Webinar presenters should smile when you speak to add energy to your presentation.

This is an old telemarketing trick, but works equally well for any presenter.

Your smile really comes through in your voice and we improve the audience’s perception of your likeability and friendliness. Other research shows that likeability directly impacts your audience’s reception of your message – so smile!

Tags: audio webinar, effective presentations, video presentations.

A conversational approach helps on so many levels – new or related insights are often shared during a conversation,  there is more presenter energy, and audio interest is heightened from hearing multiple voices.

But it can’t be just an after-thought – you really should design it in to your presentation.  What do I mean?

We recently produced an audio webinar with a large group of presenters. To break up the slide presentations,  two of the presenters carried on a dialogue between them.  In concept this was great, but in practice it didn’t always work so well.

Why?  Rather than discussing a point in more detail and having a natural dialogue, one of the presenters was asking questions that so obviously pointed to the upcoming slide (and upcoming bullet point) in the deck that it clearly had to be rehearsed.  This defeated the naturalness and authenticity they were striving to achieve.

The fix? Make sure your accompanying slides are visual rather than text heavy.

This gives the presenters freedom to cover the points in any order or manner they wish.  The speakers can always use the original slides to remember the key points they want to discuss, and provide them as part of a hand-out after the event.

The feeling then becomes more like a discussion or interview and breaks up the longer webinar presentation.

Bill

Tags: audio webinar, authenticity, conversations, web seminar, webinars.