Make Your Webinars More Interactive

I remember attending a presentation that my friend and colleague Alicia Curtis made to a group of professional speakers at a National Speakers Association of Australia meeting. She was speaking about younger people in your audience - particularly Generation Y - and how to engage them in your message.

One point that particularly stuck with me was her comment that young people don't come to a training session for you to tell them stuff; they want to tell you stuff. Alicia wasn't saying they are arrogant know-it-alls. No, she was making the point that you have to involve them in their own learning, so they discover things for themselves rather than having it spoon-fed to them by the person at the front of the room. If you don't involve them, you don't engage them.

Alicia wasn't talking about webinars specifically, but I think her point applies equally to them. In fact, in webinars you have to do even more to involve people, because it's so easy for them to get distracted otherwise.

So what can you do?

First, when you're designing your webinar, ask yourself whether your audience could get exactly the same value by simply watching the recording. If the answer is "Yes", beware! The whole point of doing webinars is to create an interactive experience.

Here are some things you could do:

Poll the audience at various pointsStop for questions at various times (not just at the end)Stop for discussion at various timesAsk the audience to write something, and stop speaking to give them time to do itAsk a question, and invite the audienc to type their response to youShow a chat room (if your webinar technology allows it) or a Twitter back-channel (if it doesn't)Ask a couple of audience members in advance to prepare a short segment, and hand over the webinar to them to present itAsk another audience member to answer somebody's question (pick somebody who knows the answer, of course!)

The main point is to be creative about engaging the audience. At first, you might think this is more difficult than in a face-to-face presentation, because you have fewer opportunities to interact. But that's not necessarily the case. In fact, a webinar can be more interactive because audience members take responsibility to engage in an individual way, rather than as a group.

Of course, the good news is that if you do any interaction at all, you'll immediately be creating a better experience than most webinar presenters offer!

Gihan Perera is the author of "Webinar Smarts", the smart way for professional speakers, trainers, thought leaders and business owners to deliver engaging and profitable webinars. If you want to know how to reach the world with mic, screen and mouse, visit http://webinarsmarts.com/ for your copy.

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