 Hello everybody and welcome to today's Business Skills webinar, presentation skills to make your webinar rock. And thank you for bearing with us for that extra minute there while we pay our respects. So thank you everyone for joining. We're very excited for today, especially because we're talking about webinars and we all love webinars here at RedBag. But when it does come to these types of online events, it's important to note that our online presenters can make all the difference between something that is enjoyable and memorable and something that maybe isn't. So today we're going to uncover the secrets and hopefully provide you guys with some great tips that you can take away and put into your webinars in your series for 2015. Now, first of all, I just want to set the scene before we go into the agenda. Now webinars are going to be different for everyone out there and we have been running webinars for a long time here at RedBag, but it's important for you guys to note out there that not everything we say is going to be gospel. Some of the things you may agree with, some of the things you might not agree with and it will depend on your industry and also the type of audience and also the type of webinars you're running. So if we do say something that you think, oh, you know, I've got a different view on this, this is something that I might think of a little bit differently, or I've been doing things this way and these seem to work for me, please feel free to type this into the chat box because we want to try and build an online community here and help everyone out. As we go through these six stages on the screen, so we're going to go into what we spoke about throughout the registration process, the engagement, the presenter requirements, so little tips that you can use as presenters or organisers as well. Some of the interactive tools and layout options that are quite unique to the RedBag platform and how you can use them to mix up what you're currently doing. Creating presentations, this was a big one, so in the registration process so many people told us they wanted to know more about how to create great presentations, how to facilitate, which is going to be my role today, so hopefully I'll do it justice, and then also some advanced techniques when it comes to presenting as well. So I want to get into it and introduce our presenter, but before we do, just a quick poll, and for those of you who haven't used polling, this is a perfect way to see it in action. So think back to the most memorable webinar you attended this year. What made it so memorable for you? So if you can just click on the radio button that corresponds best to your answer. Was it the presenter and their style? Were they amazing? Were they really infectious? Was it the content? Was it great? Was it the registration and joining process? Was it seamless and it made it the best webinar ever? Or was it the technology? Maybe the technology was so good and it totally just shone everything else. And we can see these results coming through live, and I think that's why today is so important. And I'm going to hand over to Michael now, who is our product manager of online events here at RedBag. And Michael, as you can see, the majority of people talking about the presenter and their style is making webinars so memorable. So how are you today? I'm very good, Sarah. Thanks for having me today. And what's your thoughts on that, just on the presenters being memorable? Sorry, everyone. I have a bit of a fog in my throat. The presenter is key. When it comes to any online forum, any presentation, your presenter is what makes the presentation. If they're infectious, if they have a big personality, if they can articulate and are believable, that's all the stuff that's going to be really powerful for you when you're participating or watching an online event. So, yeah, a presenter is key. How they build their content, how they build their presentation, all of that all plays a role. But, yeah, the presenter having the right presenter will make your event. Great. So we've got that covered. Now, let's talk about engaging your audience. So just quickly, I just want to make a point that it's important for presenters to not only think about when they're online presenting, but to think about how they can engage people right from the moment they register for a webinar. So let's just go into this quite quickly. And I want to talk about the registration process and getting people involved in that. What sort of tips, what sort of things have we seen? What actually works in terms of engaging people throughout this process, Michael? Well, yeah, the registration process is key and very pivotal for not just the presenter, but for the organizer. And this is where the organizer and the presenter can only be working hand in hand to make sure they're clearly articulating the right message to their audience and they're getting that right engagement. So right now, I'm just pulling up an example of what we use as our registration page. And I'll just break it down for everyone. So the biggest thing is your topic. So what are we presenting on today? What are people coming here for? There needs to be the topic and the summary, as well as the key takeaway. So what are those key points that you're wanting to be showing casing to everyone who's registering about what they're going to get while joining your event? The registration process needs to be really simple. The fields have to be short, concise. You don't want to make it complicated for people to join and you need to show credibility. And the images that you use, like right here, you can't see it, but previously, when you guys registered, there was my photo on there, as well as Sarah's. And we had links there that went off to my LinkedIn portfolio and I think Sarah's as well. So it shows the credibility in there. But Sarah, I know that you've got a lot more information on this because you are a marketing manager here right by conferencing. What are the key takeaways that you see with engaging someone from the registration stage? Yeah, I think what we've seen, especially over this year, is a lot of people paying a lot more attention to their marketing and getting their presenters involved. So Mark was spoke about the credibility factor. So when you are talking about your presenters on these registration pages, having links back to their LinkedIn profiles or their websites and getting everyone to understand a little bit more about them. And also the fields. So obviously you need to think of what sort of webinar you are presenting. So you want the basic details, their first name, their details, their emails. But also get your presenter involved. So I said to Mark before today's webinar and this is a generic question that we write to most people. What are you hoping to learn from today's webinar? I said to him, okay, what sort of information do you want to know about your audience? He goes, well I want to know why they joined him. So this is a question we put in there and then we actually give the information to him afterwards so then he can actually read that and help tell the content. And as a presenter that's incredibly powerful because not only does it allow you to break down the technology barrier when you're online and respond to that and then respond to questions but it also shows that you actually care and also shows that you have actually put some research into it. Any people are going to type in any pre-questions or anything like that, they're more than likely going to want to join on the day. And in terms of joining on the day, let's go into the confirmation email because I know there's been so many times that I've registered for a webinar and I've sat there and I haven't received anything and I don't know what to do and I don't know how to attend. How does this all work and what should people be aware of when organizing their confirmation emails? Sorry again. Key thing is when you're engaging someone before you need to keep those steps flowing. You need to make sure that once they've gone to your registration page and they've filled out those details they automatically get that confirmation email. This needs to be an auto response. You need to keep them engaged and keep them moving step by step so they know exactly the next moves and that's why we're here right now. We've got our confirmation email and this is what all of you guys would have received beforehand and the things are that this was an auto responder so as soon as you've registered you should have received this. If people don't receive that auto responder they start to get a little frightened like did they not register correctly, did I not enter my email addressing correctly and then they'll try to contact you to the organizer or the support team to ensure that they did. The key things that you need to make sure that you have on your confirmation email is that you're going to be able to get your activity straight into their calendar. It's going to prompt them on the day of the event that it's going to come up and you're joining links. So the links to join the webinar, your testing links, so every webinar platform is different. None of them are the same. So with R1 we're very lucky that we don't have any downloads for any participants to do but as a presenter if you choose or use certain functionality you might have to download a desktop client to do desktop sharing. So you need to know what you're going to be using as a participant. There's no downloads or anything. So the testing is just to make sure that their computer that they're using has a capability of doing it. And then you can start to engage with them a little bit more here. You can ask them to submit questions at this stage. So whatever you're wanting to get an answer from from the presenter on the day, if we had a case study that we're referring to you can have a link to that there, which would be great. The same thing with supporting documents and the confirming of the why. So on the presentation page it's reiterating that branding, it's showcasing people. Yes, this is the reasons why you're joining on the topics that we're going to cover and they're extremely important. Yeah, and I think this email can sometimes be underestimated and a lot of people just put it together quickly and send it off. Not realizing the impact that it can actually have on the actual webinars. So we've got a lot of clients who actually run panel discussion webinars and their presenters want to let people know what they're going to talk about with this confirmation email and also the reminder email, which we recommend should also be sent on the day of the webinar as well. They will also include a link to a case study. So the whole idea is to take a look at this case study, familiarize yourself with the content that we're going to be talking about. So by the time you do come on the webinar you've actually got some insight and you've got a vested interest. So you put all this time into it so you are going to be more than likely to attend on the day. So when it pops up in the Outlook calendar an hour before or 15 minutes before you can also have additional links in there as well. So I think just talking about this before in the engagement before a webinar just the number one tip from us would be to get your presenters involved and ask them how they would like to play a part in this and what they think would probably benefit them more on the day of the webinar and how much they would like to be involved. But any questions on that please let us know because Michael what I'm interested now is talking about presenter requirements and technology is huge and I think no matter how many times you've presented a webinar you are going to still be worried about the technology. And as a presenter what do we actually need? What sort of technology do we need to present and what happens if something goes wrong? Just let us all know and let's say it once and for all. Okay. So I'll spell it out quite clearly for you. The first thing is you just have to remember to keep calm. If you're working with technology unfortunately there's a lot of things that are out of your control when it comes to technology but there's stuff that you can control and that's what the whole part about technical requirements is. It's really testing, testing, testing and testing. You want to make sure that you've done dry runs you know exactly what's going to happen. So technical requirements from the presenter and the facilitator or organizer is the computer you're using. You want to test that you run your webinar off the exact computer that you're going to be using on the day and also make sure that you've downloaded and used that platform on the day. Stable Internet. So Internet is how you're delivering your message. You need to be able to use this to get your message out there. So you want to make sure that you're not running off of wireless. You want to make sure that you're running off of a fixed Internet connection. If you're doing this from your office you want to make sure that you're doing it at a time where not a lot of people are using the network or if you are send an email to the whole company saying I'm representing a webinar today and you can please Internet usage be kept at a low and no going to sites like YouTube or Vimeo stuff that's very data heavy that's going to affect your bandwidth. Your webcam. If you choose to use a webcam you need to ensure that you've tested the webcam and that you're doing your presenting against a wall of a neutral color. Something that's not going to cause the camera to fade in or out or adjust. And then you also want to make sure that you talk about the technical requirements with using headphones. So Sarah and I are using VoIP headsets right now which are amazing to use for deliver over the VoIP that then goes through reverse hybrid where people can dial in over the phone. But yeah, you want to make sure that you test absolutely everything. And the next ones are the really big ones is a quiet background. We're in a board room right now at the very end of our office with a sign about three meters away saying do not enter keep noise to a minimum. And we have a lot of lighting. If we were going to be using webcams we have enough lighting in here to make sure that we're perfectly lit and then the last thing is branding. So if we have webcams up we could have a banner behind us and we can make sure that we have a lot of cases and organizations quite well. Yeah. Now obviously those technical requirements are important and we can see here there are no bad audiences but there are a lot of boring presenters unfortunately. And I wouldn't, as a presenter I think it's just important for people to know out there that if you are new to webinars or maybe you've been doing them for a while and you're still a little bit hesitant about presenting is that presenting via webinar is completely different so obviously you've got technology as a barrier but there are so many other little things that play a role. So what sort of soft skills are needed, Michael? We talk about the importance of being memorable and being enthusiastic but as a presenter what are the sort of things that I should be remembering as I go into a webinar and present online and want to make it as memorable as ever? Memorable as ever, that's the key that everyone wants to know so those big things are you need to have your knowledge. You need to know your content in and out. If you're presenting on a topic, you need to make sure that you're not going to be stumped by a question from someone. You need to make sure that you're credible, you're believable, you're using resources and documents that are going to reinforce your point. You need to have passion about it. I'm very passionate about events. My career started off many years ago actually doing live events such as Fashion Week and World Youth Day and then my career kind of went on a very strange path through sales which led me to products which led me to digital events but I'm still doing in an industry that I love passion and technology where you can reach people so you need to have that passion so that you're infectious about it so you're believable and you need to be off the cuff. You can't be so rigid with your content and I know there's a lot of presenters out there who have very dry content and you can't really get away from that but you need to be passionate about that and be able to be not so rigid that you're just reading a script. You need to have a facilitator who's great for this. Having Sarah here we feed off each other so you can interrupt me with a question or interact with a chat box that I'm presenting and that will break up my presentation and the same thing with taking questions throughout. You don't need to be 100% structured. I recommend to a lot of people that they should probably take questions core of every 15 minutes throughout just so they're answering the questions that are coming through. Camera training is really key. Having a webcam on offers a lot of engagement with your audience but as a presenter it's quite daunting. You are looking at yourself through the entire presentation. Sarah and I have chosen not to use our cameras today not for the fact that we have bad hair days but because we just chosen not to. And then you want to make sure if you're presenting to a camera you have soft eyes. You're talking to almost you're talking to a friend. You have to keep gestures at a minimum because if you have very enthusiastic presenters who flash their arms out they go off camera and it kind of gets distracting. They need to be platform ready. They need to be trained on the platform and this kind of takes a couple of times. So we always thought we work with our presenters into a full hour presentation skills making sure that they know where all the tools are and also the facilitator gets trained up on that as well so that they know so that they can take over in case a presenter hasn't used an annotation tool or anything. And then again the biggest thing out of all is rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. You want to know your slides are coming up next. You want to know what's happening next. You want to be prepared and just take it one step at a time. Yeah and I think that's really important when you talk about the format Michael and having Q&A sessions and stuff like that. So right now we don't have any questions coming through but we are keeping this quite casual so I just want to let you guys out there know exactly what we're doing. We have an over two slide appear now so we've rehearsed this and we know about 15 minutes in if we have any questions we're going to pop a slide up that will actually ask people for questions. So then we're not only prompting ourselves as a facilitator and Michael can tell you this himself. As he gets into the momentum of a PowerPoint he might forget to ask questions or he might just keep going and not really pay too much attention to that Q&A box. So having these little interruption slides is a great way for you and your facilitator if you have one to just remind you that there are Q&A sessions and to keep it interactive. At the moment we don't have any so if you do have any please type them in and we are going to move along to the next section now which is tools and I think the biggest thing here Michael is there are so many tools available to people and it's almost like an overload within a webinar environment and I think if we can just show people exactly what's available to them and then I think it's a sort of scenario where we see so many people just use two or three tools throughout a webinar if it's more of a collaborative environment then they are going to use more but can we just take a look at the tools that are available on the Redback platform in particular and this is just showing our platform guys so if you are using something else then it might be a little but can we just go through some of the tools that we frequently use within a webinar environment? Perfect, no I'd love to. So I'm going to pull up now just a screenshot of what you guys are looking at right now with little highlights to absolutely everything that you can use. Now as Sarah said when you're presenting you're not going to use 50% or even 75% of these because when you're choosing to present on a webinar you need to know your content and know the functionality that you want to use so as you saw before we use polls before and we're going to use polls again throughout this and we really like that functionality and it gets people engaging it gets people using it and so our polling functionality is done down here in the tools section you can also do different things like having closed caption and a Q&A manager so the Q&A manager allows the facilitator to see all the questions coming up and then choose one to do those. And it's just a note as well there Michael so we actually pre-populate polls and everything beforehand so you have the ability to do that don't you? Yes you do. You have the ability to pre-populate polls and have them all saved there so that when you get to them you can automatically launch them but also with being off the cuff you can create a poll on the fly and choose your answers and add them to it so you'll get a lot of really enthusiastic presenters to be like and I've had this happen a couple of times so halfway through it's like oh you know what I want to find out how people are engaging with me and launch a quick poll that is made up of themselves so while we're on this right now I'll just go through the different functionalities so we'll start from left to right so participant list right now we can see everyone's names in there we can see how many people are online but the participant list can be used a couple of different ways in this example we've got a webcam showing here so normally we have a webcam on the left right hand side of the screen but for this you can have it in the participant list if you want to have your slides maximized up we then have the chat box below that the chat box allows you to have people interacting asking their questions also putting you through technical problems that they might be having and then this is the view of what I'm looking at right now so you guys will see it slightly differently because you'll have just the slide up but as a presenter I have all of my thumbnails so I can see exactly what's coming up next in my slideshow and then below it if I had any notes they'll be showing up here so instead of having my paperwork in front of me and rustling around I can keep all of my notes down below the PowerPoint and that's saved from when you're building your PowerPoint presentation if you add the notes there that carries through into our platform now that's not the same with all of them but that's what our platform does we have different thumbnails and this is the different interactivity so we have desktop sharing sorry I just clicked on the slide and moved forward desktop sharing slideshow, a whiteboard so as Sarah mentioned before those collaboration sessions where you're trying to get people's feedback you can make them presenters and people can type to you video players so if you did want to showcase a video which we'll do a little later on you can have those all pre-loaded in the platform so you're not having to go search for them and then notes where you're trying to when you can type up notes as well now as I said before your functionality that you guys are going to use as presenters depends on your presentation and what you choose to use and when and it all depends on what you're trying to achieve at the end and we'll get down to this a little later on but you don't have to use everything because it's there never think because you have functionality you need to use it, you need to think about what you're trying to achieve with your end user or who you're targeting and build your presentation around that yeah that's a good point Michael what I want to do I'm just going to launch another poll as we go into the next section to answer some questions that are coming through at the moment because I really just want to start talking about the presentations but before we go into that, here's a poll so do you think your PowerPoint slides are effective so if you can just answer but just on what we were just talking about then the actual platform, Joanne and I think this is a great point so some attendees ask very long technical questions and they suggest they want personal advice as opposed to speaking to everyone and she tries to state that the questions need to be shorter in general as it can be harder to monitor the questions and I would just like to add just from a facilitator point of view I think first of all if you are talking about technical questions about the actual platform then it's really important that you have your testing links on your reminder emails as well but also I think as a facilitator if you don't have a facilitator it's probably important to get a facilitator and what we do with questions that come through that are quite long, every question we copy and paste to a Word document so we've got it all sorted it can be quite difficult to monitor all these questions coming through in a little box down the left-hand side but if you are a facilitator this box can actually be changed so we can actually change the layout we can actually change the layout so that as a facilitator I can only see a huge box with the questions coming in but it's important to also tell people we might not be able to answer the questions that come through today so what we will do after the event we're going to download a transcript because all these questions are available on an exportable transcript and we're going to respond to those and we're going to send that out within 48 hours along with the recording of the actual webinar so little things like that can help people but you are always going to get those people that are going to ask lengthy questions and also the ideal length of time for a webinar that can be a little bit difficult Shannon but what we do for hours I think if you are doing professional development so where people actually get rewarded points then they can go as long as you like so if you are rewarding more points based on a certain topic then they may be a little bit longer but what we find the average webinar is around the hour mark so you've got 45 minutes for Q&A and then you also have 45 minutes for the presentation and then 15 minutes for Q&A but you know it depends sometimes hours only go for half an hour to 45 minutes if it is a topic that we can condense what I would recommend is that you survey your audience Shannon so after conducting your first webinar in the survey that you are asking people afterwards ask them was this length of time good for you would you prefer shorter, would you prefer longer and you'll be able to tell your audience online so we can see how many people are online and if you start seeing people drop off after 20 minutes it's like maybe this isn't the right time of day for them and maybe this isn't the right type of content that they want to hear at this hour or maybe there is too much information so the more interaction that you can have with your audience before and after is great and back to this poll PowerPoint slides and I sort of knew that this was going to be the response that we would get I think everyone looks to improve their PowerPoint slides whether or not they are online or whether or not they are face to face so we can see here 40% of people saying that they think they are great which is good but hopefully you guys too can really get some tips and tricks that you can do to improve them so let's go into creating presentations Markle because this is a fun bit and like I said earlier it is going to be really industry specific especially with branding and I know some of our webinar clients in terms of the PowerPoint slides they create but there are a few little things you can do here and there just to make it a bit more appealing to your virtual audience so let's start with webinar considerations so you mentioned before we need to upload the presentation into the webinar so what do we need to consider when creating our presentation I know that we have to use PowerPoint correct Yes so for our platform and for I think every platform out there Kino and Prezi do not play well with them unfortunately they are great tools but for what we are doing and for webinars you need to do them in PowerPoint and also you need to be aware of the platform restrictions that you may have so with our platform there are no restrictions with PowerPoint it carries all the notes it carries all the animations which is great but it is not like a live event what you need to remember is that when you are doing an online event you kind of have to have introduction slides you have to have your opening slide talking about housekeeping rules you often need to talk about slides so every time we are launching a poll we have a poll slide same thing with questions we have questions informing people about the topic or the discussion that we are going to be doing so you really want to make sure you have those you want to also build your presentation so the annotation tools work really well so right now I am using a laser dot pointer so I can talk about what I am going to be using the points that I am doing it for and on demand content so your slides need to be able to translate post event when you are putting this in the reminder email which we did not cover in the reminder email you want to have a link to download the slides yes at the very end but not the reminder the follow up email my apologies so the follow up email have a link to download your slide so if someone did not actually watch your presentation and they get your slides they will still be able to get the information from it there is a lot of people out there that do the whole one slide image which is great but that does not really translate if you go back through and you have not listened to the presenter and then test all the animations so our animations carry through but a lot of marketing people out there now use custom fonts and if they are not in the platform when you upload your slide it is not going to render correctly the fonts are not going to keep so you want to make sure you use generic fonts that are going to carry through to the platform and always upload them prior to and test and as I keep saying upload them our slides live in a library so they get converted when they get uploaded so it is not like a live event where you walk up to the podium with a USB plug in and go upload and if you have really high res images and everything it can take 10, 15 minutes depending on the size of the presentation so you want to make sure you upload this at least a day before test it, rehearse it all of those things cool and also I just saw Brad so it sounds like you should not pack too much information into your webinar you do not want to like the slides that you are presenting to should carry off the dot points as I referred to but then you should be speaking about those dot points not to those dot points so I will just go to the next one now so designing considerations so this is very key when you are building your presentation you want to use large fonts you want to use high quality images you want to refrain from blocks of text this is not presenting case studies or anything you are giving those to people so they can read them in their own time your slides need to be key information that is consistent with what you are delivering but not the information itself you are listening to the presenter and what they are talking about not just reading the slides but keeping it consistent and branding so throughout this whole entire presentation we have had a green theme green is one of our colours that we use we have had the same background image we are keeping it very consistent and then you want to consider animations so animations again are a powerful tool on this platform they use you need to test on other ones if those animations carry through I think for a lot of people out there who have been designing PowerPoints for a while they have heard this before but I just want to go through some examples of before and after and how they do translate a little bit differently on the webinar platform and then also give you guys some links as well that you can use I am going to get you to turn your laser off to Michael because it has actually sound to frustrate me so this is tip number one your facilitator is always the boss so just remember that guys so let's look at this slide so this was quite clean it has got three bullet points on there it is talking about information on the screen can it be improved things can always be improved as you said this isn't a bad slide it consistently goes with what I just said before but you can always take slides to the next level and you just have to think about them a little bit differently so here was the before let's have a look at the after so we have the exact same messages but instead of using dot points we have used those key facts from the previous slide to be those relevant points we have made it larger, we have made it more bold saying like 50% of our brain is wired for the visuals that is such a key message because visuals automatically translate by looking at the other slide I wanted to read each one quite clearly here I can see 50% 30x I know the percentages and the stats for each one of those dot points straight away it is a very powerful tool when you are using visuals that way and then we will go over to another example so again this isn't a bad slide drive revenue through new channels it's got a stock standard image on it it's got a clean backdrop but the dot points are quite small it's not a lot of text on the page so it is still a good slide but it can be improved so let's go to the after so using different style of images to carry off that exact same information but we have added depth to this page so we have got a much bigger title on there we have kept the blues all consistent our brains are wired for looking at apps now and relating that to information so we can see the mobile, the web, the tablet e-commerce and having an image behind that that gives that page a bit of depth gets rid of that flat image that stagnant presentation and these images so I know Sarah you have got links for these images correct? I am just going to put a link in the chat box so flaticon.com is a site that we use and this gives you free vector icons so you literally click on it you go and search and you click on search it will give you a list of thousand free icons that you can use and you just save them and you can use them on your PowerPoint presentations and I think that you are right Michael people are so wired with this whole mobile device generation these icons and these little pretty pictures stock images like we saw in the previous example they are great and if you search you can find them anywhere but I think these little tiny icons they resonate with people more and I think presenting on behalf of another organization and you need to use their branding it is going to be a lot easier to use these icons in a PowerPoint presentation and get that approved than someone's face holding a mobile phone for example and with a lot of these what we do so like we said earlier we want to make this like gray and green so we download the images from flaticon and then we just put them into a PowerPoint and then we just change the background color so they turn green so a lot of things that you can do with images just to really enhance it a little bit and instead of using dot points just use little icons and it makes such a big difference it does it's brilliant to do brilliant so we'll go for another example another before so here we've got a lot of our text they've bolded one section a sentence which is have a strong online presence is key and then we've got an image of music in the world which is trying to tie in that one line but that's a busy slide like it's not a bad but it's busy and you're trying to read the whole thing and having that half a sentence in bold isn't as strong as what you could potentially do which is this so just taking that one sentence out having a strong online presence is key that's all that slide was previously saying but they had a lot of stuff around it which didn't need to be there you don't need to clutter your slide if you want to just make one part the key and the focus remove everything else you don't need to have it wasn't adding any value to it so yeah if you want to keep your slide simple make them strong make them bold and speak to those slides okay let's talk more about what the presentation will actually look like in the platform so we've created our presentation we've got all these great tips we've used some flashy icons now we've uploaded into the system as a presenter will I see something different as to someone else joining the webinar and what are the advantages and disadvantages and what can I use perfect so yeah exactly as Sarah just said we see things differently as a presenter than the audience does so as you guys are at home or at work you're not seeing exactly what I am so this screenshot right here is showing exactly what I'm seeing right now kind of it's a different presentation but I'll go through it so we have slide thumbnails here so everything that I'm about to be moving forward to I can see the next slide coming up I can also see all my notes that carry through in the power point presentation that I typed in there underneath my slide so I'm not having to look down and this is really key if you're using webcams because with webcams if you're looking down on a piece of paper you drop your head if you're still looking at the page you're just dropping your eyes so you're still having connection with that camera so it's a very useful tool and then here we can see we still have the slide it's taking up the whole screen we know exactly what we're presenting to but then we're also choosing the different areas at the top here which is the what functionality so right now I'm on slideshow and then if I wanted to I could be switching over to a video player or anything but yeah as a presenter you see things differently and you always will but your audience will always have the same experience but then it's just you want to tailor your view exactly to your presentation and what you're comfortable with so presentation platform a couple different ways you can set up your room because you can customize a lot I think a lot of people don't know this do they they can actually customize the layout so they can have the chat box along the bottom of the screen as opposed to the left of the screen they can change it up as a color of the background as well so a few different funky things that you can do maybe to just even surprise people next year when they log into your webinar surprise exactly no and you can exactly what Sarah says play around with the platform make it your own you can customize it they don't always have to be the same your PowerPoint styling you can make that 4x3 or 16x9 right now we've done a 4x3 because in standard practices we would have webcams up on the right hand side of the screen in another panel which would fit that presentation quite perfectly in square and get rid of these pillar lines if we wanted to and not have a camera we can make this 16x9 and it would fill the whole space which would be great for having more content on there Q&A display as Sarah just said the chat box doesn't have to be on the left hand side we prefer it to be but it can go across the whole bottom length of the page underneath the slides which is quite good when you have a lot of people writing really lengthy questions because I would read all in one sentence and then the attendee views you can choose what they see so you can full screen the page you can remove the chat box you can make it so they just see the slides and absolutely nothing else and then format so your format is how you're building your presentation around the platform so that would be everything from having the slides at the beginning showcasing having the slides 16x9 or 4x3 so you can play around with this a lot but that's the whole thing is you want to get in your platform and play around with it and everything can be done by using in the very top right hand corner next to the blue X is a little cog wheel and that's the settings button and as a moderator or facilitator when you log in you can play around with all the controls and it's just a lot of fun to play around and test and see what's going to work best for you and saying this I know that we had questions coming in before about people wanting to know that if they should do just hybrid events from a physical event to digital and then also do just digital only using these settings you can change your room around quite a lot so that you can carry off a hybrid event on this platform quite easily. You can take the video camera and you can undock it and make it a lot larger so if you do have someone presenting an electron you can have a much bigger video player docked on the page for everyone say in the bottom right hand corner and then you build your slide so that they're around the video so that you can still do that. Can you just explain for some people out there what a hybrid event is and how that would work in this environment because I think it's quite useful. So a hybrid event is a live or physical event that you're doing that you're wanting to then do online at the same time so you're already taking your physical event that you're having and they're using technology equipment like a webinar to go beyond those four walls and bring people in that couldn't attend it physically so with that what it would be is conferences not AGMs but we do a lot of, I'm trying to think what they are but they're like small training groups workshops, people of 30 people in a room presenting an electron and then we'd have them at their laptop they would upload their slide presentations into this platform so the people online would get the exact same experience as the people in the room and then they'd have video cameras as well so they could see it so there's a couple different ways of doing it and I'm happy for anyone who wants to talk in more detail about that to contact me afterwards my details will be going out and I can help you guys with consulting on how you can take your physical event and make it into a hybrid event. And what I've also done Michael I've just put a link in the chat box to our tutorials so for those of you who are using redback at the moment, if you do want to customize your layout there's literally step by step 30 second videos on how to do that within those tutorials also on how to do anything and I just want to quickly jump to something because someone did ask this in the registration process about showing video so as a presenter and I haven't pre-planned this at all as a facilitator I just simply click on video player which is this tab here which I'm going to do now and then I'm going to actually I can search YouTube so I can stream from YouTube and because redback has a YouTube channel I just search redback conferencing and what I can then do is actually play the video straight from in here so if you can't hear you will actually need to so I don't want to play it for too long because otherwise the sound is going to talk on top of us and whatnot but that's just an example on how easy it is to actually stream a video a video is a great way to mix things up to break the ice to sort of add some sort of depth into your presentation as a presenter as well and as a presenter you won't need to worry about the technology or anything like that because your facilitator's role is to do that so I think what we've done for today we've organised the presentation then we've sat down with literally a word document step by step what comes next and then as a facilitator I will then know when to actually play the video for Michael and then all I have to do is switch back in easy perfect thank you Sarah so yeah as Sarah has mentioned the facilitator works with you as a presenter so you really want to have a great relationship there but you also want to make sure that you can practise you know each other's cues you know what's going to be coming up so it's all very important so let's move on now to the next slide so which is over to you so any questions and Shannon does have a question so is there a platform that makes it possible to participate in webinars via smartphone so I'm assuming any mobile device then Michael yes so our platform goes across any device so you can log on to this and view the slide presentation and the interactivity everything comes up on it the iPhone I think already shows the presentation but I think if you're doing off the tablets and everything you do get the webcams and other functionality comes up on it but I'm going to have to double check that one but yes our platform and most other platforms are fully integrated with smart devices these days in saying that you would have to download a local app all of them have that for but you want to just check that out first and make sure that it doesn't and a question from Megan so what about copyright web news in YouTube clips in a commercial presentation so the good thing about YouTube is that it's already it's a publicly listed and uploaded content so by having that content up there and utilising it you're not breaking any copyright copyright laws the person who uploaded it potentially is breaking it if they haven't found it yet but by you repurposing it you're not going to get in any trouble for that and saying that with our platform you don't have to just stream from YouTube you can upload any video file to it you just do it exactly the same as you would do with a slideshow presentation you just click on video players start video and there's a little button that says upload video and it uploads it for you now I want to go into flawless facilitation and I'm going to talk a little bit about this hopefully it does make sense the fact that I'm the facilitator so hopefully it has been flawless but Michael I just want to hand it over to you so as a presenter and you're probably the best person to ask right now what is the biggest advantage of having a facilitator online with you at the same time the biggest advantage is because we pointed at the beginning you have technology as a barrier for you so as you're presenting you get hardly feedback from the audience you can't judge a reaction the facial expressions or the noise in the room but having Sarah across from me she has a lot of hand signals that you guys don't see when I start to speak too fast her hand comes up she gives me feedback about my pace she I have someone in the room with me so you're not doing this by yourself you have someone to share the load and she takes a lot of the technical stuff away from me it's absolutely I think it's the best thing you can do for yourself is to have a facilitator on any webinar because if not if you're doing this by yourself it can be a little daunting you have to have many arms many hands you have to be doing everything at once having someone there with you just makes the workload so much easier I just want to do to flatter me I really did not have any other point to that question but thank you so as we go into flawless facilitation now I just want to talk about three main stages and the facilitators role through these stages so and like I said this is going to be different depending on the type of webinar you are hosting and also depending on your audience as well so if your audience is having a little bit more I don't know smaller or larger so it's maybe a little bit more collaborative as opposed to one way it is going to differ but typically there are three main stages of facilitator and their role so before the webinar so before we actually get into the nuts and bolts of the webinar the facilitators role as you saw earlier is to open the presentation to do the housekeeping rules to let people know how to interact to also provide an introduction and maybe a brief bio and then to also set the scene for everyone involved and I just really want to mention something here and I think it is quite important especially myself being a participant on many webinars is to keep it short obviously you want to create some interaction with people online but I think having it as brief as possible I have attended so many webinars and if anyone can raise their hand to agree with me where I hop online and the facilitator or the host talks about the presenter and all their accolades and all the certificates for about 10 minutes and I'm just well I know who I've actually joined the webinar to see because I was part of it through the registration process and if I was really interested in the host or the presenter I had then gone to check out their links and what not but as someone you know giving up an hour 45 minutes an hour of my time I want you to get straight into it and I want to learn something so they're my top tips for the before during section so obviously to host the Q&A that comes through and like I mentioned earlier if there are technical questions coming through usually I can actually open up private chat with people here so I'm just going to surprise someone here and this would be testing if they're listening or not so just opened up a private chat with someone Alex actually so let's see and Alex will actually get a flashing light within the actual chat box then so we can chat privately so if Alex is having any issues within the system with his sound or something like that I can actually chat to him privately so everyone else doesn't have to be part of it also to prompt the presenter like we said earlier interview style is great I think especially if you've got webcams or you've got more than one presenter definitely go for a facilitator and have them interview them and make sure they do have some sort of knowledge on the topic you can hire facilitators out there but if they do have some knowledge on the topic it's just going to come through a lot more seamless like I said the technical issues, the tools if I need to create video time management so I can say oh god run out of time let's skip a few slides or let's do this and sort of work with the presenter and canned questions so what if we don't get any questions how awkward is that going to be online when we're going to a question session and no one's asking us questions so having those canned questions and making them seem as real as possible but I think the biggest thing here with the during section is to make sure that you and your presenter are working well together and that you have it all organized otherwise it's just going to pretty much blow up and people will actually get that sense online I feel and then the last bit as well is also the close which we're going to go to very shortly is final questions so any sort of final questions wrapping it up but then letting people know where to go to next is nothing worse than being on a webinar say half an hour 45 minutes an hour and then they just close it and then it's like oh okay well that's it there's no sort of follow up there's no call to action and if you're doing something for educational purposes you know where can people find out more what if people have questions after the webinar what are they going to do also for lead generation purposes if you're doing this for sales reasons also you know what are we going to do what would you want people to do after that and then also close the webinar as well so that's essentially what the role of a presenter a facilitator is but like I said it's really really crucial that you work hand in hand with your presenter and I can see a few questions coming through but being the timekeeper that I am I'm just going to move on quickly to storytelling and framing before we go to those questions so Michael I know that you like a good yarn but let's go into storytelling and what that is and how it all works okay so storytelling is taking your presenters content to the next level so a lot of people a lot of presenters out there will build content that is extremely dry and that's because of the topic that you have to talk about so you need to be able to make it relatable and relatable to the audience and you need to take that presenters stuff to the next level and by doing that is kind of by humanizing yourself and pulling yourself into the content so I'm going to do my best to draw an example of this and the very first time I presented with Sarah and this is going back a couple years we weren't doing a webinar we were doing a webcast and I was extremely nervous I didn't it was a broadcast quality HD camera feed and I didn't want to participate in the live event so being the technical person that I am I was like I know I'll pull the wool over people's eyes and we'll do pre-recorded content and so Sarah and I we sat down on the couches she interviewed me for about 45 minutes I then took the file I encoded it and I made it possibly too high and then when the event went live I started streaming it at a very very high rate because I don't know why but I did and then all of our audience that were out there didn't have the internet bandwidth to see it so it sort of buffering terribly and so within the first two minutes people were chatting can't see it can't see it can't see it so I've had a Mike Sarah myself up very quickly jump on the couch and we had a cut from recorded content to live content think I'll be wearing the same clothes and then had to inform everyone that I was very nervous about doing this today so I try to pull the wool over their eyes and do pre-recorded content but as they say the show must go on and we'll go into the live presentation now and the good thing about that was instantly people kind of felt bad for us so they listened to us and they wanted to see how it would go but the feedback we got was amazing they were like you guys showed us what true presenters have to do they have to get on with the show you handled it very well we did the Q&A and we got great feedback and it turned out to be a very good experience but yeah the first few minutes I was pulling my hair up but as we say the show must go on and by telling people you guys the story it's showing you that I know where you guys are coming from in the beginning and you might want to take shortcuts but you need to jump in there prepare make yourself relaxed and be able to use content that is relatable and so people can relate to you but not only that the content and the stories you talk about need to illustrate and reinforce learning so by me doing that back then I never did it again but I also did it so that I would always test my equipment I would always make sure that I knew the stuff that I was talking about and I wouldn't let my nerves get the best of me and then the next way of using the storytelling method and everything is trying to use metaphors now using metaphors to make it memorable and I'm going to pass back to my facilitator because she's got quite a good one for this yeah we actually had a webinar I attended not that long ago and it was a marketing webinar and it was on lead generation and nurturing so many of you might be familiar with the lead nurturing concept and taking people through a journey in a sales cycle and one of the greatest metaphors that resonated with me was these guys were talking about their product and they were talking about all the nurturing tools that they can do with it and what not and I'm like well I still don't get it I certainly know what you're talking about and then he started comparing his product to a relationship so he started talking about the fact that when you first meet someone you ask them to go on a date you don't just get down on one knee and marry them within 20 minutes so you need to take them out you go on a date, you take them for dinner and it's such a journey and he compared that to the journey of a sales cycle and the fact that that is exactly what their product does and that's exactly how their product can help you and being a webinar attendee and having that light bulb moment for me was so powerful and I think just a simple metaphor like that from a presenter is excellent if you can try and like Michael said humanize your content and make it relatable for people it's going to make the world of difference and going back to his example of us a great day as you can all imagine I think for us getting online and the best thing Michael could do was tell the story to people and say you know what guys we tried to do something but it actually stuffed up and it didn't work and I think that puts people at ease because it also makes them realize that you aren't just his talking head behind a computer in webinar land you're actually a real person and they can actually learn a thing or two from you so just a few tips there with storytelling now the next thing I want to talk about I've been quite often in my life but it's your audience just not that into you and this goes into framing and we've got a whole webinar presenter center blog of videos that we can send you the links to after this but for me I think framing is really important and I think it's something that has to be told from the beginning and I'm going to explain that now because sometimes as a presenter you don't have that instantaneous feedback from people Michael and I have feedback from one another as we mentioned earlier but I can't actually see my audience rolling their eyes or walking out or checking their emails so for me sometimes you can sense it and if you're a presenter and you see people drop off then it's probably one of the worst feelings in the world but if you can try and frame it for people out there I think it makes the world of difference I don't know if you guys remember but at the beginning of the webinar stay I actually set the scene for everyone and I told you guys we are doing this on webinar presenting today and we have been doing this for a long time however it isn't gospel we understand that everyone is different but here are our tips and here's some information that we're giving you guys you might take one or two things away from it or you might take a lot from it but at least I'm setting the scene and I'm not coming online and pretending to be the expert and the person who knows everything because really no one is so I think if you can that's another way that you can humanize yourself with people online just to set the scene and let them know that here are your tips however I'm not here to make your webinar a success overnight or anything like that and start to build rapport that way with people and be honest and I think if you have been a participant on a webinar before or if you are presenting on a webinar but you've never been a participant then the best thing to do is to become a participant somehow go register there are hundreds of free webinars online and put yourself in their shoes and listen to what other presenters are doing and then think ok how could I do this better on my webinar or I think they should have something different there or I think they could be rapport building here or there and try and use those little techniques as much as possible but yeah just a few tips and like I said if you engage people from the beginning through the registration process and get that feedback that's another way for you to engage people and frame your content at the beginning so a few little tips there and it does encompass a whole lot of the webinar planning stages and I'm going to in a moment put a link into the chat box which will actually have some information on the presenter centre which is a place where you can go to watch these videos but that pretty much wraps it up Michael I have a few more questions that I do want to actually getting into from people out there I would like people to do and this is also another feature of the platform is to actually complete the survey on the right hand side so we like to bring this up during the Q&A session at the end because it allows people to actually do something and still engage in something as well as typing out questions and listening to us but as a presenter make sure that you capture as much feedback from people as possible and you can send people an email asking for their feedback but it's not going to be fresh in their mind if you can get this feedback on the fly from people who are engaged in the webinar then that's the exact feedback that you want and then learn from it I guess but yeah thank you everyone thank you Michael do you have anything that you would like to add before we go to the rest of the questions from everyone No I just want to say from the very beginning I saw that a lot of you typed in that you haven't done or you've never presented before so yeah just take your time with it make sure you rehearse the more that you rehearse and you're not caught off guard is the best advice that we can possibly give and just constantly try different things see what works for you and yeah as Sarah mentioned we have an amazing site webinars.com.au which has a presenter center which has all these different videos in it which is absolutely great so please have a check out of that because trust me you'll get a lot of information from there tick any of those radio buttons at the last question of the form that question just didn't come through but I've just put a link into the presenter center like I said if you go to webinars.com.au that will have so much information for you guys on webinars so everything from presenting to marketing your webinar to previous webinars so if you want to go and have a look at some other webinars and how other people are presenting feel free to go on there and take a look and I just want to also let you guys know that we will be sending out a recording within 48 hours and that will contain a link to today's webinar as well as the PowerPoint slides some other links that we've spoken about today as well but also on that will be our direct details so if you have any questions at all regarding today Megan I will get back to you regarding facilitation after the webinar but any other questions or any other tips or anything that you felt wasn't really explained today please let us know otherwise enjoy the rest of your day I'm going to just finish up the last question that we have here from Shannon and thanks everyone for joining. Now Shannon so is it possible to vet questions in the chat box and I'll hand this over to Michael Well yeah there is a setting that you can put on so that people can tick a question icon so that it will show up so that it highlights that it is a question as a facilitator you will be reading through the questions and if you are trying to vet questions before they go to the facilitator I would privatize it so that people aren't seeing the questions come through we've made our chat box completely public so everyone can see everything that gets chatted in there really depends on your audience and everything but if you want to have it privatized so not everyone seeing it that's a way of moderating questions before they go through and then you can choose which ones to say alternatively there is a QA manager functionality which is an advanced feature of the platform that you can use to moderate questions but for the chat box that is key and I probably privatize it so people don't see and then as a facilitator you would choose which ones to read out Excellent thank you for that and hopefully that has and definitely Shannon with sensitive topics it does really help and what you can also do as a facilitator Shannon I might add I can actually go in here and I can actually highlight tech so I've just highlighted your question as yellow so then Michael will be able to see that that's yellow and maybe that's of high importance for him and that's the way that we can communicate without having to communicate verbally so definitely something I would recommend is hop in the platform, attend in a training session with one of our trainers which happen on a weekly basis and then also they can show you some other tips and tricks that you might also not know about and Ruth so what level of analysis do you have on the feedback so I think are you just referring to the survey that's up now or any sort of reporting that you can get from the system we'll just talk about all of it actually because I think that is a good question we'll do a survey here on the right hand side you can create whatever questions you like in their Ruth and you create that pre-event because you don't want to be creating that on the fly but you can have up to six questions you can have radio buttons, you can have dropdowns, you can have open ended questions whatever you like or you need to do I can send you a link if you like to step by step how to create in the platform it's very very simple and then all you need to do is activate it but other reports that you can pull Michael yeah so the other reports are any functionality that you use during the day you get absolutely all those reports afterwards and they can be downloaded from the administration portal that we have if you do a managed service where you have a facilitator and someone they'll actually package up all the reporting for you which is a different thing but what it is is that anyone that's answered any poll questions done the survey anything it all gets downloaded as a CSV file and it's really easy to read it's really comprehensive it gives you a breakdown of all of it and it's really quite a valuable tool as Sarah said on the surveys and polls you can have multiple within the room and each one of them is broken down individually for the reporting so you don't just have to have one survey we have a couple clients that do it quite interesting well they'll have a survey at the very beginning surveying people on their level of knowledge going into the topic and then they'll do the same coming out of it so then they can compare both of them at the end which is quite nice and then as I said before it's all downloadable from the administration site if you're using it from our platform. And Ruth just in terms of analyzing the survey feedback there's a reports portal which you can go to and export all of this information but in terms of how we analyze our data personally so we obviously provide it to people afterwards but then every quarter we go through so we even go through our registration pages and we say okay we had 1000 people look at this registration page and only 200 people registered what can we do to fix that we also then go through the survey feedback that we're actually all the data that we've exported and then we talked we obviously give it to our presenters in raw format so they can do whatever they like with it but what we also do is we go through and we as you can see here we've got a rating scale so we've got excellent very good good fair pour and what we actually do we compare that to other webinars over time as well so we can then see you know is the quality of our webinars increasing or is it decreasing and I think the best information for us is that qualitative feedback that we receive so that question number three there receiving that information and doing things with that information is really important to us what we will be doing in 2015 as an organization is creating benchmarking so obviously we run hundreds and hundreds of webinars on a monthly basis we'll be analyzing all this data and then providing it to you all in a report so as a customer you can then say yes it can be exported to CSV you can then say okay my webinars will run on this date this date this day and my feedback was excellent and I'm in this industry as a benchmark how does this relate to everyone else in my industry so there's so far to go in the webinar world and we're only getting started which is really exciting but I think you know just getting involved in these little things and you know being willing to analyze your data and improve on what you're currently doing is the first step so yeah any sort of other ways that we can provide you with some more intelligence or any other things that you think as a customer this is what I would like to know this is how I think I could improve my webinars let us know and we will create it somehow trust me well I won't personally I'll get the tech guys to do it but that brings us to the end guys thank you for staying on for so long it's been a great session we've had a lot of fun and yeah feel free to give us a shout if you need anything else after the event we'll close down the webinar for now thanks guys thank you