Confidence is the new currency of PR. How can you instill confidence by hosting virtual events?

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Speak PR Podcast. This is the show to help business owners to maximize the value of public relations with tools, tips, and technologies that are, for the most part, free to use. My name is Jim James, and I've been an entrepreneur for over 25 years and running my own companies as well in Asia and in Europe. And I've been working on this podcast now for a few months, And I have to say that I've been feeling kind of more and more confident about it as I'm growing. And checking the stats today, I'm feeling pretty good because I've now got listeners in over 28 countries, 117 cities, all 6 continents. People have listened to this podcast and I have a combined 527 downloads. The reason that confidence is so important is that it is really what keeps us going. The confidence that I have now that this podcast has an audience is really part of why I want to keep going, because it shows the degree to which I feel that my actions will achieve positive results. Positive results in helping entrepreneurs and business owners to find out ways to unlock value within their company or their organization by using public relations tools and technologies that I've learned about over all these years. Now, I was listening this morning to a webinar with the people at the Progress Shed. We're, as East West PR, sponsors of the webinar program there, and they had an author called Michael Michalowicz, who's the author of The Toilet Roll Entrepreneur and 5 other books, and he's an acclaimed author, lives up in New Jersey, and he was saying this morning that of his 450-something clients, when he'd asked them what they need most of all at the moment, they said they wanted confidence. So I mentioned confidence about my own Speak PR podcast and the program I'm developing, because it's only if we believe in what we're doing that other people around us will also feel that sense of confidence. And there are coaches out there like Michael who are helping companies to develop that level of confidence. Now, I was talking as well with a client this morning that is working with Chinese students coming back to the UK, and in the, in the previous years working in the education sector, the talk has always been about degree and postgraduate degree levels of, of grades and success, sometimes a little bit about fee levels, but there's been a huge competition amongst universities around the world for the attention of international students. So the public relations in the past has been around the campus and has been around the teaching faculty and about the jobs that could be held afterwards. Now, in this new COVID era, it's interesting because the conversation really has turned Entirely to security, security of healthcare. So the students, when they come back, will need to be reassured, or frankly, they won't come back. But it's not just the students; it's the parents and it's the agents that are involved in helping students to travel internationally. So the the universities now and all. All establishments are really now focused on what I've termed the hygiene regime. What can companies and organizations do, including yours, to have a hygiene regime but also to communicate about that regime? Because this is really where the, the customers and the employees and the partners are going to feel confident about getting back and involved with the business. We have a term at East West we've coined called the COVID mindset, which is where we believe that all, all PR will need to be COVID, i.e., compassionate, optimistic, values-based, informative, and digital. And I've written articles and there's a full webinar video on my website eastwestpr.com where you can view that. When the students come back to the UK, to again to recommence term. Many of them will be taking online courses. So one of the byproducts of COVID for everybody around the world has been the growth of screen time. Screen time, as we know, for people like Netflix has been a real bonus, but for the rest of us, especially parents with young children like me, it's been a time of great anxiety because we know that we're in front of the screens late, But also our children are in front of the screens. So I was working this morning with my sister, Dr. Shelley James, who's actually a world-renowned expert on light, and she put together a webinar for concerned parents on the impact of light on children, talking really about issues around, for example, the flicker on screens, the the way that LED lights transmit light and the impact of the oscillation of the light for not just children but for all of us, and the impact of blue light and all of the different ways. In fact, she detailed 5 different ways that we as parents and as older people or just independent people can impact our environments. And of course, this also, you know, applies in workplaces, and she mentioned how patients in care responded nearly 3 times more quickly to their treatment when they were surrounded by good light sources. So she has the subject matter and is an expert on that, but where we went a little bit awry this morning was the technology. And it seems to be now that we have more and more people working, really creating their own events, and companies creating their own events, that technology both is an enabler and a potential disabler of our public relations campaigns. And the reason that it's important to master the technology is, of course, because if we're trying to create a sense of confidence and self-confidence, plus the ability to focus on what we're talking about, we must have some mastery over the platforms that we're using Here are some things that can and pretty much did go wrong today on our first session. We were much better on the second one. One is lighting. So we filmed to, uh, in a studio, uh, really a converted office, and we had some, some large stand-up display lights. And they're good for bouncing light onto, uh, the subject, but they also can potentially create glare on the screen on the back The second is around the sound. We had a problem really where we'd done a pre-check, but once she went on to Zoom, the microphone seemed to drop in and out. So we had an issue. I had a backup set of audio equipment with me, but did we interrupt the the conference or not in order to you know try and rectify? The answer is that we decided that we would stop and try and get the conference back online with good audio. But nonetheless, getting the audio prep in advance and having a backup is really important. The internet, of course, dropping in and out. We didn't have that problem today, but what we did have was people in the next unit, building unit, doing drilling and hammering. So we hadn't really been in control of our environment. So that's one thing that people mentioned was distracting. When people logged into the conference, there's now an option on Zoom to allow people to come in, but they have to all be on mute when they enter. But also, one of the little features is that they can ring a bell. It can automatically announce when they arrive. Now, we learned that as we went along, and we, we had to turn that off. And I recommend that you make sure you turn that off if you're the administrator. What we did find out though was that after the call had happened, uh, and we had finished the Zoom call, there was still the binging going on. And, and it turned out that my sister had left her telephone on and people have been sending her WhatsApp messages throughout the webinar, which is why we had constant pings, not just from the Zoom but from the phone. So making sure that everybody in the room, especially the speaker, has turned off their phone. Creating breakout rooms so that people can go in and out of the main area is a feature that websites like Zoom have got for bringing people into the conversation. So it's worth just asking yourself if you're going to hold an event online about the type of the program and the agenda, because I think now we've all moved on to Zoom almost as a default. And we've— we're quite possibly not thinking through the different kinds of meetings and the different kind of content that we need to prepare in order to maximize that time. Bear in mind now, we can only get something like 12 people per screen, and if you've got, like we had this morning, 40 people, there are some people who don't have video on, but there are many people who are not going to be seen at all. So just thinking about what result we're looking for And what feeling do we hope an attendee will come away from? In the same way with the trade show or a conference, we used to spend a lot of time planning the environment, the lighting, the signage, the display material, and so on. And another aspect is how interactive are we going to make it? Are we going to make it a presenter and everyone's quiet, which makes it not so, not so interactive? Or is it going to be interactive, in which case how are we going to do that? And I've mentioned some sites like Mentimeter, for example, which is good for actually holding polls as you go along. And Zoom now also has some embedded polling software. So making sure that it's interactive is really, really important. Now, another issue really is to make sure that you can prepare material in advance. So we talked today on the conference call with some 40 people about the material. People said, can I, can I get that? When can I get it? And what we hadn't done was to have the presentation already on, for example, SlideShare or Google Slides so that people could immediately get them. So we've created work for ourselves, but also we've not met an expectation. So being prepared and getting the materials online in advance makes a lot of sense. Now, another aspect that we could have done and we'll do next time is to pre-record material. Now, Saturday Night Live, for example, isn't all live at all. In fact, most TV shows, the hosts are live but the segments are not. And that's because when the stakes are high, it's very tough to record live. Talent doesn't turn up, or it, it's not prepared, or it doesn't speak properly. So in my days in, in broadcast at the BBC, we used to have the, the, the cart ready with pre-loaded material. And this is something that really Going forward, I shall look at doing much more. So another term for pre-recorded content is simulated live content. So what can we do, or what can you do if you are going to host an event, to reduce the risk of things going wrong, to reduce the need for multiple participants to be dialing in and having good online? So this morning, for example, I mentioned the Michael Merkowitz talk, for the first 15 minutes his internet wasn't working, and so people were losing interest and losing patience. It could have been pre-recorded because actually in the end he didn't take Q&A anyway because he had to leave. So it could have actually been pre-recorded, and then we could have had a discussion ourselves. So let's just look at if you're creating events and you want to create confidence around the event How do you do that? By creating the materials online in the same way that you would a trade show or a conference. You wouldn't expect to just turn up and build the booth on the day. You'd have everything ready. Now, I was listening to a talk and overheard about a product or a platform called crowdcast.io. So I've had a look at that briefly, and I'm going to sign up and have signed up for a demonstration, but Apparently in 2014, Sai Hossein was in Costa Rica, and while he was there, he met a whole bunch of innovators and changemakers. And I was interested because I went to Costa Rica myself back in 1990, and it's a beautiful country and one of actually the oldest democracy in America as well. So while he was there, he and a group of people banded together and decided to make a a platform for sharing integrated media. So this means conversations but also presentations, polls, discussions, breakout rooms. In other words, a sort of fully furnished and fully functioning online virtual event platform in the way Zoom at the minute is kind of racing to catch up from being a conference call platform to becoming an event platform. Crowdcast.io, in its DNA, started as a virtual event for multicasting and for having dialogue and engagement. Today, apparently, they host over 3,000 live events with some 200,000 live event attendees every month. It's— it has a subscription model of just some $20 a month for the first couple of hours, and then it can scale up to $50 to $100, $250 per month, which is not a great deal if you consider it also embeds a platform, a payment gateway like Patreon in it, so that you can actually charge for people to attend the event. I like what I've seen so far in that it, it enables you to do polling. People can log in and actually participate within their own social media platforms, and you can multicast across different platforms. So it really makes it a much more fully functional, more like a conference center, and as we all know, a proper conference center has all the functionality for hosting those kind of events versus a ballroom at a hotel that is sometimes used for banquets and sometimes for conferences. So Crowdcast.io looks like an interesting alternative to Zoom if you're trying to create a multi-party live streaming and engagement style event. Now, confidence is what we're talking about today, and if we're using an event like we were doing today to try and reassure parents, for example, about what they can do with natural light for their children, what we want to do is have a platform that enables us to do that, and then we want to think about when we're on that platform what we do. So ultimately, in a crisis, people trust people. And what we have to do is to acknowledge our role as leaders, because if we do that, if we step up and say, I'm going to lead this, I'm going to be the person with the flashlight taking you to the emergency exit in the event of fire, it removes the anxiety of there being a leadership vacuum for all those people in the room. We need to stand tall. We need to make eye contact. We need to be still and not fidget. We need to speak slowly and clearly because if people's anxiety levels are up, then their ability to concentrate and focus goes down because they're distracted. We need to allow some silences to get people to pause and start— get them to slow down in their own metabolisms and their own physiology. And we need to keep our hands visible because, as we've discussed before, hand gestures and the presence of the hands communicates apparently more than any other element of our body. You can take slow and big steps, and Andy Walter of The Progress Shed was explaining today how when we make a one kind of a key point, we need to stand in one place, but if we're going to tell a story or a narrative, we need to move across the stage. And use the stage or the platform for different parts of the narrative. Very interesting that, and I shall explore more about that because I hadn't heard that technology before. But we also need to remember to try and engage everybody. So one of the roles I played today on the webinar, for example, was to actually pinpoint and invite people to contribute and not just have the people who always always like to speak, but to find those people— like this morning I found a lady had a 2-and-a-half-month-old baby— to ask her for her thoughts about the impact of light on children. She wasn't going to speak otherwise, but it felt like a good opportunity because that was a key audience group and she was the one person with the child. How can you create positive visuals, and how can you take criticism about the event But to turn that into something positive, because if people are feeling negative and needing leadership, they may not be positive and constructive on the call. But our role as leaders is to turn that and show them that we can stand tall, that we can face down the problems, and we're using a platform that we've prepared on and prepared the materials within, and that enables us to be calm and focused and to deliver the message that we're in control. And ultimately, as we said at the top of the hour, people right now looking for confidence, and they'll find confidence in people to lead them. And right now, public relations can play a key role in communicating your ability to take the lead and to do that within a platform that gives you the control and the presence of mind to do that. So set up, rehearse, go Confidence comes with some experimentation, but then with practice. So thank you. This is the Speak PR Podcast. I wish you good health, a profitable business, and that you keep on communicating. 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