Zoom Videoconferencing: My Favorite Tips for a Better Zoom Experience

Alright, hello everybody. My name is Randy Dean and I am here tonight to share with you some of my favorite video conferencing features from the Zoom platform. This is something that obviously with the current virus outbreak and so many people working from home, I've had several of my clients get in touch with me and they wanted to touch base about, you know, what might be some options to help people utilize these tools a little bit better, a little bit more completely, get a little bit more out of these tools. And so I'm planning to make a series of these videos, and this is the first one I'm doing which features the Zoom broadcasting tool. And so why don't we go ahead and dive right in? All right, hi everybody. One of the first tips I'll give you when it comes to Zoom is right here. You can see this— try not to have a top light, okay? And the other thing is, is notice this. I'm looking at the camera right now. Try not to look down at your screen because it might make your eyes look like you're not looking at the camera. Now watch what happens if I change the lighting routine here real quick. Now as you can see, if you change the lights so that they're coming in from sort of the front and the side, now the light's coming more forward and it looks much more professional, and easier for people to see. Top lights tend to really make the top look really bright and darken out your face. That's one tip. Now let's do another tip that's sort of fun. This is pretty cool. One of my favorite things about Zoom. In Zoom, one of my favorite things, as you can see, the background has changed, and you'll see why in just a second. I'm gonna come down here to share. And I'm gonna hit share screen. And when I hit share screen, I'm also gonna come down here and go down to video settings. Now what this is behind me, this is a simple green tarp, like the kind of tarp you would use for camping or to do some work in your yard. But take a look, you can come up here and hit virtual background and see it says I have a green screen. Now all I did was hang a tarp here in my home office And now I can be speaking to you live from Alaska. This is a picture from my trip to Alaska last summer. Now I can talk to you from outer space, and because my tarp has some wrinkles, it looks like the stars are twinkling. And take a look at this, this is sort of cool, uh, now we're in San Francisco Bay. Now what's interesting, the other thing that I did, you'll notice the camera angle changed, and what I did is I actually took my laptop to get a more square view I put my laptop on just an empty cardboard box, and it changes the angle so that you're looking more directly into the camera, and it allows you with the green screen to change your backgrounds. And you can even have a little bit of fun. Oh my. Help! Hee hee! And now we're in the Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone. And of course you can do something way more professional. Let's try something a little bit more professional here. I'm simply coming down here by the video. I'm clicking on this and then I'm going into video settings. And then when I do video settings, I'm going to virtual background. And notice that it says I have a green screen, which allows me to do this. And then what I can do is I can go through my images to find an image that perhaps can work better. So that's interesting. Let's try this. And now I'm in the, what was it, Teddy Roosevelt Lodge, Yellowstone National Park. You could have some fun with this. But you could also just get a nice professional background or take a shot of your normal office, and then you can use the green screen to set yourself up so it looks like you're in a professional setting. Now one little tip, notice these little sparklers back here. I got some little sparkles. That is because this tarp is a little bit crooked because it was in storage. And what you might want to do when you first make your green screen is get one that's brand new fresh and it comes right out of the packaging. Because when you do that, that's going to make this much cleaner and you won't get these little freckles and sparkles in your image as you're doing your, doing your program. Now what I see a lot of people do is they basically just take a nice picture of a bookshelf in their home, turn that into a picture that you can put on your green screen, and it gives you a nice basic thing. Like I said though, better if you have a cleaner tarp, you won't get the sparklies, so people won't even be able to tell that you're not positioned perfectly in front of your bookshelf. And the real benefit of this is if your office is a mess, You just put up a tarp. Nobody knows your office is a mess. They think you just got a nice, neat bookshelf with a signed basketball by Tom Izzo behind you. So that's pretty fun. Now, while we're talking about this, one interesting little thing, look at, look at the dress code here. Um, I actually believe that in a lot of, you know, work from home type situations, getting all dressed up, wearing a tie, all that kind of stuff, it feels a little bit contrived. Um, one thing that you might want to do is have a chat with your team members about what is appropriate dress code in a work-from-home office situation versus an in-office situation. Now, if you're in your professional work-based office, then dressing up a little bit more like in a professional office situation makes better. But if you're really streaming from home, it, to me at least, looks a little bit contrived if you're overly dressy. And I think, you know, it's just something sort of nice casual probably works better. But you might want to make sure there's agreement to that with everybody on your team. Team. Now, one other nice feature I like is the chat feature. And as you can take a look over here, what you can do is you can see who the participants are that are in the room. And notice down here, you can do everyone, or if you have individual people, you could do private chat. And the nice thing about that is, let's say a question comes up that you want somebody to ask somebody else that's in the meeting, you could just privately message that one person so that they have the opportunity to ask that question. Or you could, like, send them a little note on the side saying, you know, make sure you remember to bring this up. And that, that way you can do privates and as well as total group chats when you're inside of the meeting. Notice that you can also come down and record the meeting, and as you do the recording, you can either pause or stop the recording as the recording is taking place. Place. And that's sort of a nice feature because sometimes when you're doing some recordings, especially if it's something that you wanna develop like a training program or something, you can then pause the recording. And then when you pause the recording, you can resume or stop the recording as you're moving between content buckets. Now you're probably wondering how I'm pulling this off. I'm actually recording this from GoToWebinar with Zoom open in the foreground. So I'm actually doing sort of a double whammy here, and that's why this can actually work. And I can hit stop, and now it says the recording file will be converted to MP4 when the meeting ends. So you can actually take this and turn it into something that you can use later. So just a few different things that you can do inside of here that are quite nice. It's a solid tool. One little bonus tip that I would recommend. Notice down here, um, you have a mute button. Uh, if you're not speaking, it might be very polite for everyone to just hit the mute button because— see, I just muted myself, and I did that on purpose because it takes away the background noise. And the less background noise, the cleaner the chat will be. And so you might even want to just hover your mouse over your mute button when you're in a multi-person meeting so that way you can, uh, quickly turn on and off your mic as needed. Now one other thing that you could actually really easily use this for is you could open up a 2 or 3 person Zoom chat very quickly. And then notice this, I'm going to come down into share and I'm actually going to, uh, bring up this Word document. Share. And now here's the beauty of this, if I've got 2 or 3 people integrating on this, I could be making edits Check out my best tips for virtual meetings. And the other participants could actually be saying, well, how about we word it this way? And you could do real-time work together with other people on a document or file in Word or Excel or PowerPoint. So that's one of the nice things that you can also pull off when you've got this kind of a tool. Tool. So you really can use it for larger group meetings, or you can use it for just basic collaboration on simple basic documents and files. All right, hi everybody, new day, new shirt. And as a reminder, let's have a little fun with this. Let's pop down here into video settings in Zoom, and let's go back to that virtual background. And let's jump down and put the more professional-looking bookshelf in the background. And we'll close that. All right, so isn't that fun? Hi. And now I wanna actually do something even a little bit more fun. Let's take this a whole other level and let's invite myself. Excuse me, let's pop in, let's hit invite. And I'm going to send an email via my primary Gmail account. And you'll see it's gonna— what it does when you hit, uh, invite by email, it's gonna quickly open up your, uh, mail tool that's on your device, whichever one that you select. And then what I'm gonna do is I'm actually gonna invite myself a couple different ways. I'm going to invite, uh, Timelyman @outlook.com. And I'm also going to invite my business account address. And, and I'll also send it to my Yahoo address because I wanna show you what I'm gonna do here. There it is. Okay. And now notice that what it does when you do this, it's gonna give you the Zoom ID, meeting ID, password, etcetera. I'm just gonna hit send. So now it just sent the message. Now what I'm going to do, which is gonna be sort of fun, is I am going to now add myself in from a different line. Let's try this. Okay. And there I am. Hi everybody. Look at that. Now I'm in on my phone. I actually have my phone set up right here next to my computer. And as you can see, I'm now two people. And now let's take this one step further. How did I do that? It's because my phone decided to lock up in the middle of a Zoom meeting. That's funny. Let's get back to Zoom here. See if we can open this back up again. I think I might be moving again. Am I? Yes, I am. And as you can see, I've got this down here on the bottom. So let's, let's play around with this just a little bit. Let's go to speaker view. And notice that when you do speaker view, then it switches to the person that's speaking. You can also do gallery view, which means you can see everybody. And this is, this is nice if you're having a really interactive discussion between 2 or 3 people. Like I said, I really do like the speaker view though if you're gonna have somebody who's gonna be talking quite a bit, and then you can flash it to the person that's speaking in another area. So let's try something here. Now, let's see if this works. Yeah. There we go. Now you'll notice how it switches. And you'll notice that especially if you're sitting reasonably close to each other, one of the things that you're gonna really wanna do is make sure that you're muting the microphones if you've got a couple, 3 people logging in, on separate laptops, but in the same approximate area because you're gonna get sound and you're gonna get feedback. Feedback if you don't do that. And so now watch what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna hit mute here. I'm gonna switch back to here and unmute. Once again, got the feedback. But as you can see, now what it does is it automatically switches, which is one of the really nice features of this. Although, of course, like I said, if you're having a really interactive, you could just leave it on the gallery view. And that way, you can have all people talking at the same time. Now one of the things that I wanted to show you here too is that you can come down here at this point and hit chat. And when you hit chat, what's gonna happen is it's gonna open up a chat window. And you'll see over here on the side that you have some choices here. You can either chat it to everyone, or you can, just send it to particular people in the meeting. Privately. The other thing that's nice about this option is notice that you can come over here and also grab a file. And, when you grab file, you just click on the word for file, and then you can come down and use any of these popular tools to make this thing work. So that's a few things that I think are really cool about this. There's one other thing that I really wanted to show you though, which is pretty cool. Notice that down here under share, I showed you that you could share, you know, like a Word document or something like that. You could open up another item. But one of the things that I wanted to show you was this feature right here called Whiteboard. And when you do Whiteboard, what happens is it actually brings up a whiteboard that you can see on your screen. And then what'll happen is this moves over to the side. Now what you can do is you can actually do drawings. As you can see, I can come in here and actually draw some stuff. Hey, let's make a baseball player out of this. Alright. And you can see, I mean, you're— it's limited by your drawing skills and abilities. But that's not creepy at all. And, but you can also do things like this. You can come in and do text and say, let's hit the text button, make sure it selects, and then you can say creepy. Ball player. Now where this comes in nice is that I could see somebody actually utilizing this as a really cool way to do like a brainstorming activity. You could basically just take this thing and start to utilize it so that you can, you know, make quick notes while the meeting's taking place. You could do whiteboard demonstrations. There's quite a bit that you can do here, but of course if you're doing this, you could also come back down And let's switch. Let's close the whiteboard. Let's go up to share. Oops. Let's resume share. And let's do a new share from the top. My documents folder. I'm gonna hit share here. And now what I'm going to do is let's open up a PDF. Sort of a fun PDF. This is the PDF of our entrance passes for Cedar Point. Last year. And as you can see, it's going to bring it up on the screen, and it's going to allow people to take a look at the entry passes for us going to Cedar Point last summer. So you can share different kinds of documents— Word, Excel, PowerPoint. You can bring these in, you can have it so people can see the information, you can talk about specific points. And it really is a pretty solid tool. Uh, you know, there's, there's a lot of capabilities here many of which I'd recommend that you take a good look at and see how you can make this work. Now when you stop the share, notice what happens. You go back to either speaker view or gallery view depending on what you had selected. So, uh, once again, let's play around with this. I'm going to mute this one. I'm going to unmute this one, and now I'm going to start talking. And what will happen is, because I'm in gallery view rather than speaker view— let's switch to speaker view— and now with speaker view Now I'm talking to you from the phone and you can see the green screen in the back, or I can mute this line, unmute this line, and now I switch back. And now it's— you think it's a bookshelf with some little speckles. Fun stuff. It's, it's a cool tool. I recommend you play around with it and, take advantage of a lot of these tools to help you with running good virtual meetings. Next, I'm gonna start taking a look at Microsoft Teams. All right, I hope you had fun with this video and it gave you some really good ideas on how you might be able to use the Zoom platform. I wanted to let you know, if you'd like to know a little bit more about me, once again, my name is Randy Dean. I call myself the Email Sanity Expert. You can find out about more on my programs and what it is that I do at my website here, randaldean.com. You can also— so if you'd like, I strongly recommend to subscribe because I'm going to be putting a lot more of these videos out in the future. And if you'd like to even get a whole series of my PDF tip sheet productivity sheets, just send me an email randy@randalldean.com. Put YouTube PDF in the subject line. I'll send you a series of little PDF tip sheets on time management, email management, Outlook usage, Google and Gmail usage. Smartphone tablet usage, and a number of other items that you can use and keep and share, uh, so that you can take your productivity one step further. Thanks for your time tonight.