How to Get Online Speaking Right, from Meetings to Classrooms to Job Interviews to Recordings: Part One, HELP Yourself

by Steven S. Vrooman

There's a an awful lot of working from home via video right now, and many of us are muddling through. But what should we aim for in terms of best practices? Here are some tips based on mistakes I am seeing people make or am hearing about in my network of colleagues and former students.

These tips apply to all forms of electronic speaking, from formal roles like presentations or job interviews or leading a meeting or lecturing to a class, to more informal ones like being in a meeting or class. Different mediated formats will affect this advice, and I have tried to clarify that when it is relevant for things like Zoom or Google Hangouts or Skype versus social media live versus recorded presentations.

I have been teaching online and studying online interactions since before video was possible, and I have done a fairly constant stream of live and recorded presentations to various professional groups and corporations over the years in addition to recorded media for my university and for classes. Plus TEDx. All that is to say that there are lots of opinions out there on this right now as people madly produce content while trapped in their houses with their cats. But I think my take is going to be valuable for you. These notes, by the way, will provide the backbone of a new chapter on electronic speaking in my forthcoming update to my public speaking textbook.

I will do this in two parts. This first part is focused on you. The second part will be focused on your tools (think visual aids).

Here's this post in video form, if you'd rather:

In my video presentation of this, I organized this based on the Beatles' 1965 hit, "HELP." It's a gimmick, sure. And we used to make fun of these, a bit, when I first started teaching public speaking in the 90s, when we assumed people could and would pay more attention and found this kind of thing insulting. We've done a lot more research on attention and processing since then, plus Buzzfeed happened, so, you know, especially in an electronic, frazzled environment, any aid to memory and attention will be good.

Photo by "Loco Steve," and that's not me, btw

And if there's an authentic connection, well that makes us forgive things that might otherwise have seemed cheesy. In this case, you can see a video performance by The Beatles of "HELP" where they nail all the tips I'm going to outline below. You can skip to the end of this piece to watch if you are impatient.

H. Honesty

I have seen it thousands of times while evaluating student speeches. The student gets lost in the outline or has a brain freeze and they just stand there, silent, awkward, staring at the outline. In some number of seconds they recover and start up again as if nothing had happened!

But, look, we all just sat there and saw that. We were uncomfortable with you, wondering if you'd make it or not. Just barreling on next is fundamentally dishonest. It violates our shared experience by asking us all to pretend it didn't happen. We all just clam up like the English gentry in a stuffy BBC production and move along, nothing to see here.

But that marks them as forever fragile, a person who we need to focus on as someone with an always-possible weakness.

If, instead, the student were to manage to do what I teach, which is to just honestly, and with some self-deprecation, reference what just happened like an adult, it would not only be just fine, but it would mark them as the opposite, as someone resilient in the face of difficult times.

This is even more true in live video speaking. You will probably edit it out if you are recording, but when we are live, this kind of thing happens a lot. If you can honestly note moments where you get lost in your notes or the interface or if your cat just bit you in the toe, it has an almost incalculably large effect on your credibility. You are committed to authenticity, even in difficult circumstances, and you are not offloading your difficulties onto the other people in the conversation, left to wonder if the video just lagged or what.

E. Eyes

I have had a small cottage industry of helping friends and alumni nail distance interviews for jobs. This is my number one tip.

Look at the camera.

You all now have enough experience with teleconferencing things by now to notice how offputting it is when people are not looking at the camera. If you are sitting in a long meeting or class, I get it. You can't always manage this.

But I'm not talking about audiences. I'm talking about talkers. Most of us have cameras on top off our phones or laptops and we look at the big bright screen underneath. We are never precisely looking at the people on the other side. We think we are. We are looking at their pictures in the little windows, but it is not the same. And you can tell. Try this out next time you are Facetiming a family member. Have them look at your face and then the camera, back and forth. You can tell, even though on their device it will seem a matter of inches.

You can see my cat is getting this advice better then me at just this moment!

Especially for a high stakes moment like an interview, if you can manage to increase the amount of time you look at faces by increasing the amount of time you are looking right at the camera, it will have a demonstrable impact on your effectiveness and all the intangible bits, like their judgments or your likability, empathy, passion, etc.

My protip for most software is to shrink the video window if you are doing this work on a computer. You are only looking at them to gauge their responses. If you find yourself looking at their dog pawing at the door or the design of their ceiling fan, you are doing too much wandering around in your attention to their video feed.

So shrink those windows from fullscreen and drag them up to right next to the camera. The last time I had to nail a Google Hangouts interview, I actually moved the window up so high it cut off their forehead. I had eyes as close to the camera as I could so it would feel, as much as possible, like I was looking right at them.

It mattered. The interview was a success.

L. Large-ness, Large-osity?, Large-itude?

Okay, this is normally "energy," but I made sacrifices to the acronym gimmick!

Having big energy has always been a central tip of mine for public speaking. You need a lot. However much you think is a lot, well, for most people, triple it and you almost have enough.

Energy is not the same as volume. So DO NOT do the "infomercial delivery." Ew. Instead, think of the energy that comes from your favorite YouTubers. There is a kind of generous, intense connection that draws you to them as they ask you to "like, subscribe and comment below!"

Be you, but larger. Authentic, but more the person you hoped you'd be today rather than the frazzled, exhausted person who might have actually showed up.

We have all been doing this remote work thing for a few weeks. And we are already tired of it, yes? So we owe each other more energy, more human connection is a world of social distancing and masks.

Don't social distance online, as well as in the "real" world.

P. Practice

Yes, of course we should practice our presentations and lectures and prep interview questions and meetings, even back in the "old days" of in-person things. And you should keep that up now.

But we have a bad habit of under-practicing the more technology we add, and since technology adds more opportunities for error, this is a recipe for disaster. 

Just think of the ubiquity of the slideument, to use Garr Reynolds' term. Most PowerPoints are horrible messes of dense nonsense, not because that is what makes for a good visual aid, but because we smash our own speaking outline, the in-the-moment visual aids PowerPoint should be, and the takeaway document we might want people to have afterwards, all into one thing. But those are three VERY different needs, and trying to make as kludgy a piece a software as a slidedeck maker do all that well is just a recipe for speakers reading words off their slides to bored audiences who will download them later and never look at them again. 

All of that mess also leads to under-practice. I can always turn around and read the slides, so why bother with a run-through?

Now we are here in the world of dystopia. And we are not practicing enough. I know we are busy, but we read your Facebook updates. You loudly celebrated your busyness before as if you were competing for a place ranking, and now we see you sharing every chain letter of ritualized boredom and Ina Garten's latest planet-sized cocktail, so how are we to think about that?

Here's the clearest lesson about practice: At the very least know your marks. Know where you can sit or stand and be fully in frame. Tape off the floor if you are mobile with a selfie stick or whatnot. Know what you can do and gesture, with head and shoulders or arms, and still be in frame.

Also, know what else is going to be in frame, eh?

HELP

When we were younger, so much younger than today, even though we kept reading listicles giving us #lifegoals  and #protips on Buzzfeed or Inc or, God forbid, Medium, we really felt, at heart, that we never needed anybody's help in any way.

But now those days are gone, and we're not so self assured.

So change your mind.

Get your feet back on the ground.

By the way, just in case you want to see all of this in action, look at the way John and company are able to manage all of the tasks I've noted in this piece in this recording, especially when the camera cuts to the front view.

 

Stay safe, everyone.