Yesterday evening, I was browsing the web, randomly reading blogs and tweets. When suddenly I had what at first sounded like a crazy idea. I heard some people talking about the fact that they start their webinars with a wide-screen video-broadcast of themselves. Nice way to great the audience, they said. At this time, I didn’t really give it lots of thoughts. But hey, only fools don’t change their minds. And that’s exactly what happened yesterday evening. I read about it again somewhere. And I really wanted to give it a try.
I was giving an internal presentation on milk replacers to our scientific communication team the next day. Webinar format. My favorite, obviously (there are days I truly believe the virtual world was created for people like me) . Anyway, it was the perfect opportunity to test this maybe-not-so-crazy idea. Worst case scenario : it goes wrong, it crashes. But at least I gave it a try and I learnt something from it.
So when I woke up, I shoot a short intro video. You can watch it below. I’m sure I still have lots to learn in terms of video-creating and editing, those are skills I still need to work on for sure. But for something that took me 10 minutes, it’s not that bad I think. And again, it can only get better in time I’m sure.
I inserted it as a video clip in my webinar conference center, right before my slides. I played it right at the beginning of the online session. And it worked perfectly. Everybody could watch the video. It did not cut in an out, everybody called in so I could hear it play on their computers. They might even have enjoyed it a bit.
I’m sure I’m not the first one who tried this. But I just wanted to point out that in today’s world, we can constantly try to push the limits of our creativity. I’m a webinar addict, I love this opportunity to travel the world in an instant while giving an online presentation. I spend a lof of time crafting my webinar series : this was a successful experiment, am probably going to try it again very soon, but I will keep thinking. I’m sure there are other ways to make online experience memorable. I just need to keep working hard on it.
And if you want to be part of this online experience, my next webinar series is on Nov 22nd (in English) and 23rd (in French).
DR. EMMANUEL FONTAINE 