Yesterday I delivered the first of the 3 presentations on ASP.NET MVC I'll be delivering in less then a month.
It was also my first webcast ever and I'd like to share my impressions on the presenter experience and what an attendee can do to make life easier for the presenter, thus increasing the overall experience for everybody.
The biggest and probably the most obvious difference between a webcast and a in person presentation is that you (as presenter) don't have a visual feedback, you don't get to see the people that are attending the presentation: you cannot tune the tone of the presentation just by looking at people's faces. I tried to have some pauses between slide and sections of the presentations, but I didn't know if they were long enough, or too long.
The other problem is that, especially when it's not possible to mute the audio of attendees, you hear all the talking that is going on the other side of the wire, and this is distracting both for the presenter and for the other attendees.
I guess my presenter experience and the overall webcast would have been better if the attendees did the following points:
- if the audio cannot be muted from the server, mute your phone (most phones can be muted with dialing *6), your mic or, at least, when you have to talk about your own business with a co-worker do it away from the mic
- when the presenter asks questions, please answer them: vocal feedback is the only feedback available during a webcast
- use the "mood" selector: almost every webcast client has a way to notify the presenter about the attendee's perception. You can say everything is fine, or that you have a question, that the presenter is going too fast and so on
These 3 little things can improve the webcast experience for everybody, so, use them.
For sure, now that I delivered a webcast, I know how to behave when attending one.