I recently attended a webinar led by Ken Moley. He offers consulting services through his company Webinar Success (www.wsuccess.com) and blogs regulary on all things related to web conferencing and on what it takes to create a compelling and effective presentation and deliver it over the web.
Ken gave this webinar alongside Adobe using Adobe Connect Pro but it was not the traditional or expected comparative, competitive fare that said how or why this feature works better in Adobe Connect v. Webex rather a more compelling presentation was made on what we all can do to use the features in Connect in other ways that promote more interactivity with the audience and keep everyone engaged in any meeting or presentation topic we might deliver. He started with a quick multi-choice poll where everyone chose five of ten presentation points; the top five things you would like to discuss and the bottom five that are of lesser interest, and then spoke to those items in succession.
One of the first things I noticed in the Connect meeting room with Ken was a simple layout. 5 pods total. Two on the bottom for chat (one for attendees to chat amongst themselves and the other to send questions to Ken) above that a share pod with a ppt file and to the left side the attendee list pod and a polling pod. Now it is the polling pod asking two simple questions that is key here. The choices were: “This topic is interesting, keep going” and “We have covered enough on this topic, move on”. This pod was open the entire time and as subjects moved forward and questions came in from attendees real-time feedback was being given to Ken and the attendees could see the vote percentages in real time too. This was insturmental to keeping the presentation moving along as everyone had a voice in the pacing and content of the meeting. Voices, questions and comments were also heard (read) in the chat pods as attendees shared the opinion and thoughts on why their presentations succeed or fail. This constant, polite and professional dialog also kept the meeting flow moving right along and when question on one topic faded Ken led us all on to the next topic. If your next Connect meeting lends itself to this type of format use polling in a similar fashion, not to sample final opinions on a subject but rather to promote dynamic interaction on the subject at hand.
The second thing I noticed was a lot of trust Ken had with the attendees. Having such open chat pods can invite passions to flame up and comments to get desultory and yet that never happened here during the entire hour. Now he laid out the ground rules at the beginning and gave us all some guidance but things just went smooth and no one got out of control. If someone had Connect has the ability to remove attendees from the room and of course the chat pods could always be closed but that was not needed here. The biggest question I recall was “How do you prepare for holding such a meeting?” All this real-time feedback and progress could cause your one hour meeting to last 35 minutes, some topics might not get the attention you think they deserve and you could run out of material before the meeting end time; and that’s okay. If you are prepared to talk to the topics, you do so at the depth and scope prompted by the attendees and your audience has told you so then you have more than likely had a successful meeting.
The interactivity is also likely to bring up a few new topics you might choose to address in this meeting or use as topics in a future meeting. Either way you engaged your audience and if they told you in real-time “move on” then keep it moving. I cannot recall the last time I or any speaker was chastized for ending a meeting early. Can you?
