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

I've been working on my SPEAK|pr podcast now for a few months. I have to say, I've been feeling more and more confident about it as I'm growing. Upon checking the stats today, I'm feeling pretty good because I've now got listeners in over 28 countries, 117 cities, or six continents. People have been listening to my 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 my 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 in helping entrepreneurs and business owners find out ways to unlock value within their company or their organization by using public relations tools and technologies that I've learned over all these years. 

I was listening to a webinar with the people at The Progress Shed, of which EastWest PR is a sponsor of their webinar program. They had invited Michael Michalowicz, author of The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur and five other books. Mike is an acclaimed author, and he lives up in New Jersey. On the webinar, he was saying that, of his 450-something clients, when he asked them what they need most of all at the moment, they said they wanted confidence. 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. 

I was talking as well with a client that is working with Chinese students coming back to the UK. In the previous years, in the education sector, the talk has always been about degrees and postgraduate degree levels of grades and success, sometimes a little bit about fee levels. 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, the teaching faculty, and about the jobs that could be held afterwards. In this new COVID era, it's interesting because the conversation has turned entirely to security of healthcare. 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 the agents that are involved in helping students to travel internationally. 

Universities now and 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 where the customers, the employees, and the partners are going to feel confident about getting back and involved with the business. We have a term here at EastWest that we've coined the "COVID mindset," which is where we believe that all all PR will need to be COVID: Compassionate, Optimistic, Values-based, Informative, and Digital. 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 regain or to commence their studies, many of them will be taking online courses. 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 who love 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 and so are our children. 

I was working with my sister, Dr. Shelley James, who's actually a world-renowned expert on light. She put together a webinar for concerned parents on the impact of light on children. She talked about the flicker on screens, the way that LED lights transmit light, the impact of the oscillation of the light not just for children but for all of us, and the impact of blue light. She actually detailed five different ways that we as parents and as older people or just independent people can impact our environments and, of course, this also applies in workplaces. She mentioned how patients in care responded nearly three times more quickly to the treatment when they were surrounded by good light sources. She has the subject matter and is an expert on that, but where we went a little bit awry this morning was the technology. It seems to be now that we have more and more people working, creating their own events and companies creating their own events, that technology serves to be both an enabler and a potential disabler of our public relations campaigns. The reason that it's important to master the technology is 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. We filmed in a studio, in an earlier converted office and we had some some large standup display lights. They're good for bouncing light onto the subject, but they also can potentially create glare on the screen on the back wall. The second is around the sound. We had a problem where we done a pre-check, but once we 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 conference or not in order to try and rectify? The answer is we decided that we would stop and try and get the conference back online with good audio. But nonetheless, getting the audio prepped in advance and having a backup is really important.

The internet dropping in and out could've been another problem, but luckily, we didn't experience that today. What we did have was people in the next building unit drilling and hammering, so we hadn't really been in control of our environment. That's one thing that people mentioned was distracting. When people logged in to 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 that can automatically announce when they arrived. We learned that as we went along, and we had to turn that off. I recommend that you make sure you turn that off if you're the administrator. What we did find out though was that after we had finished the Zoom call, there was still the pinging going on. It turned out that my sister had left her telephone on and people had 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 next time, we'll be 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. 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'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, we can only get something like 12 people per screen, and if you've got 40 people like we had today, there are some people who don't have video on, and there are many people who are not going to be seen at all. You should always keep in mind the result you're looking for and the feeling that you hope an attendee will come away from in the same way with a 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.

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 interactive? Or is it going to be interactive, and in which case, how are we going to do that? I've mentioned some sites like Mentimeter which is good for holding polls as you go along, and Zoom now has some embedded polling software, so making sure that it's interactive is really, really important. Another issue is to make sure that you can prepare material in advance. We talked today on the conference call with some 40 people about the material. People said, "Can I get that? When can I get it?" What we hadn't done was to have the presentation already on SlideShare or Google Slides, so that people could immediately get them. 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. 

Another aspect that we could have done and we'll do next time is to pre-record material. Saturday Night Live, for example, isn't all live at all. In fact, in most TV shows, the hosts are live, but the segments are not. That's because when the stakes are high, it's very tough to record live. Talent doesn't turn up, or it's not prepared, or it doesn't speak properly. In my days in broadcast at the BBC, we used to have the cart ready with pre-loaded material. This is something that, going forward, I shall look at doing much more. Another term for pre-recorded content is simulated live content. What can we do or what can you do if you're going to host an event to reduce the risk of things going wrong, to reduce the need for multiple participants to be dialling in? 

I mentioned the Michael Michalowicz talk. For the first 15 minutes, his internet wasn't working, and so people were losing interest and losing patience. 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. 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 beforehand.

I was listening to a talk and overheard about a product or a platform called Crowdcast. I had a look at that briefly, and I signed up for a demonstration. Apparently, in 2014, Sai Hossain was in Costa Rica, and while he was there, he met a whole bunch of innovators and change-makers. I was interested because I went to Costa Rica myself back in 1990. It's a beautiful country. It's actually the oldest democracy in America as well. While he was there, he and a group of people banded together and decided to make a platform for sharing integrated media. This means conversations, as well as presentations, polls, discussions, breakout rooms; in other words, a fully furnished and fully functioning online virtual event platform in the way Zoom at the minute is 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 200,000 live event attendees every month. It has a subscription model for $20 a month for the first couple of hours, and then it can scale up to $50, $100, to $250 per month, which is not a great deal if you consider it also embeds a platform payment gateway like Patreon in it so that you can actually charge people who attend the event. I like what I've seen so far in that it enables you to do polling, people can log in and participate within their own social media platforms, and you can multicast across different platforms. It functions more like a conference center, and as we all know, a proper conference centre has all the functionality for hosting those kind of events versus a boardroom or hotel that is sometimes used for banquets and sometimes for conferences. So Crowdcast looks like an interesting alternative to Zoom if you're trying to create a multi-party live streaming, and engagement style event conference.

Confidence is what we're talking about today, and if you're using an event like we were doing today to try and reassure parents 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. Ultimately, in a crisis, people trust people. Therefore, we must 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 get them to slow down in their own metabolisms and their own physiology. 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 one 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. It's very interesting. I should explore more about that, because I hadn't heard that technology before.

We also need to remember to try and engage everybody. One of the roles I played today on the webinar was to pinpoint and invite people to contribute, and not just have the people who always like to speak. This morning, I found a lady who had a two-and-a-half-month-old baby whom I asked 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 and turn that into something positive? Because if people are feeling negative and needing leadership, they may not be positive and constructive on the call. Our role then 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. That enables us to be calm and focused, and it delivers the message that we're in control. 

Ultimately, as we said, at the top of the hour, people are 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 and rehearse. Confidence comes with some experimentation as well as with some practice.

This is a transcript from our podcast which you can find on EastWest PR. If you're interested in learning more about what we do, you can sign up for our newsletter here.

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