But then there was last week.

I spoke at two conferences last week, and in the middle I did a presentation to an Australia/New Zealand audience…from my hotel room.  Wouldn’t you know it, literally 10 minutes into the presentation the hotel’s internet connection went down.  And it was down for the rest of the presentation.

There are a lot of different ways to “plan for the unplannable,” but here are the specific things I/we did that turned disaster into success.

Rehearse
Pros rehearse.  Amateurs don’t.  You might be a “professional” in the business world, but you’re an amateur presenter if you don’t rehearse.  In this case, my moderator and I had chatted before hand.  I was able to keep going because he pushed my slides.  Note that this was possible because the failure wasn’t the conferencing provider or my computer…it was local to me in the hotel.

Print a copy of your slides
I use a lot of slides, and I know my material well, but I still print a copy of my deck in the “nine slides to a page” handout view.  It gives me a chance to look ahead, and since I use very visual slides, I’m not reading them.  But a printed copy is like car insurance…not something you plan or want to use, but in the case of disaster, you live or die by your ability to adapt.

Write the login details somewhere at the top of your printed slides
Again, this is experience talking.  If you get booted off your web conference, or the audio drops (I had my local phone provider cut me off in the middle of an event once!), you’re not searching for how to get back in.  If you’re using an operator-assisted call, give the operator a phone number where they can call you right back.  AND, if you’re using VoIP (I was in the hotel room), it goes down with the internet connection.  But a minute later I was dialed back into the audio conference and we were back to presenting.

One other note here…I close all extraneous applications, including email.  So where’s that phone number if you’re looking for it?  In an email or on your Outlook calendar.  Spare yourself the headache…the time it takes to reboot email and get the phone number will seem like HOURS when you’re under the gun.

So, was the event a disaster?  Not if you look at the post-event survey.  Audiences realize that “stuff happens” (oh, BTW, stuff happens in the offline world, too!).

The question is, “Are you prepared?”

Plan for the unplannable.

Unless your surname is Smith, be sure to tell the moderator how to pronounce your name.

You get two big benefits:

Your audience gets started with better momentum
It doesn’t help anyone to have the moderator stumble over pronouncing your name correctly.  You’re not going to turn someone into a radio personality, but you will save them kicking off your webinar with some mush-mouth intro that starts you in a momentum hole.

Your audience will have better connect with YOU
People connect with people, and in today’s global environment your surname doesn’t have to be Smith to be acceptable.  But what if someone in the audience wants to call you after the webinar?  Help ‘em out!  What if you want to have the audience at least remember you and be able to tell someone about you?  Nobody wants to look foolish in front of a peer, and if they can’t pronounce your name, it’s less likely they’ll share.

Help your moderator help you.  Tell them how to pronounce your name.

To be fair, sometimes crap happens.  And to be doubly fair, I acknowledge that two minutes late doesn’t seem like much when you’re in person.

And a confession:  when you’re online and your early arrivers are looking at their computer clock and start typing “hey, is this thing starting!?” and “hey, how unprofessional to start late!” into the questions panel at one minute past my gut reaction isn’t full of love and joy.

But, here’s another way to start late and get by with it.

—-> Put it on your opening slide.

Less perfect is a phrase like “We will be at approximately 11 am.”  But you’re off the hook.

I prefer being specific with “We will begin at exactly 11:03 am.”  But then you better do it.

Like I said in a previous post about one way to do this, since a good chunk of your audience is logging in a few minutes late anyway, this gives you a chance to get more of them into the ‘room’ and more of them will hear the opening welcome/instructions.

And while we’re at it, here’s one thing I’ve tried that didn’t work.

While the Sr. Dir. of Marketing at Corvent (as a co-founder I had liberty to try new things), I tried actually advertising our internal webinars with start times like “11:03 am.”

Problem?

Nobody noticed, remembered what they saw or read their confirmation emails or all of the above.  #Fail.

Start late without pissing anybody off by stating it clearly on the slide attendees see when they join your event.

And this was a 17 minute video.

My first response is to quote a line from Amadeus, the 1980s movie about Mozart.  In one scene, after Mozart concludes a new piece, one of the royalty in the audience exclaims, “Too many notes!”

Wolfgang replies, “And which ones, sir, would you have me take out?”

But that’s just the smarty pants in me.

A frequently asked question is “how long should a webinar be?”  I usually play on Einstein’s “make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler” with something like “as short as possible but no shorter.”

Two cultural challenges beset us:  One, meetings somehow always have to be an hour long.  Two, content and context have everything to do with it.

In short, there is no simple answer.

Given that I’m fond of saying you should talk WITH your audience and not AT them, here’s a guideline or two.

If you are going to talk at them, make it short.  Then shorter.  Remember the ‘long winded’ 17 minute TED presentation.  State your point, make your recording, post it on the web.  Especially if it’s about you, not them.

If you have interactivity, especially in a training context, you can go longer.  I’d still keep it to two hours or less with a break in the middle.

Here’s why:

We live in an information-on-demand culture.  If your live webinar is the equivalent of on-demand information (meaning there’s nothing uniquely live about it), you’re competing with every other source of on-demand information available in those 23000 results that come up in a search on a search engine.  You’d better get to and make your point quickly.

If, however, you treat an event as a shared experience, allowing adult learners to be active (vs passive), giving the audience the chance to get questions answered (a radically high form of personalization), you’ll command attention more effectively and at very least keep audiences around to experience more.

A final tip:  plan to end early.  Nobody complains about presentations that end early.  This doesn’t mean you can’t take Q&A through the hour, but it’s one simple way to set yourself apart from the many who drag on and on.

Make your webinar as short as possible, but no shorter than necessary to make a focused point or deliver what you promised.

Why?

The research we’re conducting will be turned into a practical set of best practices…and you’ll have a chance get a pre-release copy of the report.  It should only take you a few minutes to complete.

On behalf of 1080 Group and our co-sponsor, QLM, thanks in advance.

You can find the survey here:  http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MSTVDYX

To get a pre-release copy of the report, participate in the survey.  It should take you about 5 minutes.

Would you consider hosting a trade show booth, networking luncheon, cocktail reception, or seminar at a hotel somewhere without considering all the details, tangible and intangible, that are part of the experience?  Would you invite people to a “great presentation” but not tell them where to park or how to find the restroom?

Nope.

Don’t do it for a web seminar either.

Design the user experience every click of the way from the first thing they see when they get an invite to the last follow up afterward.

Then test it.

Walk in their shoes.

We buy automobile insurance, too, for similar reasons.  But only because we plan for the unplannable.

When presenting virtually, you need to be prepared for the unexpected, too.  Even the most reliable platforms aren’t perfect.  It’s software, and it’s reality.

Don’t let the occasional bump in the road dissuade you from the immense benefit of connecting virtually.  In fact, with even the tiniest prep, you can be ready.

Have a printed copy of your slides

Over a decade I’ve seen presenters lose connectivity from downtown San Francisco because a backhoe cut through the fiber out in the street, had them lose power because of a hurricane, seen them come to a grinding halt because some news thing happened and everybody in the company ran to the web to watch news streams.  It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, you’ll be happy for the old fashioned paper variety.

Plan with your peers

Just because YOU have a problem doesn’t mean that your fellow presenters or event moderator do.  Plan in advance how you’ll work off each others’ verbal clues.  Don’t waste everybody’s time complaining about technology.  Have them push your slides until you’re in the driver’s seat again.  Oh, and did I say have a printed backup?

Mentally switch to audio-only mode

VoIP is great, but it makes everybody’s computer the single point of failure.  Love it or leave it the POTS (plain old telephone system) is one of the most reliable things on the planet.  In a worst-case scenario, mentally switch to delivering your presentation verbally, making sure to describe things as you would in any other instance when you were on the phone with someone.  The picture on the slide might tell the story better than words alone, but that doesn’t mean you have to be dead in the water.

Life happens, including during web seminars.  Don’t get caught with your pants down.

“What do you find most beneficial, formal surveys or Q&As with the future audience?”

Fair question, Roger, but I’m not sure I’d call one better or best, I’d call them different.

Formal surveys are good for a few things.  One, it’s easier to quantify data, cross-tabulate one response set against another for deeper insight, etc.  For instance, you might ask yourself “of those respondents who expressed X on question 3, how did they answer question 6?”  As with anything, formal surveys come with some tradeoffs.  They might take longer to develop.  You will likely only have a fraction of those invited respond, meaning you’ll need to be inviting enough to generate a sample size that’s statistically relevant.  And you’ll have to balance between length (“I’d love to have answers to ALL these questions”) and what you’re going to need to do to get responses (would YOU want to fill out a survey that would take you 30 minutes?).

That said, there’s one other key challenge:  being able to ‘read between the lines’ and respond on the fly.

That’s where a few conversations with your future audience can be gold.  Someone might tell you something over the phone that they’d not put in a survey.  Or you might be able to infer meaning from their tone of voice.  In addition to being able to ‘read between the lines,’ your dialogue very often will lead you to learn things you didn’t even think to ask in a more formal survey.  Often this leads to you asking additional questions to explore something else.

Conversations are also good when you want to explore something less tangible.  For instance, imagine that you know that your product/service has a positive impact on clients’ process but you know clients often have different policies and procedures and processes.  Creating a formal survey that roots out the insight that you can use is difficult at best.  The tradeoff with conversations, however, is that they take time, let alone if you want to have a number of them.

Without knowing more specifically what Roger does and how he does it, I’d probably suggest a combination of tactics.  Some initial conversations would likely deliver insights that would help create a more effective formal survey, but I wouldn’t stop there.  In-event polls or end-of-event surveys are awesome tools for dialing in the relevance of your content, too.  Consider asking a question or two that would specifically assist you with dialing in your invitation messaging to those things that your audience is most likely to take action on.

Remember that what you think is important is (mostly) irrelevant.  Your audience will take action when they perceive your webinar is relevant to them.

Fast forward more than a decade – the pain of much of the project management of producing a web seminar has been eliminated by conferencing service providers integrating those tasks into their wares.

But at least one thing as suffered:  the presentation of benefits.

A rule of thumb for the question of “how many registrants will show up to my webinar” has long been “a third” or “a third to half.”  There are a lot of factors that go into that, and that’s another blog post another day.

The problem with automation, however, is that most often promoters don’t take one extra, valuable step:  including in the reminder email some copy that reminds registrants of why they signed up in the first place.

My exhortation:  take one extra step.  Take the content you put on your registration page, or at least the bullet points below the “Attend this webinar to learn:” and copy it into the reminder email(s) that will hit your registrants’ inboxes.

Here are a couple reasons:

1.  Just because they registered three weeks ago doesn’t mean they are fully in touch with the motivation that got them to register when they get the “don’t forget this webinar at 10am tomorrow” email.

2.  Hopefully your event title is descriptive and compelling, but if that’s all you wanted and needed, you wouldn’t have written additional copy for your registration page.

3.  If anybody pushes the “forward” button (often a desire of marketers!), the person receiving the email will have more to motivate them.

Go beyond “what” in your reminder emails.  Remind them “why.”