If you’ve ever attended presentation skills training, you may be familiar with the research findings that show that audiences receive the most meaning from your presentation from visual cues such as body language (55%), followed by your voice (38%) and finally from the verbal message (7%).
Let’s assume you are not using a web cam in your web conference। How do you communicate your message and content with impact when your audience cannot see you? The trainer or presenter is left with his/her voice and content to keep participants engaged and interested. I’ll focus on voice in this posting.
The speaker(s) during a web conference should focus on a variety of volume, pitch and rhythm in their voice. Presentations skills trainers often suggest that you think about how you use your voice when you read a story to your children or other kids. Clarity and focus are also of utmost importance. Finally, to keep the speaker’s voice animated, he or she should stand up during the web conference, smile and gesture while speaking. Even though the participants can’t see this body language, they will hear it in the speaker’s voice.





One of my favorite courses I helped redesign for delivery in a web-conference is a workflow productivity course. During this highly interactive five-hour session, participants learn a new way of organizing to-do lists, emails and paper files. Although all participants are supposed to participate from their desk, in the most recent delivery a small group participated with laptops from a conference room. This was an unplanned twist in the delivery model, but an exception was allowed because we didn’t have time to move the group back to their desks.


I am at the
In two webinars over the last two weeks I heard the main speaker asking the technical person/producer of the event which slide was showing on the screen because the main speaker couldn’t tell what he was seeing versus what his audience was seeing. This situtation is easily remedied by having the lead speaker log into a second computer as a participant. By having two computers side by side, the speaker can always see the presenter view and the participant view simultaneously.
I recently came across a humorous posting on the
We’ve all heard the saying that you only get one chance to make a first impression. This seemed liked an appropriate topic my first blog entry on web conferencing. I have a passion for web conferencing and how to design and deliver first-rate sessions. Karla Gutierrez from Shift elearning recently posted an article about the