Delivering a Virtual Keynote speech.

What are the particular communication challenges of delivering a speech virtually these days? It's increasingly an opportunity that could come your way. The great part is you save a tremendous amount of time rather than spending a day flying across the country or to another continent doing the event, checking in hotels, cabs there for the event, another day home. Rather than losing three days, you can just do the whole keynote address through Skype video or GoToMeeting or some other platform, either from your office or if you have a home set up as I do, you can do it from your home. I do keynote speeches right here from my home based video studio. And you save so much time. Now the hard part is you got to be in a little room with no human beings and stare at a piece of machinery, a camera. And for most people, that's awkward. It's weird. Now it's easy for me, not because I have any unique talents, it's just that I've done it so much. To me, there's really no difference between that and talking to a human being or talking to a group of people. But you don't get the eye contact, you don't get the questions necessarily in real time. So it is challenging. I recommend that you treat it in a sense like any other speech. Have an outline. Make sure you have simple notes that you can glance down occasionally and look at. Don't read. If you're going to use slides, make sure you figured out how to do it. Technically, it's a little harder to use slides unless you have a particular GoToMeeting or WebEx system that you've used before. If you're using just Skype, it can be done, but there's more buttons you have to push and screen sharing. I typically prefer to just speak to the audience, let them see me. I avoid the extra gizmos and the special effects and putting different slides on. I just talk to them, but talk to them like you're talking to one person. You're going to have a microphone on. You can't shout across the country, so you don't have to put that speech tone of voice on the way some people do. You want to sound just like you're having a conversation. You want to have no more than a handful of ideas. You still want to have stories. You want to come across conversational, comfortable and likable. Also, be sure to. Excuse me, I just took a sip of water. Be sure to have water handy because if you're giving a keynote speech and you don't have a group around you and you don't have the laughter of an audience or someone asking you a question. Even if you pause, you're still going to be pausing less than normal. So you are likely to get your throat dried out. So drink plenty of water and look at the camera as if you are looking at one person. It will make you more comfortable and it will make the audience more comfortable. The biggest thing also, or one of the biggest issues, you have to keep moving. You have to move your head, you have to move your face, you have to move your hands, you have to move your body. You can have the greatest speech ever, but if your head is frozen and your face is frozen and your body's frozen, you are going to look like a hostage being held at knife point or gunpoint to read a script by a bunch of terrorists. You don't want to look that way. The other thing is make sure you're still happy to ask or to answer questions if you're doing it live. And that's how I do most of my virtual speeches. I do it live through Skype video. And then I tell the organizer, just plug in a microphone into the laptop that you're using in the auditorium. Have people come up, ask me questions. I won't be able to see them necessarily. I don't need to, although they could in fact put the camera and show the person speaking. But I'll listen to them answer their question. And the whole experience can be very similar to being in person, especially if you're speaking at a larger conference where there's an image magnification on the speaker. So if you're at a conference and there's 2000, 3000, 5000 people in the room, typically you're not really looking at the speaker when you're in the audience. You're looking at a big screen image magnification of the speaker. Well, if the screen is just showing me from where I am via Skype or some other platform, it's not that different an experience for the audience, especially if you stay after and answer questions. My advice, don't turn down opportunities to give speeches because you don't have time on your schedule to fly there. Always give people the option and say, hey, I can't make it to your convention, but I can speak that day virtually. Shall we discuss.