Ready, Set, Plan For The Worst

Earlier this week I hosted a webcast featuring a great speaker – a well known  author, engaging presenter and communications coach.  We’d done events together in the past and knew each other’s style, had a great topic and a huge audience.  Of course Murphy struck with a vengeance. 

Our featured speaker was calling in from a hotel room – not uncommon at all.  His room had a broadband connection, his phone sounded great, but as we got underway the bandwidth to his notebook just went to hell in a hand basket.   Suddenly, as he advanced his slides, he couldn’t see the slide changes on his screen.  Thinking he wasn’t advancing the slides properly, he kept pushing the advance button till he was way out of sync with the slides everyone else was viewing.

Once we realized what was happening he passed control of the slides over to me and I gave him verbal cues as to what the audience was seeing and we continued to complete a great session with excellent audience participation.  All in all a successful event.  But for a few minutes it was clear that we were having some kind of trouble.

We didn’t find out exactly what happened until the post-webcast wrap up call, but once we did we discussed what we could do to ameliorate the problem should it crop up again during our next event together.

Here are some things to keep in mind when running your next webcast.

Your internet connection isn’t reliable.  Don’t expect you’ll have the bandwidth you need – or for that matter the connectivity you need at the time your event goes live.  Always have a hard copy of your presentation in front of you so you can keep presenting when your technology fails.

Have a “presentation buddy”.  If your slides have lots of builds and subtle transitions that are key to your presentation, ensure there’s somebody else on the call who can take over the job of advancing the slides for you.  This could be the event moderator, a colleague in another location or a dedicated event producer if there is one.  Do a complete dress rehearsal with those people so they will clearly understand your cues for advancing the slide or build.

Hide the extension phones.  There is a legendary story at Ziff-Davis eSeminars about a presenter whose visiting mother-in-law picked up an extension phone during a webcast and began to blindly dial and say “Hello?  Is this thing working?” when she heard unexpected voices on the line.  That particularly embarrassing event happened to me a few years ago.   While you’re at it turn off your iPhone, pager, Blackberry, PC speakers and anything else that will make noise you don’t want to share with a few hundred of your closest friends.

Check the equipment before you start.  If you’re in a hotel room or unfamiliar office ensure you can mute your phone for those times someone else is speaking or presenting.  And if you are doing a long event – some virtual trade shows I’ve participated in have run three hours or longer – work from a wired phone so you don’t run the battery down on your cordless handset or headset.  I’ve had presenters ‘disappear’ in the middle of an event when their phone died.

Have a drink.  If you’re speaking for a while you’ll get thirsty.  Have a tall glass of water handy when you start to wet your whistle when necessary.  And take a bio-break before you start, just in case.

Have you had an event melt down?  Let me know what other disasters we can help avert together.