Speaker 1: So, you probably know me already if you're watching this video. You might have seen some of my other videos where I talk about how to facilitate meaningful human connection and these magical human moments online, and you probably know that I spent a lot of time on Zoom all the time, and this is where I have access to these amazing features like I'm able to see and hear my participants, I can ask them questions, they can unmute and tell me, they can hold up things in front of their camera. I can use breakout rooms, which to me is one of the secret superpowers of Zoom because the magic happens in those small conversations, not one person broadcasting to a bunch of people that are just listening and taking things in. They can also use different engagement tools like the reactions buttons and add like thumbs up and celebration emojis. We can use annotations where they can draw on top of my slides, on top of my screens. We can use digital whiteboard tools, but the thing is, not always we will have access to all of these amazing features when we're facilitating. If you're doing a interactive keynote or if you're doing any keynote, if you're doing any speaking, if you're running webinars, or if you are sharing your knowledge, your expertise for somebody else's audience, they might not have Zoom meetings. They might have Zoom webinars, and therefore, all of these things are gone. How do we still engage our participants? This video, I want to share with you three different ways you can create engaging webinars, engaging presentations that are interactive, yet the only tool you really have is a chat because that is the one tool that you have with every webinar software. Let's talk about how can we use the chat and maybe some secret other tool that I'm going to introduce you to, which is one of my favorites, to create an engaging experience right from the start. This is the part that is the most important when we're creating any experience, when we're doing a speech, a talk, a webinar, a training, a workshop, you want to start right at the beginning with something that gets an interaction going because if we skip that part and just go straight into talking about ourselves or sharing slides, we're going to have a much harder time to engage our participants later on. If you want them to really stay glued to their screen, to stay with us while we're training or teaching and sharing stories, then we have to start right from the get-go. The very easy first thing that we can do is what I call asking a curious question, something like this. This is one question that I ask often that is not related to any type of theme, but just share a small wink from the week in the chat or share something that made you smile in the last few days, or what's something good that happened to you recently? The idea is to start with something positive, something that gets people thinking about good memories, about something that they get excited about, and therefore, we can ask them to share that in chat, and then the job as the host, as the facilitator, as the emcee is to actually acknowledge people for what they shared. That's the part that is the hardest to do if you're doing things in a virtual space where you can't acknowledge people, people can't acknowledge each other, let's say, in a breakout room. We need to do a lot more work in reading out certain comments, mentioning people's names. If you've ever attended a huge conference or webinar with hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of people, and the host reads out, hey, Jan, I see you just posted this, and he reads out your comment, it makes you feel really good, right? So the more we can do that, even if we can't see people, but we can read people's names when they engage with us in the chat, the more they will feel seen, they feel acknowledged, and the more they want to contribute later on. The second one is a word cloud. And for this, I'm actually going to show you one that I created as part of a workshop that I held recently. The question that I asked is, who do you serve? This was a workshop for facilitators, for community builders, and I just wanted to know what are the words that they use to describe their audience. So I created this fun little word cloud where every time somebody writes a word more than once, it shows up larger. So like nature lovers in the middle here is one of the ones that showed up more. Fans of Jan, well, I did invite a couple of fans to this workshop. So that was a fun thing, open-minded, open, curious, creative. So all of those words I knew have been typed in more than once. And all of the smaller ones on the outside have been typed in only once. So this is a really cool way to get just everyone contributing and everybody's words up on a big screen. And the fun thing is that this is a tool called Mentimeter that you can use for free. Like with a free version, you can set up a couple of polls. You can do a lot more fun things with it as well. I'm going to share a little bit of behind the scenes so you can see, you can create different slides and make different polls from multiple choice. You can do the word cloud, you can do something open-ended, scales. Like this is another question that I did recently in a different workshop where I asked if all my participants were engaged, what would be the result? And we can see that these results are coming in like a box. Let me actually share this for a second so we can see it a little bit bigger. Hold on, I need to hit the right buttons on my keyboard. And this is not it. But you can see that then I can actually go and scroll through everybody's submissions. And this is all anonymous, so great for asking anonymous questions. And if you have a large audience, this might fill up really quickly because every box is somebody else's submission versus the word cloud. If things are entered more than once, it actually shows up larger. So if you have a very large audience, probably would stick to the word cloud. If you have smaller audiences, you could use something like these speech bubbles. And the last tip that I want to give you today is something that I actually do quite a lot, and that is trivia games. Yes, it's really fun to start off with getting participants into this playful mindset and start to engage them with something that is just easy and fun. Like one of the things that I do very often, even on Zoom where I can see people, but this works as well if I don't see people, if they just have the chat, which is I play different movie and TV show soundtracks and they just have to guess in the chat. And usually I try to give a shout out to the person who gets it first. I have some fun sound effects and animations for when they do get it right. Let's see if this works today. I changed up some things, so maybe it does not. Oh, hold on. There we go. We got some wrong sound effects, some correct sound effects. I have some trophies if they do get their guesses correct. So this is something that I love to do. And you could even do it with other trivia questions. So one thing, going back to Mentimeter as a tool, is they also have a trivia one where I did this virtual facilitator quiz at the end of my training just to test a little bit of the knowledge. And every participant can enter their name and we actually get to see a little leaderboard. Who has entered the fastest, you will get more points. So you can see a little leaderboard coming up. And I love the little animations. But you can ask different questions, can assign more than one answer correct. And that's another really great way to get your participants engaged right from the beginning. So if you like these tips, please let me know what other things that you have maybe been doing at your virtual experiences, virtual keynotes, webinars to get your participants engaged. Always interested to learn more. Plus, if you feel like, oh, that was really good, I want to get more of those tips, make sure you subscribe to my YouTube channel, number one. And number two, I do have a workshop, a bonus coming up actually today on Monday, August 23rd and this Friday as well, where I share a few more tips on how to engage participants right from the beginning. So hopefully we can avoid this from happening when you ask a question where all you see is tumbleweeds and you hear crickets because nobody responds because your participants aren't engaged. I'm actually sharing a lot more tips on how I use Zoom when you have breakout rooms, when we can see people's video in a workshop called From Crickets to Connected in 20 Minutes. But like I said, this week I'm offering two live bonuses where I share more tips on what to do when you don't have video, when you don't have breakout rooms, when all you can do is use the chat. If you're interested in that, I'll drop a link below and hopefully I will see you there. Bye.