Different Types of Webinar Presentations by Gihan Perera

If you're a presenter who wants to deliver your material by webinar, the secret is to forget you're doing a webinar, and structure it just like any other program. There's nothing magical about the webinar format. It's just another medium for delivering your presentation. You prepare the content just the way you would any other presentation, and you deliver it in (broadly) the same way.

Let's look at some of these options.

Keynote presentation

If you give keynote presentations, design your webinar as a keynote-style presentation, with the aim of changing their attitudes or shifting their beliefs. It will probably run for 45-60 minutes, with you doing most of the talking, and perhaps a brief Q&A session towards the end.

Be careful with trying to adapt a keynote presentation to the webinar format. Webinar audiences expect high content. Some keynote presentations are very light on content, which can be acceptable in a conference room. But on a webinar, your audience can't see you, can't see each other, won't speak up as readily, and won't do interactive exercises unless there's a very clear point to them. In general, you can't rely on the energy and "showiness" of a face-to-face presentation.

Training session

If you're a trainer, your job is much easier. The webinar format is ideally suited for transferring skills and knowledge through education and instruction, provided the teaching doesn't depend on the participants actually being in the same room.

If you offer your webinar as a training session, you'll be teaching them skills. It might be about an hour long, with a handout they download in advance, and exercises they complete during the session. You'll still do most of the talking, but you might have more than one opportunity for them to ask you questions, and you'll allow more time for questions.

Broadly speaking, you take the material you typically deliver in a face-to-face training session and adapt it for delivering by webinar. You can still use slides, handouts, workbooks, asking questions, asking for a show of hands, and even initiate group discussion.

Training course

The next logical step is to present a multi-stage training course. If you can do one webinar well, it's only a small step to present material as a series of webinars. Rather than a one-off event, you present the training in smaller chunks, perhaps with "homework" between each session.

Even if you're not doing training this way in your face-to-face presentations, consider how you could do that using webinars. Webinars lend themselves well to this sequence, because they have such a low overhead. Some of your material might be better delivered as a course, but it might have been too difficult to run a face-to-face event each time.

Interview experts

Webinars allow you to bring in other experts for your audience. Although you can do this in face-to-face presentations as well, that is rare - perhaps because presenters think they themselves need to be the only expert in the room, and their credibility would be diminished if somebody else was also delivering material! For some reason, interviewing experts by webinar doesn't have the same stigma. In fact, if some people attend your webinars regularly, they will appreciate hearing from your guest presenters as well.

If your guest is already a skilled presenter, they can simply treat the webinar just like any other training webinar. However, you might also have the situation where your guest is an expert, but not a skilled presenter. In that case, you don't want to force them to make a presentation. Instead, run it as a one-to-one interview, with the audience silently "eavesdropping" on your conversation.

Panel Interview

The next logical step is to interview a panel of experts. If you have experience in this area already, again a webinar is an effective medium for conducting your interviews.

Even with a panel of experts, you can add visuals to enhance the experience for the audience. Of course, the larger the panel the more difficult it is to manage this, so plan it carefully. For example, you might decide only you show visuals - a particular Web page or document, for example - and then call on the panel to comment on it.

Facilitation

If you're a facilitator rather than a trainer, you can still use a webinar to host your presentation. The key difference here is it's your job to create the right environment for discussion among the participants, rather than being the expert with the presentation. So you set the scene, and then open the webinar for the audience to do most of the talking (with your guidance, of course).

Coaching and mentoring

So far we've talked about webinars as being for group presentations. But there's no reason you can't use them for one-on-one presentations as well - in particular, coaching, mentoring or consulting. If you run a webinar as a coaching session, you'll be asking lots of questions and giving the client more time to answer them. So you might ask a question, and then give the client time to answer it.

If you're conducting mentoring sessions by webinar, you'll combine the training and coaching modes - that is, a mix of teaching and asking, with some time for you to speak and some time for them to interact with you and with each other.

Presenting remotely

Finally, one other use of webinar technology is for you to make a presentation remotely (in other words, when you're not physically present). The audience might be gathered in a room, but you make your presentation from elsewhere.

You might have seen this already in the form of videoconferencing, where a speaker is "beamed in" to a conference or meeting. That is still an option, of course, but it has some drawbacks: It can be expensive, it might require special equipment at both ends, it needs a fast Internet connection, and the audio and visuals don't always synchronize correctly.

Doing it by webinar is far easier, and often more effective. It doesn't require as much Internet bandwidth, it doesn't need any special equipment at your end, and you can show a slide presentation as well.


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