- Virtual presenting is just ubiquitous now. Everyone is having to present virtually, whether you view yourself as a speaker or not. Now it's literally become a core skill for effectiveness in our new environment. 

Unfortunately, everyone doesn't know how to do it well. So it's so important to avoid these five critical mistakes. A horrendous virtual presentation can have long-lasting effects. You don't want to be that person. So just take a little bit of time to really step up your virtual presentation game. It is so worth it. 

Mistake number one is being stiff and robotic. Nobody wants that. I swear. There's something about that camera light coming on. It seems to just turn perfectly affable, funny, interesting people into complete zombies. And that's exactly what you don't want. 

There's so much competition for their attention that you've really got to be high energy to grab them, to pull them in. So one of the recommendations that I make is you really just want to exaggerate your gestures, your tone of voice. You want to be sure that you're smiling. 

And if you're not comfortable or as comfortable with those exaggerated gestures, do this. Record one version of your presentation as you normally would. Then go back and record a second version where you've really done everything on steroids. You're really exaggerating. 

This does a couple of things. One, you get to watch it back as the viewer. And then that gives you a sense of, oh, yeah, that really does make a difference. And then, two, it lets you look at your own gestures, et cetera, and see what you're comfortable with and what you're not. 

Now, maybe you go a little too far and some of it is a little crazy. You want to cut that out. But maybe you find some other things that really are very comfortable for you. But you absolutely do not want to be stiff and robotic. That's absolutely how you're going to lose people. 

Another other hard one, believe it or not, is something as simple as eye contact. And one of the reasons why it's hard is that it goes against what we've been taught. Most of us who are professional speakers, we go into a room, and we start scanning the room and looking around and making eye contact with people at different points in the room. And you can't do that virtually. You don't want to look anywhere except right there in the camera, because you want to give each person the view that you're looking directly at them. 

So little tip, something that I do-- I'll pull this off right now-- is I have a little smiley face. And I have it taped right next to my camera. It might seem like a tiny thing, but it really is distracting. And the last thing that you want to do is detract from your own presentation. So be sure you're giving them really good eye contact. 

My motto in terms of timing is you want to keep it short and sweet and keep it moving. Remember, everything is going on in the background. They've got email. They've got kids over here. They've got lots of distractions. So you really want to make your point, make a big important point, and keep going. 

This is not the time for the five-minute story. It's not the time for the seven-minute review of a really dense, complicated slide. That's how you're going to lose people. So make it short and brief. 

Now, with that, stories are great because we want to bring it to life. So we want stories. We want examples, anecdotes, case studies. But just give them the shorter version of the story. 

And one of the things I think that people really like is authenticity. I would encourage you not to feel like you have to give the perfect presentation. But having said that, to me, the best way to prepare is to do an actual dry run, not sitting there clicking through your slides, saying, OK, I'm going to say this, this, this. I know everything. I'm ready. No. You want to rope in your kids, your spouse, your friends. Actually set up a real dry run, a practice session, because that's the only way you're going to catch all the little nooks and crannies of things that can go wrong. 

You want to not just focus on the content and the delivery, but you want to make sure you're really comfortable with the technology. Are you comfortable starting the poll? And then after you start the poll, there's that crazy silence. Oh, I didn't plan on that. What am I going to say during the silence? Those are all of the things you want to practice so that you really are comfortable. And you may not be perfect. But you will hopefully hit a home run. 

Well, one huge mistake is lecturing. And believe it or not, if you've got a deck of 20 slides and you're just going through the slides, you really are lecturing. That's not going to excite anyone. That's not necessarily going to make them want to bring you back. So you've got to do a lot more than that. 

So think of ways to really rev up your audience engagement. If you're not as comfortable with that, there's tons of technology out there that can help you. There's Slido. There's Mentimeter, Poll Everywhere. So think about using those. 

But what you want to try to do is de-emphasize you and your slides, but really focus on them. What is it they care about? What are their questions? What are their use cases? Think about, what are some real live audience engagement activities that I can curate that can bring them into the conversation and make this much more interactive? 

Maybe there's a poll with discussion at the beginning. And then 10 minutes in, I break them out into groups. And they're talking about a particular case study. And then later on, there's one more activity. And then at the end, I do a competition to bring it all together. 

So those are my four goal posts that are really the skeleton of my presentation. And then I just sprinkle in a couple slides around those four goal posts. It's a completely different design. But what it does is it moves you away from this robotic, stiff lecture-focused, I'm just going through my slides, moving you away from this paradigm of a real virtual presentation, being reading slides over video chat, which it's not. It's so much more. 

And it creates an audience-focused event. And that's really what you want. You want to create an experience. And if you stay away from these five mistakes, you just might create an unforgettable one. 

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