In Case You Missed It: This month’s ICYMI is written by Andy Goodman in February 2013 in which he shares the five mistakes to avoid when planning your next webinar.

Five Fast Ways to Ruin a Webinar

Here are five foolproof ways to do it (or, if you prefer, five mistakes to avoid when planning your next webinar).

I can’t remember exactly when I attended my first webinar, but I clearly recall my initial reaction to this wondrous new technology. “Wow,” I thought to myself, “somebody actually found a way to make conference calls more unbearable!” As the technology has proliferated and become less expensive, webinars have become a regular fixture in the workplace, but one thing hasn’t changed: most of them are still glorified conference calls, and almost all of them are boring.

But let’s be honest: you’re busy, and even if you do have a webinar to run sometime soon, who needs to expend all that extra energy trying to raise the bar? Running a webinar that’s just as mind numbing as all the others is easy. Just follow these five simple steps:

Keep ’em guessing right from the start.
When people log into your webinar, they need to know exactly how to participate to the fullest. The most popular services offer different tools, and organizations often have their own rules when conducting webinars. Participants – even seasoned veterans – don’t always know what’s expected of them, so if you want to keep them sitting quietly on the sidelines, skip past any kind of orientation and get right to your first incomprehensible slide.

Assume your audience is paying close attention.
Webinars are a great way to get work done – other work, that is. While you, the webinar host, drone on, your audience is catching up on email, firing off a few memos, and making those crucial updates to their Facebook pages. If you don’t assume they’re paying attention and start doing unconventional things like calling on them by name, or giving them exercises to work out and report back on, you can disrupt this very productive time. So be respectful of the fact that they took all that time to dial in and log on, and just leave them alone!

More text, fewer images, and no video!
Most webinars are basically PowerPoint slides with voiceover narration. If you cram your slides with text, data, and complicated graphs and charts, they’ll practically scream, “Don’t look at me!” Stay away from interesting photographs or those fancy new forms of data visualization that actually make people look more closely at their screens. And by no means use video, even though most webinar platforms now accommodate it with relative ease.

Leave the same slide on screen as long as you like.
Every time you show a new slide, you pull your audience’s attention back to the screen (and, as noted above, distract them from more important activities.) If you leave the same slide on-screen for more than a minute or two, however, your audience will get bored and will start looking elsewhere for entertainment. So keep those slide changes to a minimum, and let every slide have its day. Literally.

Speak in a monotone.
Or better yet, dominate the conversation and don’t let anyone else speak. Just as changing slides rekindles visual interest, speaking with enthusiasm – or introducing new speakers – can stimulate aural interest. This puts you in dangerous territory, because if people start listening, they may actually start to think and, even worse, participate. Droning in a monotone (a la Ben Stein in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”) is the surest way to send them back to Facebook, Twitter, or sleep.

To learn more ways to improve your meetings, register for our “Meetings for People Who Hate Meetings” workshop on March 11 & 13.