Speaker 1: The simplest way to engage a virtual audience is to encourage them to keep their cameras on. But for whatever reason, what if that's not possible? How do we engage an audience who we can't really see? And that's what we're going to discuss here today. Hey, my name is Rudeep and I'm the founder of Frantically Speaking. And I love learning about effective communications and sharing those learnings with you so that you can level up your communications game as well. Just to get one thing out of the way, all these things can work even if the audience's camera is on. It's just that it's a little more difficult to engage them if you can't see them. So we're going to try to focus more on that. Let's start with the basics. Delivery. We need to make sure that we are well lit. If we look like this, it's hard for the audience to really be interested in us because they can't really see us. Instead, we should make sure that we are looking more like this. A few quick and simple tips to keep in mind. Just try to make sure you have a clean background and that the light is not behind but ahead of you. And of course, our connectivity should be good so that we don't glitch while presenting. Now, when we talk about delivery on a virtual presentation, we don't have many tools to engage our audience with. In a live setting, we can use our entire body to command the stage. But if we only have about this much space to communicate, we rely very heavily on our eyes, which is why we should try to avoid wearing glasses unless we absolutely have to because we'll miss out on the opportunity of eye contact. And we need to make sure that we're using our voice as effectively as possible. So instead of talking very monotonously and boring the audience, we can make sure that we're going very fast at times and at times we're slowing down. And at times, to make the audience anticipate about our idea, we simply pause before we say it. These simple things make such a big difference, especially on virtual calls, because our voice is one of the very few delivery tools that we can actually leverage. One of the most read articles on our blog is on the topic of voice modulation. It's an entire guide. Putting the link in the description. Check it out if you want to know more about how to use voice modulation. The next point is to shut our presentation. Most of our video calls involve us sharing our screens and presenting a PowerPoint presentation or some slides or something along those lines. But every now and then, if we were to shut that presentation down and shift the focus right onto us, it breaks the pattern for the audience. And patterns get boring when we're giving a speech or trying to engage somebody. So when we switch back and forth between presentation and person, presentation and person, it keeps the audience more on its toes. And every now and then, we can get a few listeners into the spotlight. Again, talking of pattern breaking, people might disengage because they are only seeing us. They're only hearing one person's voice. But if we can change that around by calling some of the members of the virtual presentation, asking them to put their cameras on and converse with you and make that part of the presentation, it again helps to break the pattern and get the audience's attention back into whatever it is that we're saying. I was attending this marketing webinar one time, and it was a long webinar. It was about six hours long. And the host managed to keep us engaged by constantly making us do things. So for instance, he would send us a Google form link through the chat, which we had to fill out. Or he would send us a YouTube video link because playing videos online tends to get laggy. So he would send us a link and we would have to watch it and ping back on the chat if we were done with it. And by making us do these little, little activities, it would break away from one person just speaking and make it more of a two-way conversation. And carrying forward from the point of activities, I believe this point needs its own standing, is to use platform features like polls. Polls, as I'm sure you know, are a simple and great way to engage with the audience. Not really going to go deeper into this point. It's pretty straightforward. Instead, we're going to talk about the next point, which is to start the hype even before the presentation begins. On-ground event organizers do this really well, where they, before an event happens, they send their participants some sort of a goodie bag, which includes things that they can use for the event. And the same principle can be applied for virtual presentations and events as well. I was attending this meditation workshop. It was a two-day long workshop and very long, about eight hours each day. And before the workshop began, the host sent us this goodie bag. And it included very simple things, but they made somewhat of a difference. It helped build some hype for the event. And it included things that we could use during the workshop. For instance, it had a simple notebook with some structure in it, which would make writing our notes for the workshop a lot easier. They had a coffee mug with their branding on it because they knew that it's a long workshop. People might want to drink some coffee or anything like that while they're attending it. And there was also some other material, which was, what we found out was for a game that the host wanted us to play during the workshop. And by giving us all these things beforehand, it made the event seem a lot more legit. And we were excited to see what all these goodies would be used for, especially the gaming thing during the actual workshop. And the next and last point is to use direct messages. Now, this is better done if we have somebody else with us in our team during the presentation, because while we might be busy presenting, this other person can actually observe the audience. And if somebody seems like they have not been participating much, they've not been doing the activities, the camera's been off in a while, they refuse to answer any questions, we can simply use the direct message feature, which is there on platforms like Zoom, and simply ask them something along the lines of, hey, I noticed you've not been engaging too much, just wanted to check if everything is alright. And that simple message has worked tremendously for all the webinars we've done, because by sending that message, we are communicating to that person that we're not here just to have a one-way conversation. We actually care about you and want to know if everything is alright, or are you just not interested, or is it just too much information for you. And so many times we found out that people have had network issues, which is why they've not been able to engage, or they've had a lot of disturbance at their house. And knowing these things really helps us work together with them to actually come to a much better solution so that they can get their attention back to the main presentation. And that's about it. A few ways that we can use to engage a virtual audience, even if their camera is off. If you have any more questions around things like presentations, public speaking, or communications, we have an entire website with in-depth articles and resources dedicated just for that. So go check out franticallyspeaking.com. And if you want to know how you can open a speech, presentation, virtual, off-ground, doesn't matter, check out this video right here.