Webinars are a great tactic for spreading your message and moving prospective clients further down your marketing funnel. They’re usually live, interactive, and dynamic. Most webinar attendees join in early and stay until the very end of the program. They’re engaged.

I’ve been leading a bunch of webinars lately, and I’ll pass along one of the lessons I’ve learned.

Transitioning from a Live Audience to a Virtual One

Speaking on a webinar is very different from speaking to a live audience.

Speaking on a webinar is much the same as teaching on a conference call line when the others are muted. The difference between a webinar and a conference call seminar (now commonly called a teleseminar) is the addition of visuals (usually created in PowerPoint or Keynote).

The key distinctions between these presentations and speaking to a live audience are the loss of your senses of sight and hearing with respect to the audience. You won’t be able to see or hear the audience.

It’s surprising how much of a difference losing these senses causes during the program.

When you’re speaking to a live audience, you can see how they’re responding to your comments. You get lots of visual cues.

• You can detect confusion and boredom.
• You can see them nodding and smiling when you’re making sense.
• You can tell whether they’re busily taking notes or whether they’re paying attention to their mobile phones.

You also get audible feedback.

• You can hear them laugh or groan.
• You can tell when they start whispering to others.
• You get a strong feel for their response by hearing the murmuring of the crowd.

You lose all that on a webinar.

The Effects of the Webinar Void

For me, talking into that void—with no feedback at all—feels a bit like falling into a black hole. I feel the emptiness swallowing me up as I go on and on.

My initial response was to keep talking and talking. I found myself speeding up in some misguided effort to fill the void. It felt like I was trying to fill the black hole with words. Maybe I thought I could fill it up with the words and stop myself from falling. I’m not sure what I thought, but I definitely wasn’t at my best. It was unpleasant.

When I listened to the recorded audio, I clearly sped up as I went along. By the end, I sounded like I had been inhaling helium. I was going about 100 miles per hour.
I needed to slow down. I needed to feel like I was talking to a real person. I needed some resistance to bump up against.

Don’t Let the Black Hole Swallow You

My solution? I had one of my team members sit in front of me and I talked to him. He made eye contact with me and nodded and snickered at appropriate moments. That slowed me down. It made me pause for him to react. It felt more like I was talking to a live audience.

When I listened to that recording, it was dramatically improved.

I repeated the use of a live person for about five webinars. Eventually, I found that I could just imagine a person without requiring someone to sit with me. I’m not sure I could have done it without having a live body in the room with me initially. It made a big difference.

I’ve talked to a number of speakers who have experienced the black hole. I’m not sure that it happens to everyone, but it definitely happened to me.

It’s a big transition when you switch from a live audience to the webinar. Be prepared by bringing a friend. Your friend can pull you right out of the void and keep you from being swallowed up by the black hole.