9 Lessons learned on how NOT to do a webinar
I just logged out of one of the worst webinars. It was disappointing because I do believe that webinars can be a great tool to learn about and promote social media. This was a learning experience in how to NOT conduct a webinar on social media,
- Don’t test your webinar technology
- Promise a level of interaction that your technology can not provide
- Don’t thoroughly test sound quality so half of the speakers sound like they are trying to speak underwater
- Don’t show up on time to start the webinar, people like to wait for you
- Depend on canned responses like computer voices telling your audience they are being placed on hold while awaiting the seminar to begin
- Cheerlead your audience like at a rally, encouraging them to stand up and cheer for you from their computers. Everyone wants to do cheers in their office
- Assume that your pacing and presentation should be identical for a webinar as an in-person seminar where you and the audience can feed off visual cues.
- Don’t practice your instruction ahead of time so you can ramble and run over your time allotments
- Interrupt instructional segments, in middle of a concept, with sales pitches
- Never summarize your points before beginning the next topic
- Don’t provide handouts or visuals to address keypoints.
- Handouts should only be links and sales promotional materials
- Encourage your audience to write out their own notes by hand on your sales materials
- Pitch your product early and often before you have sold your audience on your authority and value
Halfway through the webinar, only 25% of the proposed content had been addressed and the sound was intolerable. I sent messages repeatedly to the organizers updating them on sound quality issues but was ignored. So, I logged out and used my time to write this post instead. I am not going to name the organizers here. I sincerely believe that their intentions are good and they probably do have meaningful information to share but need to rethink their delivery. I will send them a link to this post as constructive criticism. In addition, I will refer you dear readers to Sam Clark. Sam recently conducted a four week free webinar called the 16 steps that was much better done. He conveyed true authority and gave his audience a real value.
