Presentation Summit 2021: Conversation with Ken Molay

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  Ken Molay is president and founder of Webinar Success, a consulting firm that assists companies in producing and delivering effective and compelling web seminars. Ken combines a technical background with experience in corporate marketing and public presentations. He is a prolific blogger on the subject of web conferencing and its applications, and has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal and industry publications. He is a frequent public speaker on the topic of more effective webinars.

In this conversation, Ken talks about his participation at the upcoming Presentation Summit 2021, being held on location in Clearwater Beach, FL, and virtually this year from September 26 to 29, 2021.

Indezine.com is the official media partner for the Presentation Summit.

Geetesh: Ken, you are presenting Best Practices for Virtual Engagement at this year’s Presentation Summit. What would the audience’s takeaway be from this session?

Ken: My goal is to arm virtual presenters with practical tactics they can apply right away to help spur greater audience engagement, interest, and involvement in the topic being discussed.

For the past year or two, web conferencing vendors have been leaning very heavily on the word engagement as a way to promote their feature sets. This has led to some skewed impressions of what engagement really means. To twist the old saying, if you are trying to sell a hammer, you need to make customers think that every problem is a nail. Sure, you should take advantage of webinar functionality, but you can’t let that be the end of it.

I want to illustrate how engagement is not just a matter of displaying a few polls during a webinar or asking for questions at the end of the hour. It comes from a comprehensive approach to presentation design, delivery, and planned interactions. Savvy presenters start audience engagement with the first words they utter and continually incorporate engagement strategies throughout their talk. As a matter of fact, audience engagement can begin well before the session itself, as a part of the marketing and registration process. By the same token, engagement should be allowed to extend past the end of a virtual session to enhance relationship building and business benefits.

Image: Ken Molay

Participants in this session should emerge with ways to make their presentations more persuasive, memorable, and interesting to their audiences. Techniques will be equally applicable to marketing webinars, online training, in-house or external outreach sessions, thought leadership demonstrations, and other types of virtual presentations.

Geetesh: Considering that this is the first hybrid season of the Presentation Summit, how will your presenting approach or style be influenced by the changed environment?

Ken: It’s going to be a great illustration of exactly why engagement needs to be thought of as a gestalt that incorporates more than just basic conferencing software platform interaction features. Summit presenters this year need to think about how we will engage onsite attendees sitting together in hotel meeting rooms as well as individuals at home in front of computers.

I plan to employ the very tactics I talk about in my session, thinking about audience engagement from the first words I speak. It’s going to be important to find ways to acknowledge and involve both local and remote participants.

Image: Ken Molay

As a remote presenter, I am going to have a different set of challenges and opportunities from my colleagues who will be at the hotel presenting locally. I will be inherently biased towards thinking in terms of the virtual environment and the interaction tools available to me in the software. I have to consciously remember to address and include the onsite attendees in my delivery style. I’ll need to rely on a local assistant to help manage questions and interactions with the local audience. My colleagues who present locally in the Summit meeting rooms will have the opposite challenge and will need to find ways to work with remote attendees. They will have to rely on assistants who can monitor the online platform to make sure virtual attendees get their voices heard. It unavoidably adds complexity, but that is the price we pay for local and global inclusivity in a post-pandemic world.

There are third-party utilities that can provide interaction opportunities for both audiences, and I have used those in past Summit presentations. But this year I really want to concentrate on engagement techniques that rely less on specialized software and more on universal approaches that can work in any environment.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.