Engaging the audience over video

During the lockdown Sales, education and meetings moved online. How can we get better at engaging the audience over video? Do you hate selling your ideas through video calls? All of us now run meetings, give presentations and even sell ideas through video-conferences. People simply take whatever they would have done in person and present it through the camera. Teachers across the world are offering their classes online. That experience of learning online through videos is so bad that several students plan to defer their admission to next year when they can attend classes in person. 

The standards have gone up

During the lockdown people consumed dozens of movies and that has raised their expectation of what engaging video looks like. Listening for hours to someone boring is terrible. The audience keeps nodding dutifully while completing the movie on their phone. The rules of engagement change quite sharply when you think about communicating over a video. Persuasion refers to the amount of effort needed to shift another person’s opinion attitude or behavior. That is quite a tall task. Who needs to do better at this? Everyone from the parent trying to persuade their toddler, getting the teenager to change their mind or the employee trying to change the mind of a colleague. Everyone is constantly having to persuade and influence someone about some issue.

Rule 1: Make it relevant

Until your audience believes that what you are saying matters, they won’t pay attention. The most damning feedback coming from an indifferent audience is that the speaker’s message is not “practical”. That translates to a simple, “I did not find it relevant to whatever matters to me.” If you do not go past the first barrier ie making the content relevant and getting the audience to sit up, everything else is a waste of time. Here are a few ideas that can help:

1. If something is happening in the neighbourhood, the audience is interested to know more. Neighborhood could refer to the office, the team, the person’s home and any place the audience cares about.
2. Change is stressful and usually makes the audience set up stop but if the change that you are talking about is too far away into the future, then it’s easier to hold the audience interest. Immediate challenges get immediate attention.
3. Starting the presentation for the webinar with a question gets people’s attention.
4. Using opinion polls and questions at the end of each section or idea, get people to pay more attention.
5. Getting people curious to know more about the topic is a very powerful way to get them to learn something on their own. Any Google search that a person does, is an indication of an immediate query that they are seeking to resolve. 

https://youtu.be/o3K_HbpWNpgThe nature of search done on Google has changed during the pandemic.  It is always on and people are getting more concerned about things being available close by. That results in a number of queries beginning with the phrase, “near me”. Eg “Pharmacy near me”. People are using the lockdown to build their skills. There is a spike in the number of queries on how to learn something easily.

Rule No 2: Is it interesting?

Looking for a query on Google is a rational process. If you are looking for a pharmacy, showing search results that are relevant matter. Once you have a set of relevant search results, we tend to apply another criteria-is it interesting? We do that by thinking about the search results in terms of the emotions they generate. When a particular search result has got millions of views, it builds trust and we decide to engage with the content. A stand-up comedian may narrate an incident that you too have gone through (that makes it relevant) but does it in a manner which is fascinating. That holds our attention. Quite often the skill of the speaker lies in making the ordinary seem magical.The next time you go on camera for running a webinar or a video conference, it would help to first filter your content to make it relevant by using the five tips listed above. Then comes the tough bit about delivering the content in a manner that is interesting.Every Monday, I send one email with sketchnotes of ideas that I found interesting. Because ... who has time to read everything?Free sign up at https://abhijitbhaduri.substack.com/=====Written for my blog on Times of India and Economic Times