There’s no question that most of today’s webcasts lack the visual impact of having the presenter “connect” with the audience. For me, while I love the experience of presenting live and virtually, presenting live is an order of magnitude easier than presenting virtually. They are as different experientially as from watching a play, movie or TV show as listening to the radio.
In a traditonal webcast, both the presenter and audience are at a disadvantage. Without being able to visualize critical non verbal cues such as eye contact, facial expressions and overall body posture make the use of ones voice even more critical to engage with the audience. So does creating slides with more visual content and white space help keep the audience to stay tuned in. I want to motivate them to determine if what I’m saying is of value to them, and is so, be open to taking some next steps. The last thing I want is for them to be bored by reading rows of bulleted text on each slide.
So when you add in the costs of the additional capabilities and technical expertise to produce and add a video compoenent, not to mention the logistics and overall project management, it can be both daunting financially and cost wise. For this reason, I think in the B2B world, and for non training webinars that need to be delivered in under an hour, the two dimensional use of today’s webcasts using slides and audio, will be around until the cost curve and time commitments to using video come down and the production quality improves for presenters, regardless of their physical location for using a webcam or some other video/audio solution.
I look forward to hearing what others have to say too.
Mike Agron
Co-Principal WebAttract