Imagine your audience in their underwear. Look slightly above the heads of the people in front of you. Find a friendly face to focus on… None of the classic tips on how to deal with glossophobia are of any help when your audience is invisible. But your audience is still there, and they are seeing you, and listen to your every word. Or, even if you embrace the fear of public speaking. Smiling back? Making eye contact? Connecting with the audience? It is all really hard when you are presenting remotely, through a live stream or otherwise.
“Can everyone mute their microphones, please?”
*Painfully loud echo* “Sorry, go ahead” *Dog barking* *Child screaming* …and this is just the tip of the ‘Conference Call Bingo‘-sheet. It likely won’t take you long before you got yourself a ‘bingo!’—but at what cost? In an attempt to mitigate the classic video conference risks, I did an experiment with hosting a Google Hangouts Livestream instead. I created a ‘view-only’ event and invited my colleagues from across our studios to tune in. Which worked great as such, and made the above bingo-sheet obsolete. Simultaneously, I asked two of my colleagues to join me in the regular Hangouts call to 1) verify that my A/V was working, and 2) to join me for a panel reflection at the end of the presentation. But between those two moments, it was just me, sitting in an empty room, in front of a screen, trying to verbally address the tiny camera hole in my screen.
The loneliness of livestream presentations
Both for the presenter and the online audience, remote presentations can make you feel very isolated and lonely. More so if you do it through a live stream where it is ‘send-only‘ for the presenter and ‘view-only‘ for the audience. No chat or comments, nor hearts or likes. Nothing but a constant stream of awkward silence. On top of that, experience has shown that when audience members feel like they can ‘hide’, they will be less engaged, paying less attention and be less likely to interact with the presenter. So, what’s the solution then? Regular Hangouts can create a lot of distraction and pushes the limits of internet connectivity*. Livestream Hangouts seems more stable and controlled but feels like talking to yourself.
*We actually ran an 85-people regular Google Hangouts video conference after writing this, and from the post-session evaluation, it appears that the connection was perfectly fine (for most). Yet, it requires some technical-juggling to see simultaneously: the presentation, your speaker notes, and the live audience—and even then, you’re limited to only seeing the last 3 people who spoke out.
Preliminary conclusions
It seems obvious that remote video conferencing tools like Google Hangouts, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and the like are meant to take the physical meeting room online. It allows for several participants to see each other and discuss a meeting agenda fairly similar to an offline meeting would—Tele-conferencing. But it’s not simply a virtual meeting that we’re after here. Giving a presentation is something different. Even with the functionality to share slides, it doesn’t live up to the width and depth of speaker-audience interaction you would have irl. Just like watching a webinar is just not the same as seeing the same speaker on a stage. Can we do better? Probably! Let’s keep on experimenting with different solutions and set-ups.
Are there any benefits from presenting remotely? Yes. The obvious one is that you can reach a larger audience across any location. Additionally, allowing the audience to reflect individually, send in questions in silence*, and up- or down vote questions from others enables you to focus on answering those questions that matter to the majority of your audience. Unlike a regular presentation session, where anyone can raise their hand to claim time for an issue that may be less relevant to everyone else.
*Using Google Slides ‘Audience Tools’ for collecting and managing audience input.
Other lessons learned from the Google Hangouts Livestream experiment
The quality of the stream seems pretty good. However, the use of the virtual laser pointer and animations in slides don’t really work because of the low frame rate. So you have to keep the pace (slides/minute) at a reasonable speed so as not to lose your audience.
You can use a built-in feature of Google Slides called ‘Audience Tools‘ which allows the audience to ask questions and up-/downvote other viewers’ questions while giving the presenter the possibility to select the questions to present on the screen. One downside here is that the generated URL to join the Q&A was quite long. A solution could be to generate the URL ahead of the remote presentation and create a bit.ly link or QR-code that you display on your slide as well. The other downside was that there is only one single list of all incoming questions/comments, regardless of how many audience interaction moments you have planned for your presentation. This creates a bit of a mess after 2 or 3 rounds of audience interaction.
There is also a plugin for your Google Slides deck you could try to allow for more than just questions, called Google Audience Connect. Although it is made more for video marketing purposes (think youtube ads), it does have functions that allow you to ask the audience multiple-choice questions, or select a value between 0 and 100. It’s nice because it integrates with your slide deck but still limited when it comes to connecting to your audience. Specific tools, such as Mentimeter might still be the best solution, but you will need to alternate between your slide deck and your Menti deck.
Not only is the actual audience invisible, but also the amount of people who joined the live stream is only a guess, as there is no indication of that whatsoever, weirdly enough. In my experiment, I had a little over 40 people who accepted the invite, but without knowing if any of them were there, I had to rely on Slack messages to get some kind of positive feedback.
