Today I was quite disappointed.  I sat through an hour-long Webinar put on by a high-profile training organization (I shall save them the embarrassment of naming them), and it was B*O*R*I*N*G.  Really boring?  Yes, really boring.  People who purport to work in the training industry ought to be on the cutting edge of producing quality Webinars.  Alas.

Oh, don’t get me wrong– they talked fast.  They also passed the controls back and forth among the two of them and told some interesting stories. But visually I couldn’t have been more bored, and content-wise, I had to DIG DEEP to acquire the few golden nuggets I took away (I believe there are ALWAYS golden nuggets one can find if one looks hard enough).

What could they have done different?  One thing could have made all the difference:  Make it more visually stimulating.  Putting up a slide that is text heavy with bullet points and letting it sit stagnant for three minutes while you cover all the points is NOT what I call visually engaging.  Sure, they had a small picture off to the side (that sometimes related to the majority of their points and sometimes not), but for the most part it was what I would call an amateur presentation.

Call me picky. Call me someone with high standards.  Just don’t identify me as someone who would put up such lame visuals during a Webinar.

Here’s an exercise you might try:  The next time you watch a movie or turn on the TV, turn down the sound for the first two minutes and count how many times there’s a cut to a different camera.  I’m not going to tell you the average number of cuts — I want you to say “WOW” to yourself when you discover this number for yourself.

Then I want to encourage you to think about the Webinars you’ve attended.  How many different screen shots or changes did they make in the entire hour?  (Hint: My guess is that there are more different camera angles in the first to minutes of any TV show than what’s in an average one-hour Webinar.

The truth?  Webinars do NOT have to be boring.  First, I encourage anyone who does Webinars to attend one of my Certified Trainer Workshops (either seat classes [April, July, or October, 2013] or self-paced).  Second, I encourage you to watch my latest Webinar on Training Do’s and Don’ts: Best Practices from 25 Years in the Training Room (free) to see how Webinars can be more visually engaging.

REPEAT: Webinars do NOT have to be boring.  And you can learn how to make your audiences go “WOW” in a GOOD way. 

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Filed in Technology, Training, Management, Train the Trainer, Human Resource Management