In online communication industry, there are some certain rules you must follow - at least when it comes to the business sector. If you have a lot of attendees in one room, it’s hard to keep everyone engaged which makes it difficult to collaborate in the most effective way.
Most people have experienced some sort of online meeting failure in the past. Your team's dynamic and productivity are affected by some of these issues, including awkward silences and dodgy technology. You can avoid them by following our advice.
Do you remember the last time something or someone at an online meeting failed? There are a lot of examples online of kids walking in while their parents are on live TV, inappropriate pictures in the background, and times when audio wasn't muted when it should have been. Online failures actually sometimes make meetings unproductive and negatively affect team morale, client relationships, and productivity. So how to stop them?
In this article, we will show you some examples of online marketing mistakes and meeting failures and provide you with tips on how to avoid the most common mistakes. Ready?!
#1 Not promoting your event
If you’re not using existing resources in an appropriate way, you may be sure about poor attendance. Promoting events through social media? Remember that a single post is not enough to gain a list of registrants. Unless you don’t have any community engaged into your social media sites or you haven’t spent a penny on promotion – don’t expect crowds to join your event. You have to interest potential customers, get their attention, and be noticeable and without proper promotion, this won’t work out. Run a campaign on your social media channels before the event. Try to reach potential attendees in groups, comment sections, forums, and other places that gather people.
#2 Not preparing equipment and space
An online meeting can be adversely affected by tech failures in surprising ways. The meeting is important, so if your wifi connection is patchy and your connection speed is under 20 Mbps, you may experience problems. If you prefer, you can use an Ethernet cable for a hardwired connection. So, do you want to build a professional image? In the first place, you should care about high quality Internet connection – bandwidth is the most important thing when it comes to audio video meetings. Secondly, test your connection and check your camera and microphone before the meeting. Don’t use cameras with low resolution, if you can buy an external one. Another effective way to make a good impression is setting the right amount of lighting and choosing a quiet place free from distractions.
#3 Not knowing your audience
Ignoring your audience is a serious and common mistake. One of the biggest fails during online meetings is not knowing your interlocutors. Remember that no matter what are you hosting, a meeting or webinar, your audience should be engaged. Try as much as you can to make attendees actively participating. Run polls, surveys, use the whiteboard to present your ideas, share documents, photos, and charts. This will minimalize the chance that your audience will get bored with your presentation.
Bottom line: Be sure to get to know the customers, your audience, who will be attending the meeting. This will help you run the webinar more efficiently as you involve the community to talk, to ask questions, and to follow-up. The audience will feel appreciated and glad to have found your webinar. Therefore, you can be sure that some of them will also sign up for the next meetings with you!
#4 Relying only on PowerPoint
Why only PowerPoint? There are so many other, different ways to create your presentation. Yes, PowerPoint is an excellent option, but maybe you want to find something less obvious and more attractive? Do the research and find what will interest your audience, and at the same time, will be looking exciting. In that way, your audience won't get bored.
What's more, be careful with showing presentations. If you already have one prepared, make sure it doesn’t contain too much content. One of the most common fails in during online meeting are presentations overloaded with content. There are a couple of crucial rules when comes to giving a presentation: don’t use small fonts or poor quality photos, don’t speak monotonously, and don’t be afraid of making pauses. Think about slides as triggers activating your core message. Remember about the 10-20-30 rule (no more than 10 slides lasting no more than 20 minutes with the font size no less than 30 px) and include some stories into your presentation if its possible. Keep in mind that people are naturally programmed to respond to them, so think about your presentation as a story as told.
#5 Not having a (backup) plan
What are you going to do in a critical situation? Let’s say your microphone won’t pick up your voice and the meeting platform crashes. In that case, you should have a plan for the entire group of participants. Switch to different software and have an “in-case” hardware. Your backup plan should include the most probable accidents depending on the situation, environment, etc.
We hope that following these simple tips will help you avoid failures and make your meetings more productive (and mistake-free). Share your stories about other problems you had to deal with during your online meetings! Write to us on our facebook page or send us a message here.
In fact, once you know how to facilitate meetings, most of today's online meeting technology becomes user-friendly. The point is, before proceeding to the webinar, you need to know what to do if something goes wrong.
Even before Covid-19, people had trouble running meetings because problems were forever and often arise when you least expected it. The webinar challenges only increased with the move away from face-to-face meetings. To make matters worse, online meeting leaders struggle with many of the new features that they only learn in an online appointment. Why so late? Because they assume it's easy? Or do they forget about it? Either way, you can avoid this by following our advice!