Last
week I fired up a replay of a webinar I was unable to attend live. Fortunately for the presenter I needed to complete the webinar to qualify for professional certification units. Otherwise, I might have bailed early. Let’s see why.
The pitch got off to a nice enough start with a slide with four graphic boxes on it and a bit of verbiage. It served as a nice visual reinforcement for the speaker’s points. Unfortunately, she stayed on this slide a full eight minutes, about six minutes after I was dying to see something different.
Let’s skip slide 2 for a moment since I always like to save the worst for last when making a point. Slide 3 had four ideas, again framed nicely from a graphical point of view and each idea would have merited its own slide to keep things moving but the presenter stayed on this slide for six minutes.
Slide 4 presented us with 24 line items which the presenter took nine minutes to cover. So at this point we’ve seen only four slides in 37 minutes. At this point her creativity finally fired up and we spent the remaining 26 minutes of the webinar looking at 13 more slides. So the presenter left us somewhat relieved at the better pace but that is only if we could forgive her for slide 2.
If you kept track, I said that she spent the first 37 minutes on four slides and you’ll notice that the slide duration for slides 1, 3 and 4 did not add up to 37. That is because she spent 14 minutes talking to the infamous slide 2. You might assume that the slide must have been loaded with information for her to spend 14 minutes on it.
Her intention was to list ten things that a member of a particular profession might be guilty of. The approach was meant to be humorous. As she started to speak to the slide, I assumed that she would reveal each “guilt factor” next to its corresponding number as she spoke. On the contrary, the slide never changed. For 14 minutes we sat there staring at an essentially blank slide.
Giving her the benefit of the doubt, perhaps this was a “slide build” that worked live but for some reason did not get recorded properly for replay. I seriously doubt that is the case but one has to find some way to excuse her for this disaster.
Of course, there really is no excuse. If the slide looked that way during the live event then it was a huge blunder. If the slide worked live, she should have watched the replay herself to ensure it properly represented what transpired live and then posted it. To add insult to injury, we all paid to access this webinar replay!
The presenter was very knowledgeable but please know this: unless you are the most compelling speaker on the planet, you cannot sustain interest as you talk for 6, 8, 9 or 14 minutes on a single slide. You will lose your audience. Again, had I not needed to complete this webinar, she would have lost me halfway through slide 2, which is a terrible shame because the presentation improved in the later slides.
Don’t let this happen to you! Keep your presentation moving, make sure your “slide builds” work and watch your webinar replay before you post it for consumption. Sadly, as the coroner on this webinar, I must charge the presenter with webinar murder in the first degree.
Posted by Matt Bovell on The Webinar Wire