Webinars: More Like a Talkshow Than a Workshop

I did one of my first webinar trainings yesterday and, while it wasn't terrible, it was much more difficult than the in-person trainings I am used to doing.

This article expressed my feelings exactly:

What I hadn't bargained for was the deadly quiet, the utter lack of audience interaction. No eye contact. No heads nodding. No "sense of the room"-that vital sixth sense experienced speakers hone to alert them to the audience drifting away. Worse than the sound of one hand clapping, this was the sound of one voice yapping.

A colleague from Community Media Workshop, who was listening in, advised me to think of a webinars as more like hosting a talk radio show than conducting a traditional workshop.

Three quick points that I will definately use the next time after the jump

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Three tips for better webinars:

1) Get all the words off the PowerPoint slide. As my colleague said: Just put up a funny picture and start talking.

2) People used to tell their audience what they were going to tell them and then summarized at the end what they just told them. That doesn't work well in the webinar world. You need to engage and re-engage your audience by telling stories related to the topic.

3) Continually remind and cue people on how they can come into the conversation much like a talk show host does, for example, "people who want to share a similar experience, click the chat button in the lower left or press star six to unmute your phone."