Guest
post by Roger Courville of 1080 Group
I recently has the pleasure to meet Roger at a seminar he conducted for the Southbay Organization Development Network. Roger
is a guru when it comes to conducting effective online webinars and shared some
of his tips. Needless to say with a growing virtual workforce, the ability to
deliver online presentations, with the same engagement and connection as being live,
is a mandatory 21st century competency.
Imagine
for a moment that you were sitting down over coffee with a potential partner,
and after some get-to-know-you chit chat you say, “so, tell me about your
firm?”
On that
prompt, your coffee partner pulls out a data sheet and starts reading it to
you.
“What?!!?,”
you start thinking. But it
continues.
A
half-hour later, when your heart is about as cold as your coffee, he looks up
and says, “So, any questions?”
While a
bit dramatic, this is essentially what happens every day in online
presentations. Web seminars. Webinars.
In a study I conducted last
year about online presentation best practices, in one section of the survey I
presented respondents with a question asking them what annoys them most about
online presentations with seven potential responses.
Their top
two responses made it look like the other five weren’t even on the list:
“Presenter
reads what is one the slides” and “Presenter reads a script.”
So why is
this the number two mistake in online
presentations?
I’ve
incorporated this research into my public and private webinar skills
training. In a recent session to a
European audience
My
response, “Good job,
An old
adage on the sales floor is “people by from people.” But that isn’t just a sales tactic. People aren’t going to pay attention, engage,
or trust your ideas if you speak at them.
And their
message for webinar presenters is clear:
TALK with me. Talk WITH me.
Talk with ME.
About Roger
Roger is the co-founder of 1080 group. Roger and Scott Driscoll met at the
company that literally invented web meeting professional services,
Envoyglobal.com. Envoyglobal.com later merged with PlaceWare Web Conferencing,
becoming PlaceWare's "Event Services Division," and their business
model for providing professional event services was copied industry-wide.
In 2003, PlaceWare was
acquired by Microsoft for $200 million, and that same "ESD" group
lives on providing services as the services division of Microsoft Office Live
Meeting. After Microsoft, Scott and Roger were part of the founding team of
Corvent, a web conferencing services company providing professional services
and proprietary technologies for the web seminar industry.
Scott and
Roger formed 1080 Group to serve companies who have chosen to produce their own
marketing and training web seminars.
For more
information visit www.1080group.com
On
Twitter at www.twitter.com/1080group
Pick up
their book, The
Virtual Presenters Handbook
