, it makes things up to fill the gap. And it gets stressed.” He adds,
“The brain basically doesn’t know what to do with virtual visual images, because they lack a host of inputs we would get in person, like changes in air pressure and so on, so it responds by getting stressed-out.”
Medina notes that the brain gets used to a certain level of errors and omissions in virtual exchanges like phone calls, webinars, and videoconferences, but it isn’t happy with the impoverished picture it’s receiving. So, it “builds up a spread-sheet of responses from past experiences, because the brain is ridiculously adaptable, like starting to see all caps in email and texting as shouting.” But the whole process remains both stressful and unsatisfying for the brain.
In Medina’s taxonomy, email is the worst, the most impoverished. Following that is the phone. And only a little better is video. When I asked him what he suggested to ameliorate each of these impoverished channels, he suggested that the best thing Chapter_09.indd 193
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194 Specific Techniques for Specific Digital Channels to do with an email is “call the other person up and read the email to them.” At least, in that way, you’d have a chance to ask the question “How did what I just said make you feel?” This key question is, in a very real sense, the question we always want answered as humans most urgently: What is that other person’s intent toward me? We are hardwired, as Medina points out in Brain Rules, to ask basic questions on meeting other people, questions like “Is this person a friend or foe?” Not getting clear answers for those kinds of basic questions makes our brains very nervous.
How are you feeling right now?
For phone conferences and webinars, Medina notes, “Virtually all group social signal is absent. There is no good fix for that.” And for vi
deo? “A little better but still very stressful,” he says. He recommends instituting the perception check outlined above. “How did what I said just now make you feel?”
Adding almost any kind of emotional connection in the virtual world helps. Indeed, a study of virtual negotiations found that brief discussions of social connections like hobbies greatly increased the likelihood of the negotiation’s ultimate success.3
There are a few basic rules you have to understand if you’re going to use Skype or something like it. Let’s consider them next.
You don’t have to shout
You do have to be more aware of the conversational handoffs in virtual interactions than in a face-to-face discussion. Many of the little signals that tell us how to conduct a conversation, with the appropriate opportunities for the other person or people to chime in, don’t translate even in the video world. For example, Chapter_09.indd 194
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we need our full peripheral vision to make a conversation work, and the two-dimensional screen makes such vision much more difficult.
Follow some commonsense
rules when using Skype
The first rule of Skype is an old-fashioned one. Create some formal, but simple, mechanism for handing off the conversation to the next participant—such as a hand raise. The discipline required takes some people a little time to learn, but the results in terms of increased clarity are worth it.
Second, you absolutely must provide an agenda for a Skype call that’s going to last more than ten minutes. And adhere to it. Third, because people are often too polite to want to express problems of communication on their end, you always should begin with a check-in around the Skype circle to establish local issues that might affect the call, questions of timing, and so on.
One company that has three offices in different cities relies on a mix of conference calls, videoconferencing, face-to-face meetings, instant messaging, and emails to conduct daily business.
The company reports difficulty with a number of these channels, but videoconferencing may be the most difficult—simply because it is the newest communication channel still in the business world and employees have less experience with it.