I recently decided to deliver webinars to compliment my Professional Speaking, and let me tell you – it is nothing like Professional Speaking as I knew it.  When your speaking in front of an audience (at least for me), it’s all about improv.  I have my topic and a solid understanding of the material, but I feed off the audience.  I look for facial queues (like the audience falling asleep), or audio queues (snoring), and adjust accordingly.  It’s like dancing with the audience, and working real hard to count in my head while not stepping on toes.  Keep an eye on the toes, and no problem.

Webinars are a completely different beast, and I’d have to say that if I didn’t have all the Tech stuff in my background, I wouldn’t have been able to handle the speed!  I’d like to give recognition to Tom Drews from www.whatworks.biz for his advice and guidance.  Here are some of the challenges of speaking on a Webinar:

1.  Visuals – Power Point is 2nd nature to me.  As an officer in the military, you ate Power Point for breakfast, and were put through the most rigorous scrutiny.  When you’re on stage, power point is a compliment, you are the focus.  In Webinars, you don’t exist – you’re just a voice.  Power Point becomes the focus.  I had to break through my old paradigms on slides when it came to webinar presentations.  I look back at my power point slides I was going to use before Tom set me straight, and I know the audience would have fallen asleep.

2.  Technology – You’d think all you need to do is have a webinar account, and you’re good to go.  No way Jose.  I have three computers running on my desk during the webinar.  First computer controls the slides.  Second computer has the chat windows open so I can see questions (and it serves as a backup if the first computer dies).  Third computer is set up so I can see exactly what the audience sees.  When I first started giving webinars, I thought I could use one computer, and just open different windows while I was speaking… yeah right!  I’ve found that I can’t talk and chew gum at the same time, let alone open different windows.  The three computer system is necessary, but even then, I have a hard time focusing on any given screen when I’m trying to focus on content.  This is where I got the analogy of driving 100 mph – there’s so much going on, I never imagined it would be so strenuous.

3.  Speaking – No more reading the audience!  Not only is there nobody to look at, everyone is also on mute.  Try giving a joke to dead air.  There’s no cue on when to continue, or how long to allow laughter – if in fact there is anyone laughing.  You just have to press on and imagine people are enjoying the presentation.  Then try and keep your pace and tempo when the application freezes, and you need to go the backup computer.  YIKES…. my first webinar I almost considered stopping in the middle because of technical problems.  So far I’ve been able to overcome the issues, and present a smooth presentation.  One of the things that helped me is that I’m doing a team presentation with Ian Griffin.  While Ian is talking, I can recover most technical issues.  Talk about working against the clock.

There you go – speeding down the highway blindfolded, and yet every time, I’ve made it home safe.  The reality is – there’s not much risk here.  Other then looking dumb (which my wife has made sure I’m OK with), you can recover from anything.  If you ever considered giving webinars, my suggestion is to try it out.  It’s not the same as speaking to an audience live, but it’s definitely exhilarating.  Check out Tom Drews’ website www.whatworks.biz and register for one of his webinars on giving a webinar (as if that isn’t redundant).  Regarding which service to use, I tried many, and am extremely impressed with GoToWebinar.  I initially balked at paying $100 per month, but now that I’ve given a few webinars, I appreciate what it buys you.