Category Archives: Webinar Engagement

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7 Questions to Guarantee Interactive Presentations

The One Word Secret to Creating Interactive Presentations

Interactive presentations benefit greatly from 7 types of questions.

I went to law school and questions were rarely encouraged and there were no interactive presentations. It was very boring. After 3 years I quit.

Doing something for the sole purpose of making money is rarely, if ever, a good idea. Someone at a careers expo told me that lawyers made lots of money so straight after finishing school I headed to the prestigious University of Queensland. Law wasn’t my thing mainly because I loathed the long, boring lectures. I am a visual learner so imagine my challenge having to endure a long procession of mumbling lecturers standing behind a lectern reading their notes in a sad monotone manner without any hint of enthusiasm and talking “at you” for 2-3 hours without a break. Microsoft created PowerPoint too late to rescue me and law lectures almost killed me. OK, that was a little melodramatic, but I decided right there and then that if I ever taught anybody anything I would make my classes engaging, interesting and that I would present with enthusiasm and lots of variety.

I have now been training people for more than 25 years and I love it. I will never want to stop. Delivering interactive presentations that engage my participants is my driving passion. So how do I do it? The one word secret to creating interactive presentations for webinars (and any training) is questions. Put simply, ask your participants lots of questions and inevitably you will create an interactive presentation that engages with their minds and their hearts.

Can someone please explain to me the psychology of why questions work? I would be fascinated by that. I suspect that part of it is as simple as remembering how we learnt as a baby or small child. When we were an infant, did we learn by listening to long monologues of educational content. Nope. More likely, our parents asked us short simple questions and gave us short snippets of information that answered our questions (or at least the questions our parents thought we might want answered). Can you name a fruit that starts with B?

People are trained from birth to respond to questions. A question mark is a call to action. Let’s not re-invent the wheel and instead let’s use questions to maximum advantage. There are 9 types of questions you can ask during webinars that will ensure an interactive presentation. Use a variety of these questions and your participants will be sitting on the front of their seats waiting for your next invitation to engage with them. Click on the video below to find out the details.

7 Questions to Guarantee Interactive Presentations – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxqNzCvhKw4

The above video discusses the 7 types of questions to guarantee interactive presentations, which are:

1. Participant Questions

One of the adult learning principles is that people learn best when they have a need to learn. When adults identify a need or motivation to learn something that will often stimulate them to ask questions. By answering their questions we can powerfully help our participants become more enthusiastic about our content. Consequently, we should proactively and genuinely encourage our participants to ask their questions. We should not hide from questions because we have fear about being able to answer them. Instead, by empowering our participants to ask questions we will understand what they are thinking and how they are reacting to our presentation; This is valuable intelligence information so that we can customise that webinar and improve our future ones on the same or similar topics.

Your webinar participants will love you for giving them the chance to ask their questions. Do not be concerned if you do not know the answer. Keep in mind that you always retain the option to research and reflect and provide an answer to them at a later stage.

2. Rhetorical Questions

Are you enjoying this article? OK, I don’t really expect you to answer that now, which is the definition of a rhetorical question. Most people ask many rhetorical questions every day. They are especially powerful for webinar presenters because every questions stimulates all of your participants to think about their potential answer to that question. That is the main benefit of rhetorical questions in that they stimulate the participants to focus on the topic without taking up significant webinar time.

3. Statistical Questions

I am a numbers guy. I love maths and statistics fascinate me. Yes, I am biased in saying that statistical questions are valuable. However, I am not alone. Most people are amused by relevant or interesting statistics. So find some. Use them to your advantage. Consider presenting them as a graphic to bring them to life and use persuasive statistics to to support your key arguments.

4. Audio or Video Response Questions

One time saving approach to presenting improved webinar content is to ask questions about pre-recorded audio or video. Some webinar systems provide great options for presenting audio (and sometimes video) content. Sometimes, it is clever to use a different voice to present a case study or support your conclusions. You can then ask questions about what your participants thought or felt about that pre-recorded content. This can be as interesting an activity in a webinar as it is a face-to-face classroom.

5. Confirmation of Learning Questions

Ask questions specifically to check if your participants are understanding your content and/or to find out if they are agreeing with your conclusions. If you don’t ask, you don’t know. There are lots of ways you can ask questions to confirm the learning of your participants, including:

  • Do you understand what I just explained?
  • Would you like me to repeat this concept for you?
  • Shall I explain this again a different way?
  • Would you like me to describe a case study that explains how this works?
  • How are you going to use this information during the next week?

It is very dangerous to assume that your participants are learning. Confirming their learning will provide comfort to you that your webinar participants are still on your learning train and that they are still headed in the right direction.

6. Permission Questions

It can be very clever for you to secure permission or “buy-in” from your participants before you move onto different parts of your webinar. Three of my favourite examples of permission questions include:

  • Do you understand this well enough so that I can move onto our next topic?
  • Have I provided enough value so that you would like to hear about my available product or consulting services?
  • I see that we are almost at our scheduled finish time, but would you like me to now give you the chance to ask some additional questions before we finish the webinar?

7. Really Tough Questions

My final advice for asking questions during a webinar is to be unapologetic in asking the really tough questions during a webinar, for example:

  • What problems or challenges do you see with the approach I have outlined during this webinar?
  • Would you like to buy this product?

How engaging are your webinars?

Click here to obtain my free Webinars Engagement Checklist. Put simply, it is your chance to identify lots of options for making your webinars engaging and interesting to your participants. Get your participants more involved in your webinars and they will reward you. It will help you identify:

  • What you are doing well
  • Engagement strategies that you can do better
  • New ideas for improving your engagement

Click here to get your copy.

What do you think about asking questions to create interactive presentations?

Do you agree that asking questions achieves interactive presentations? Which types of questions work for you? Please click here to tell me and share your thoughts in the YouTube video comments.

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Webinar Polls and Engagement Tools

Make Your Webinars Better

Webinar polls and engagement tools can make your webinars better. Much better.

Have you ever been a teacher? Have you ever been gobsmacked by a comment from one of your students? I remember the day a student came in late to one of my classes in how to become a trainer. He explained to me that he was looking forward to becoming a trainer because he didn’d like people. Seriously. He figured that by becoming a trainer he could just stand up the front of a class and tell people what he knew. His class attendees would listen attentively to his every word then break into applause at the end in recognition of his efforts. He wouldn’t have to deal with any annoying or needy people and his life would be fully of wonder and classrooms of joy.

The reality is that classrooms are not like that. The best face-to-face teachers are those who actively engage their class participants and talk WITH them rather than AT them. It is the same for webinars. To engage the heart and soul of our webinar participants we need to talk with them, ask them questions and answer their questions too. The most successful training benefits from two-way flows of information through which our participants learn most effectively and the trainers do too. And for webinars, it is chat, polls and the other engagement strategies presented in this article and the accompanying video that create those successful exchanges of information.

My previous two articles and videos discussed the types of webinar chat and chat engagement strategies. In this article we focus on polls and other engagement tools. Today’s video presents 8 specific strategies you can use to improve the quality of your webinars. If you want to become a better webinar presenter these are simple strategies used by the best webinar presenters, and you can easily implement them too.

Webinar Polls and Engagement Tools – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-BxgvKQszM

1. Conduct webinar polls

Webinar polls are often underestimated in their ability to re-establish connection of participants with the webinar. If the poll is enthusiastically introduced this magically brings participants back to the webinar. People like having something to do especially in this era where multi-tasking and participating in online social activities is so popular. Unless you have a very compelling reason to the contrary, I recommend that you conduct at least 2-3 webinar polls each time you fire up your software.

2. Ask for hands up

Some (but not all) webinar software provides a “hands up” feature where the participants can raise their virtual hand to mimic what the well-behaved kids do in the classroom. In a webinar however, you do not need to raise your hand to go to the bathroom. Instead, skilled webinar presenters use this feature to solicit answers to Yes/No questions or to create a visual affirmative response to a question of value to them. If your participants have access to audio (through either a microphone or telephone line) that can be muted by the presenter then you are welcome to duplicate my approach of letting the participants know that if they want to go live during the webinar with a question or comment then they should raise their hands to get the presenter’s attention.

3. Plan activities

Before the webinar plan activities so that your participants can enjoy activities either before, during or after your webinar. Your ability to use this strategy is only limited by your creativity.

4. Split the participants into break-out rooms

Some webinar software, led by some of the corporate systems, have added break-out room options. This provides the opportunity for the presenter to build community and cooperation between the participants by dividing them into groups and then allocating the groups either the same or different tasks or mini-projects. Clear instructions are required by the presenter to make this work effectively, but it can have magical outcomes if planned carefully. It is important to debrief the break-out activities so that the participants obtain an understanding and maximum learning from the break-out activities.

5. Creatively use the offer button

Most webinar software does not have an offer button (yet), but if there is one it is a magical tool to be creatively employed. An offer button is a prominent button that can be clicked on by the participant to open another browser tab or window which takes them to a specific URL selected by the webinar organiser. Most typically, the webinar organiser sets up the offer button so that it provides prominent one-click access from the webinar to a product sales page. However, an offer button could be used to re-direct the webinar participant to any URL selected by the webinar organiser. If you do have an offer button in your webinar software I encourage you to be creative and use it to enhance your webinar’s objective.

6. Show a video

Some webinar software provides the option to show a video. This is not a widespread option yet, but in coming years I expect almost all webinar software programs to provide this functionality. Consider identifying a relevant video, crack open the virtual popcorn and show a video while you give your concentration and voice a few minutes of welcome respite.

7. Share a survey

Surveys are a great way of continuing engagement with your participants beyond the webinar whilst also enabling you to gather valuable feedback about whether or not you achieved your webinar objective.

8. Give your participants post-webinar tasks

You can keep your participants remembering the content and purpose of your webinar after the event has ended by pro-actively asking them to do something after the conclusion of the webinar. This might be a specific research project or give them resources or references to look at, perhaps even on your own website. These types of strategies can be very effective in maintaining engagement with your participant well after the webinar has ended, but they are not used by the majority of webinar presenters. Advance planning is required to identify these post-webinar tasks, and this ideally should be part of your webinar planning process.

It’s all about engagement

This training article is the 4th of 5 consecutive weekly articles dedicated to helping you create engaging webinars that your participants will love. Later this month I will release my new Webinar Engagement Checklist (which you can pre-order here). You will be able to use the checklist to self-assess your level of engagement when you present webinars and score yourself. If you are not yet presenting webinars then the Webinar Engagement Checklist will give you the chance to best practice engagement habits before you even start presenting webinars and avoid some bad habits.

How effective are your chat strategies?

You can register now to obtain my free Webinar Engagement Checklist to be released later this month. Put simply, it is your chance to identify lots of options for making your webinars engaging and interesting to your participants, including improving your chat strategies. It will help you identify:

  • What you are doing well
  • What you can do better
  • New ideas for improving engagement

If you want to be one of the first webinar presenters to get a copy click here and it will be automatically emailed to you when it becomes available.

What ways do you use polls and engagement strategies during your webinars?

What do YOU think? Please click here to share your thoughts with myself and others in the YouTube video comments.

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8 Best Webinar Chat Strategies

I love sport. Lots of sports. One of my favourites is soccer (or football, as the purists of the round ball game appropriately call it). To football players the ball is their tool and they use the ball to create value for others and income for themselves. Lionel Messi, the Argentinian legend from the Barcelona Football Club, is currently earning more than 445,000 US dollars every week. Myself, on the other hand, have a total lack of talent when using the soccer ball. In fact, at 7 years of age while I was practising by myself, I tripped over the ball and broke my leg. Yes, seriously, I am that bad.

It was essentially the same type of ball. Messi makes a miraculous amount of money. My Mum got a medical bill. Sorry Mum. It is not the quality of the tool that makes the difference. It is how we use the tool that really matters. For webinar presenters, the chat is a tool that is available to almost all of us. How we use the chat is what will help define the quality of our online presentations and our value as a webinar presenter.

Today’s video presents 8 chat strategies you can adopt to improve the quality of your webinars. If you want to become a better webinar presenter these are simple chat strategies used by the best webinar presenters, and you can easily implement them too.

8 Best Webinar Chat Strategies – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QvnMxhWwlc

1. Encourage participants to use the chat

If you don’t ask your webinar presenters to use the chat then they won’t. Ask. Ideally more than once. And make it easy. I usually include a slide that shows the participants where the chat is and I ask them to type in a specific thing to check that it is working for them. Once participants use it once they are much more likely to use it multiple times.

2. Use the chat yourself

“Monkey see. Monkey do.” OK, that is not a very flattering analogy for ourselves as webinar presenters or our participants. However, it is true. Take the opportunity early in the webinar to post a few messages, perhaps before you officially start. If you are worried about the time or potential distraction factor of you posting messages in the chat then strategies 3 and 4 will help you.

3. Pre-prepared list of chat comments

This is so easy to implement. I am unaware of anyone else doing this, but I doubt that I am the only one doing it. Create a new Microsoft Word document or text file. Take 5 minutes to type in several paragraphs of typical comments you might want to include in the chat during your next webinar. Save the file and then before the webinar starts open the file again. Then, when the timing is right, copy a paragraph and paste it into the chat. Each time you finish a webinar tweak your file contents and re-save it. After repeating this procedure for 3-5 webinars I expect you will not know how you delivered webinars without it.

4. Get help

If you are still nervous about contributing or managing the chat then grab a friend and ask them to help. If you are expecting a large number of participants this becomes really important. One option is to solicit one or two of the participants that you trust to make sure they contribute to the chat and help answer others’ questions.

5. Ask lots of questions

If you want people to get busy using the chat then ask questions and ask the participants to provide their answers in the chat. Ask often for the best results because it train your participants to anticipate your chat requests, which will motivate them to stay engaged with your webinar.

6. Invite participants to ask their questions

Never presume that your participants will ask questions unless you very deliberately ask them and convince them that you want them to ask questions and you will answer them. I am a big fan of answering questions during the webinar as opposed to waiting until the end. I recognise that it might not be feasible for presenters to answer every question during the webinar, but if you answer only some it can help your participants recognise that you are not like their despised teacher from day long gone who was there only to lecture. Instead, they will more readily accept that you are genuinely there to help them learn and respond to your participants’ needs and preferences.

7. Create a social environment in your chat

Humans are social creatures. The rise and rise and rise of social media is a testament to our basic nature that we like to interact with others. If you can assist your participants in interacting with the other participants then you may have created something more powerful than a webinar – A community. If your participants like the other participants on your webinar then some people may return to your future webinars primarily to hang out with their friends. You won’t mind that if it gives you the opportunity to help them again. Of course, this is really only possible to accomplish with Group Chats.

8. Thank your participants

Thank your participants for contributing to the chat in two important ways, which are to:

  • Thank them for their individual contributions by reading their messages and acknowledging their valuable contributions; AND
  • Thank your audience generally for their enthusiastic participation in the chat.

It’s all about engagement

This training article is the third of 5 consecutive weekly articles dedicated to helping you create engaging webinars that your participants will love. Later this month I will release my new Webinar Engagement Checklist (which you can pre-order here). You will be able to use the checklist to self-assess your level of engagement when you present webinars and score yourself. If you are not yet presenting webinars then the Webinar Engagement Checklist will give you the chance to best practice engagement habits before you even start presenting webinars and avoid some bad habits.

How effective are your chat strategies?

You can register now to obtain my free Webinar Engagement Checklist to be released later this month. Put simply, it is your chance to identify lots of options for making your webinars engaging and interesting to your participants, including improving your chat strategies. It will help you identify:

  • What you are doing well
  • What you can do better
  • New ideas for improving engagement

If you want to be one of the first webinar presenters to get a copy click here and it will be automatically emailed to you when it becomes available.

What ways do you use chat for maximum benefit during your webinars?

I seriously want to know what YOU think. Please click here to share your thoughts with myself and others in the YouTube video comments.

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Webinar Chat 101

What are the webinar chat basics that affect software choice

Webinar Chat 101 is all about choosing the right webinar software for you. This is because each type of webinar software normally only permits one type of chat. If you choose the wrong software your preferred type of chat engagement might not be available to you.

Today’s video identifies the three types of webinar chat so you can make sure your webinar software enables the type of chat you want.

Webinar Chat 101 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRZBX81cQbY

What are the 3 types of chat?

The three types of chat are:

  1. No chat – The name says it all. No chat is best suited to webinars used to present announcements or information only sessions where no questions or feedback from the participants is required.
  2. Individual chat – Each webinar participant can submit feedback or ask questions to the presenter (and moderators) and receive replies from the presenter. Individual chat is best suited to webinars where the presenter wants the participants to exclusively focus on the content without being distracted by the chatter and opinions of other participants. However, presenters should be aware that by using individual chat their ability to maintain the engagement of the participants with the webinar instead of checking email, using Facebook, browsing other websites or other distractions might be reduced.
  3. Group chat –  Every webinar participant can see the feedback and questions of the other participants so that in addition to communicating with the presenter (and moderators) they can chat with each other. Typically, there is an option for a participant to also send a private message to the presenter or another selected participant instead of making the comment visible to everyone. Group chat is best suited to webinars where the presenter wants to provide maximum opportunity for the participants to remain engaged with the webinar with less scope for distractions. Using group chat also provides more opportunity for the presenter to help nurture a feeling of community among the participants and provide a more enjoyable webinar experience. This can boost retention rates during the webinar and the likelihood that participants will want to attend future webinars by that presenter (or community).

It’s all about engagement

This training article is the second of 5 consecutive weekly articles dedicated to helping you create engaging webinars that your participants will love. Later this month I will release my new Webinar Engagement Checklist (which you can pre-order here). You will be able to use the checklist to self-assess your level of engagement when you present webinars and score yourself. If you are not yet presenting webinars then the Webinar Engagement Checklist will give you the chance to best practice engagement habits before you even start presenting webinars and avoid some bad habits.

How engaging are your webinars?

You can register now to obtain my free Webinar Engagement Checklist to be released later this month. Put simply, it is your chance to identify lots of options for making your webinars engaging and interesting to your participants. It will help you identify:

  • What you are doing well
  • What you can do better
  • New ideas for improving engagement

If you want to be one of the first webinar presenters to get a copy click here and it will be automatically emailed to you when it becomes available.

What do you think I should include in the Webinar Chat 101 syllabus?

I seriously want to know what YOU think. Please click here to share your thoughts with myself and others in the YouTube video comments.