We were thrown into the virtual world kicking and screaming. Virtual meetings, virtual presentations, and virtual happy hours have become the norm. 

So, there are few things to keep in mind when facilitating virtual meetings/presentations AND when you are part of the audience. Here are some of them:

As a presenter, I don’t want to: 

1. Look up your nose
2. See you walking around your house
3. See your cat in front of your camera
4. Hear your dog barking 
5. See a silhouette of you because you are sitting with a window behind you
6. See you disappear into your virtual wallpaper – or watch various body parts appear and disappear.

And those are just a few observations and complaints from the presenters, not the audience.  

For myself, the number one challenge is remembering to look at the camera during the presentation. It is critical to make eye contact with your audience to help keep them engaged. Think about it, in a live presentation, if the presenter never makes eye contact with you, would you feel that the presenter cared about you or their presentation?

As to the audience, many things cause an extreme disconnect, and in some cases, disrespect – however unintended. 

My top three are:

1. Audience members do not have their camera on. To a presenter, this gives the impression that you are not paying attention, are disengaged, and, more than likely, multi-tasking… taking the dog for a walk? making lunch? answering emails? You may or may not be doing any of these things, but it appears as though you are!  
2. They forget that a virtual meeting/presentation is a professional event. Not taking into consideration the camera angle, personal appearance, or background that others are seeing. Many participants show up – often late – while driving their car with their phone in their lap.  
3. You are forgetting to mute the audio line when not talking. Every noise in the background – dogs barking, kids screaming, car horns honking, Starbucks espresso machines screeching, etc., will be heard by everyone else in the virtual meeting – and be distracted and disconnected because of it.

These are the kinds of things that make virtual events suck. But here’s the point – a Virtual ANYTHING does not have to suck! And it is the presenter’s responsibility to make sure it doesn’t suck by engaging the audience.  

If you are the presenter or running the virtual meeting, here are eight tips to not suck and engage your audience. As a special bonus, two tips on how to improve your internet speed and stability. 

1. Eye contact: Raise your laptop or desktop monitor, so you are eye-to-eye with the webcam. You can achieve this by a stack of books under your laptop to raise it to your eye level. Also, remember to look into the webcam 70% of the time. This will increase the engagement with the audience. 
2. Stand up: Standing up in front of an audience and delivering your content is how presentations, preCOVID-19 were done, so why should they be any different when giving a live virtual presentation? When we are standing, we increase our energy and passion. Go out and buy yourself a standing desk, a desk riser, or use your MacGyver skills. A colleague took a basket and a lobster pot and put their monitor on top of it to stand and deliver their virtual presentation. 
3. Purchase a good microphone without breaking the bank. Suppose your internet is running as it should, but the audience can’t hear you well, or there are crackling noises in your microphone. In that case, your audience will stop listening to you. You can get a decent microphone for under $100.00, and it is worth the investment.
4. Breakout Rooms: If you are using Zoom, MS Teams, Gotomeeting,com, or Cisco Webex, utilized the breakout rooms for discussions, role-play, brainstorming, debates, strategy discussions, improv exercise, or anything that requires a minimum of 2 people. 
5. Polling questions: Poll the audience frequently and often to ensure they understand the concepts and content you deliver. Also, get to know your audience with some demographic information. 
6. Conferences IO: According to their website, Conferences i/o improves attendee engagement, participation & learning by empowering audiences to interact in real-time during presentations. In Conferences IO, you can ask multiple choice questions, short answers, numerical average, or brainstorming ideas. There is also a Q&A feature where someone can ask a question, and if others think it is a good or bad question, they can vote it up or down. I am starting to use more of Conferences IO than having the audience submit answers to my questions via the chatbox. The reason is that after your session is over, you can download a report to review and to give it to your client. Now they have something tangible to review from your presentation.
7. Use a multi-camera shoot: When you are looking at your webcam, switch to another camera, and go back and forth. The audience will likely still be engaged because they get different video angles, which helps them pay attention. Go old school, use your 2nd camera, and focus on a flip chart or whiteboard in your office. That will raise some eyebrows and make it way more interesting and fun. 
8. Simplify your slides and tell more stories:  When I say simplify, think like Abe Lincoln. Abe wrote the Gettysburg address using only 272 words, which, if spoken 100 words per minute, Lincoln spoke for just under 3 minutes. Former Secretary of State Edward Everett spoke before Lincoln, and he spoke for two hours. Use fewer words on your PowerPoint slides and tell more stories. That is how you keep the audience engaged. A data dump of faces and figures shoved on a PPT slide with the font size of 12 is just another way of telling the audience to read their email and play their favorite app game.  
9. Know your minimum internet speed, upload bandwidth, and network latency:  The minimum internet speed should be 200 Mbps, upload bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps, and network latency should be less than 100 ms. Per Netflix’s website, latency refers to the time it takes for data to travel from a user’s device to the server and back – will be measured on both unloaded and loaded connections. Unloaded latency measures the round-trip time of a request when there is no other traffic present on a user’s network, while loaded latency measures the round-trip time when data-heavy applications are being used on the network. For example, your unloaded latency is 25, and your loaded latency is 50, that is good. However, if your unloaded latency is 25 and your loaded latency is 175, which is not good, and you are suffering from BufferBloat, which can cause your Zoom meetings to buffer or freeze, even though your speed is 300 Mbps. Check with your internet provider. 
10. Improve your internet speed: You can improve your speed by 
    1. shutting down any program running in the background like Dropbox and a File backup app.  
    2. If your hard drive is almost full, then move files off your hard drive to an external drive. Free up more space. 
    3. Reboot your modem and router once a week.

I have been working with three regional salespeople for a manufacturer in the Midwest to give a more engaging virtual presentation. These are the tips and techniques I have been sharing with them to continue to do their job and engage their customers and prospects. 

If you would like me to work with you or your team on how do give a more engaging virtual presentation, please email me at peter@petermargaritis.com and put in the subject line,Virtual Presentations Don’t Have to Suck.