The most horrific webinar-- EVER!

There's an old expression, "You get one chance to make a first impression"  When you use webinars for your online presentation, meeting, or training session, a bad impression will last forever.  A bad impression breaks trust, loses opportunity, and hurts your business brand, big time.

Let me recap some highlights of the horrific webinar that I attended yesterday.

1. When I logged on to Live Meeting at the start time, I was greeted with a totally blank blue screen.  The presenter's slides were not loaded and ready.  In fact, the speaker couldn't figure out how to load the slides until 15 minutes after the hour! 
2. When each of the 100 people joined or left the audio bridge, a loud beep pierced our ears.  The highest audience count reached 65; so a lot of people came and went.  The speaker didn't disable the beep before the session was opened. 
3. People were still joining the session throughout the entire minutes of the presentation, interrupting the speaker's presentations with more loud beeps of people coming in and going out of the session.
4. The person that shared the slides used the Share Application view, and didn't know that when she had other applications open, the audience saw a great big gray block that hid the slide content.  The gray block came and went multiple times in the sesson, and was very irritating.
5. The person that shared the slides shared the slide with thumbnail view in PowerPoint (not in Live Meeting), in a different resolution than my computer, which disabled me from seeing the full slide without continuous scrolling.  She didn't know that there were other ways to share it so everyone saw the full slide.
6. The one main speaker used a mobile phone, which distorted his voice and caused unpleasant irritating fly-like buzzing sounds to intertwine constantly during his presentation.
7. The audience was not muted, nor was anyone asked to mute until much later.  By that time, she had lost control, the audience was probably multi-tasking, and people didn't hear or act on her request.  I was praying that she didn't use "Mute All Attendees" because her presenters would have been muted out, and there is no "undo" of that choice in Live Meeting.  I have to believe that she didn't even know the function existed.
8. In the middle of the second presenter's presentation, someone in the audience put their phone on hold, which caused music to interrupt the second presenter's presentation. 
9. Throughout the session, some other audience members were using unmuted speakerphones, which caused every word the speaker said to be immediately repeated in an echo chamber. 
10. Sone others audience members could be heard using keyboards, sneezing, eating, kids noises, laughing in the background, and other things that were audible to all of us.
11. The speaker said, "I don't know if you are ..., or ..."  Why didn't she use a poll to find out?  In fact, why weren't' there several relevant polls through the entire session.
12. One of the speakers talked about the conference website.  No one used Live Meeting to actually show it while talking about it.
13. The video window was activated, and one audience member shared her video and looked bored to death with her camera in "surveillance" view (the wrong camera angle)..
14. Neither of the two speakers ever used the live video.
15. The audience was never instructed in how to open the Live Meeting panes.  I am sure that some first-time users were totally baffled.
16. There was absolutely no effort to interact with the audience outside of the Q&A.
17. All of the Q&A questions were left to the end of the session, which disabled me from asking more than one question.
18. The speaker showed a total lack of understanding how to operate Live Meeting and what audience members see on their desktops.  It made her look unprepared and unprofessional, and those imprssions will never go away.
19. ...and more.

The content of the webinar was really important to me, but I know I was not the only one in the audience that clearly noticed how poorly it was delivered.  During the session, I received several emails from participants that knew me that said, "They really need your help."  Yes, they did.

For every business--large or small--when you deliver webinars like this, you look bad, your business looks bad, and you lose credibility.  It is frustrating to br in the audience and endure such a painful session.  Presenting to a remote audience is different than face-to-face and requires new skills for this new medium.  Presenting in a virtual setting requires planning, preparation, and training so the sesson is wonderful for everyone.  If you do it right, people will be actively engaged.  If you do it wrong, they won't be back again.

Respectfully submitted

Jaclyn Kostner, Ph.D., Webinar Interaction Guru, http://www.distance.com/
We help you make your webinars (for training, presentations, and meetings) engaging, interactive, and fun!