Speaker 1: Hi there, this is Fei Wu from Faze World Media. I am a virtual event strategist, trainer, and moderator. And today I bring for one of these Zoom recordings. Now, why am I creating one more Zoom video? Well, this one is because recently, I was faced with a pretty big challenge. One of my clients want to set up a really big Zoom meeting of 500 people. Let me clarify one more time, it's not a Zoom webinar where you can host thousands or tens of thousands of people where you don't get to see their video, their audio. You kind of don't have to worry about all the things that participants might do. In this case, we want to be close, very intimate with these attendees. Not 30, not 100, but 500 people. And by the way, this event was for Insight Timer, an Australian-based company. I love them. Their meditation app, they have world-class meditation teachers I love and adore. So it was such a pleasure to help them design and facilitate these sessions. Before we go any further, let's first talk about how we're able to set up the meeting. It's actually pretty straightforward. Here, let me bring up a screen. As you can see, it is the name of the event. We have an invitation link. Thank goodness I'm not the only IT person. So there's a team at Insight Timer, someone who's in charge of setting up and sending out this link right here. But what I wanted to make sure as a moderator and an event strategist, is I usually ask my client for their login and I go in and double-check to make sure, okay, video is now turned on for hosts and participants. That's something you wanna confirm to make sure that's something you wanna do. The question here is, obviously you wanna see the videos of the hosts and co-hosts, but do you want participants' videos to be turned on as well? And the answer is yes in our situation. Now down here, what's also important is that meeting options, if you want participants to be able to join anytime during that session, which for us was 60 to 90 minutes, and you wanna make sure that you check allow participants to join at any time. If you don't check this option, unfortunately it means that after a certain point, I'm not so sure exactly when five, 10, 15 minutes in, participants will no longer be able to join the session. And if you originally want to record the meeting into cloud, make sure you check this checkbox. That's it, pretty easy to set up the meeting. I'm not gonna go into the marketing side of things like reminding people to join the session and all that. It's something you can set up hopefully with your team. You can decide frequency quickly on that. I do recommend one week, one day, one hour, even sometimes 10 minutes before the session starts. I even encourage clients to consider text messages or SMS as a marketing tool. Now, since we're inside of a Zoom meeting, let me talk you through how to moderate and present to 500 people with their videos turned on. Rule number one is you wanna make sure everybody is muted and stays muted at all time since the beginning of the session. So let me show you, if you don't see this right-hand panel, all you have to do is click on participants down here and you will see a list. So now I pretend to be a co-host. You know, I'm using my mobile device here to join in and my video is currently off, but I want you to pay attention to the lower right-hand corner here. As soon as you log into your meeting that day, click on more here. Once you click on the more dropdown, the one thing that's gonna save your life is mute all upon entry. So you click on that. Now you're greeted with this dialog box and make sure you uncheck. Allow participants to unmute themselves. That means when other people join in, not only they stay muted, they also cannot unmute themselves. This is critical for a large meeting. It doesn't even have to be as big as 500. If you have 50, 100 people, this is very necessary. From this point on, the only way for the participant to unmute themselves is that you have to allow them to unmute. Let me show you right here. You see ask to unmute. That is the only way. Once you do that, you actually see a screenshot that says the host would like you to unmute. And as a participant, that person has a choice to either stay muted or then unmute. I also wanna make sure by default the play join and leave sound is off. Certainly with a large meeting, you don't want any special sound or ring sounds to come in when they leave or join the meeting. And everything else, just make sure you go over with your team and just look through. There are not a lot of options here and you can design it to your own needs. A couple of other tips. When you run a big meeting and your presenter is here, you wanna make sure to immediately spotlight his or her video. So make sure you know that in order to spotlight someone, you need to have at least three people in your meeting and the person you want to spotlight needs to have video turned on. As soon as the presenter of the meeting joins your session, you wanna make sure to make that person as a co-host. It's really simple. Simply click on the more button, go down and make that person co-host. After you make them co-host, make sure their video is turned on so you can spotlight them. Secondly, when you have other operators and people helping you out with a meeting, you wanna make them co-hosts as well. You may be wondering what is the point of co-hosting? That co-host will have all the abilities just like yourself as a host. If all of a sudden there's an emergency, you're out of electricity, the co-host will actually take over the meeting from there. In other words, Zoom will not just drop out a host and just kill the entire meeting, which is obviously not something you wanna see happen inside a 500-person meeting. As a moderator, you really want to have some additional support. Number one, you want to have a backup person to record the meeting. If that is part of your deliverables, recording the session, you can ask your co-host or the operator to record a local copy while you record a cloud copy. This way, you know you have a backup in case there are glitches, you have a backup copy of the meeting. Number two, co-hosts and operators are fantastic when it comes to moderating the chat section, responding to questions. Sometimes during these large meetings, people have questions completely unrelated to the agenda or topics. Maybe it's related to your services or products, which is not a bad thing, but you want them to be addressed if possible so that you as an operator can continue to maximize what you do best. When it comes to running a large Zoom meeting, the Q&A and the live interactions can be a little tricky, as you can imagine. Here are some of the things I would recommend you do. When you start the meeting, while people are in the waiting room, or as soon as they step into your session, you wanna leave them a message right here inside chat. As a moderator, you can call their attention to the message or the agenda details you've left inside chat. Things I like to mention are today's agenda is, sometimes I give timestamps so people know exactly when and what is going to happen. In addition, I always address Q&A. Some people don't know whether there will be a Q&A session. So people tend to bombard the presenter with a lot of questions up front, which is okay, can be captured. But if they knew that there is, let's say, a 20-minute Q&A session at the end of the Zoom meeting, sometimes they will just wait for then to submit their questions. You may be wondering, Fei, if all the questions are coming in, and as a moderator, how do I filter and choose these questions? Simply click on the three dots down here, click on Save Chat. This way, you're able to save the chat file and be able to navigate back to it very easily. Once it's saved, click on Show in the folder. Boom, right here. It says, blah, blah, blah. You can see the timestamp, the person, who it came from. And this is where it gets interesting for you to give necessary cue to your attendees. So for me, I always welcome them with a message, but also say, if you wanna ask a question in chat, and there's so many of us, please start your question with question colon, and whatever the question may be. This way, halfway through the meeting, we may be receiving hundreds of messages, and this way, I'm able to most easily go back to the question. It's not always a good idea for an anonymous or very public meeting, and just bring random people on the stage with you. I would say, in this case, we were a little nervous, but knowing that this was a paid event, and people there to meditate with Sarah Blunden, they're very respectful. We could just tell from the chat room. And we just rolled the dice, and it turned out to be a fantastic session. One thing I wanna know to co-hosts and event organizers is that when people are brought on stage under spotlight, you do need consent from them before you publish this video, or share it, or use it for resale later on. So what you can do is maybe organize the Q&A towards the end of the session, and only use a presenter segment with no participants' videos as the resale portion. And then when people do join in as part of Q&A, you can use that video for a different purpose, maybe only for the paid attendees, and not for public sharing. Finally, I wanna talk about the best practices outside of Zoom or the Zoom app in general. You wanna make sure that you connect with your team and the presenter, often separately, at least a few days or one week prior to the big event. Walk your team through. Do not assume that everybody knows what they're doing already. If you want someone like Ruby to help you spotlight someone, tell Ruby that, and actually teach her how to get it done. And if someone is from the IT team, and let this person know, Philip, let's just say, these questions might come up. If people are unable to connect or disconnect from the event, you are in charge of helping them out. Also, assigning roles that make it very clear is critical. Also, I often see my clients to not necessarily share the entire agenda with their teams, and that can be a problem, because you wanna know when to start the event officially. You want verbal or visual cues from the presenter, when to start the session, and to when, for instance, out of 500 attendees, let's wait until 250 people show up. It doesn't have to be an exact number. When you close the event, you also want the presenter, let's say Sarah in this case, to say, goodbye, it was so great to have you guys. See you next time. You will have these cues to know when to close the meeting, because otherwise, it could get a little tricky, and you might just end the meeting a little too soon. Depending on the event, sometimes my clients will say, we want the presenters to talk about everything, including things like how to use Zoom, which is not their expertise, but our attendees really would like to hear directly from them. In this case, as a moderator, or someone as an event organizer, it's important to prepare a light script for the presenter. Oftentimes, when we start a meeting, it's so easy to forget what we're there to talk about, where there's any technical or helpful tips we wanna provide. You wanna write them down. Otherwise, you can volunteer as the moderator to say, hey, is it okay for me to just spend a couple of minutes on Zoom's best practices, remind the participants before Sarah begins the presentation? Hey, I hope this content helps you, because it really was very helpful for me to teach it again, to share all the details, to talk about it through a checklist format. If you decide, at the end of this, that Zoom webinar is better for you with all the Zoom webinar features, and not having people show their faces via videos, or have the slightest chance of turning on their audio, you might wanna consider Zoom webinar, and I have a lot of videos on Zoom webinar, and I recommend you start with this one right here. Also, if you wanna become a Zoom pro, and become a better Zoom host and moderator, be sure to check in the description below. We have a course for $97, designed for Zoom hosts, co-hosts, and moderators. So much love for this community, and I will see you next time.