Everything we learned from running over 100 weekly webinars

Let's Unmute The Audience🎙️. Down with boring, one-way presentations 😡

Hi there!

In this newsletter:

• TODAY: The new way to present on Zoom and Teams (that actually excites people)

• Learn: What we’ve learned from running over 100 webinars

The new way to present on Zoom and Teams

We’ve all sat through slide decks that feel more like sleep aids than live presentations. But what if your PowerPoint could do more than just present? What if it could listen, respond, and involve your audience, without breaking your flow?

• Present on Zoom? Register here

• Present on Teams? Register here

We’ll explore how to turn static presentations into real-time, two-way conversations. Whether you’re leading a webinar, a client pitch, or an internal meeting, discover how to bring your audience into the story and keep them engaged from the very first slide.

​​💡 What You’ll Learn

​​🔹 How to make your slides interactive, without changing your workflow
🔹 Ways to involve your audience live, even with cameras off
🔹 Techniques to boost engagement inside your deck (not outside it)
🔹 How to turn passive viewers into active participants in real time

It’s happening TODAY and Thursday

🗓️21st October (Zoom) & 23rd October (Teams)
⌚11am EST | 3pm GMT | 8:30pm IST
🌍On Zoom! (Yes, presentations on Zoom can be fun!)

Can’t make it? Register now and we’ll send you the recording

What we’ve learned from running over 100 webinars

I was looking at our Luma calendar the other day and realized that in the last three years we’ve run 115 webinars to over 3,500 people.

Here’s what we’ve learned from all those webinars.

1/ Technical problems happen, roll with them

The more often you do virtual presentations the more likely you are to encounter technical problems that you hadn’t even thought of.

If something goes wrong it’s better to acknowledge that something has gone wrong. If you can, move on to the next item on the agenda and let people know that you’ll come back to whatever it is that has gone wrong.

Yesterday there was a huge outage at an Amazon datacenter and various websites and apps were all down.

We were giving a demo to potential clients and StreamAlive wouldn’t work because, as we later found out, our app relied on the Amazon datacenter that had an outage.

Normally that would throw off the demo, but in this case we rolled with it, switched to a PPT presentation and promised to show the live demo at another time.

2/ Most problems are forgivable, but not this one

Everyone in your webinar is super-accommodating when it comes to technical problems. The clients we spoke to yesterday even joked that maybe the Amazon datacenter outage had affected StreamAlive - and they were right!

However, there is one technical problem which is unforgivable and will cause people to leave early.

Your microphone.

If your microphone makes you sound like you’re talking into a tin can then don’t be surprised when your audience drops off early!

You can have the crispest HD camera, a beautiful setup, a flawless presentation, but if your microphone is picking up background noise, or is on the cusp of human hearing, or makes you sound like Darth Vader, you’ve lost your audience.

Invest in a good, external microphone with noise-cancelling abilities. Your audience will thank you. So will your marketing team!

3/ Stand up

Not quite what I look like when presenting, but I just wanted an excuse to include a picture of some meerkats!

This is the most common tip for virtual presenters but trust us, it makes all the difference. The energy and movement you can bring from standing up is the difference between people staying on in your webinars and dropping off early.

It’s second only to having a good microphone.

4/ Prep time can be reduced significantly

When we started our webinars three years ago our prep-time started 30 minutes before the call with multiple technical checks, can you see my screen checks, am I audible checks, and so on.

Now we fire up Zoom about two minutes before we’re due to start because all those technical checks are muscle memory and we present so often that we’ve built confidence and trust in our tools to deliver.

5/ Learn tools like Ecamm and OBS

When you (the presenter) turns up to a webinar looking like you’re joining the weekly marketing meeting, then the audience is going to treat it like another meeting.

Creating broadcast-quality scenes like this in your webinar isn’t that difficult in OBS or Ecamm. Martin and Neil have lots of video tutorials on YouTube showing you how to do it.

Tools like Ecamm and OBS help turn your video feed into something much more visually engaging and signals to your audience that:

a) You have invested time and effort into making this webinar a better experience

b) You are a professional presenter who (potentially) knows what you are doing, and by extension, what you are talking about.

Said Saddouk uses OBS to create a visually immersive experience, laying StreamAlive interactions on the background behind him

Want to see how we do our webinars now?

We have two upcoming sessions showing you how presenting on Zoom and Teams can be fun.

• Present on Zoom? Register here (happening today)

• Present on Teams? Register here (happening on Thursday)

Catch us on our social pages

If you haven’t already, check out our social media pages to stay updated on our quirky takes on the latest social media trends and the occasional piece of engagement-related advice.

All the best,

Peter and the StreamAlive team
100% human-written with ❤️