57. It’s Easy for People to Lose Interest Online

If you will be delivering your presentation online, then you have some additional challenging factors to deal with. The chapter “How People React to You” covers how people react to nonverbal communication. But many presentations these days take place online, often with only audio. This means that the participants don’t have any visual stimuli. In that environment, it’s easy for people to get distracted by things in their local environment—for example, email or an offline conversation.

If you are giving an online presentation, here are some things to consider:

• If possible, use video. At least people will be able to see your facial expressions.

• If you have only audio and no video, then you must rely on your voice to convey all of your nonverbal information.

• Keep the presentation time short. An hour and a half is about as long as you want to go. If there is more material than that, then you will need to break the material up into shorter, multiple sessions.

• Stop periodically and ask if there are questions or if everyone is OK. Since you can’t see your audience, you must ask for feedback as you go along.

• You will have to change the activities you plan. Although some teleconferencing and teleclassroom tools let you have “break-outs,” that may be challenging to do. Think through carefully what exercises and activities will work online. You need to either have short activities that people can do by themselves or assign longer activities between sessions.

• To grab and hold attention and keep interest, build in changes of topic, polls and quizzes, or discussion (if the group is small).

• People tend to arrive late for online presentations (they tend to not give themselves enough time for logging into the meeting and calling the phone number). Assume that most people aren’t online until 10 minutes in. This means that if you say anything really important in the first 10 minutes, you will have to find a way to subtly repeat it later.