Four golden rules to speak to your audience in an effective way while sitting in a video conference
The spreading of virtual places (like video conferences) has made our virtual presence even more important than the real one. Now, voice is not a secondary detail of our virtual presence, as it highly impacts on our audience together with other factors, like our appearance on the screen and our facial movements. Therefore, it is not a bad idea to spend some time to learn some best practices to speak in front of a camera efficiently.
First rule, speak to the camera. The camera you have in front is your audience, because during a conference your guests can look only at the screen, and nowhere else. In other words, video conferencing compels participants to be attentive and focused along the whole event, without many opportunities to get distracted.
If you look directly at the camera, your participants see you as looking at their eyes and become immediately attentive. If you look somewhere else, the result is dramatic: on the screen, everybody sees a guy who turns right or left and does not speak to them but to somebody else off the screen.
Second rule, keep your hands away from your face.Unfortunately, cameras magnify everything, and even the smallest and insignificant movement becomes automatically well visible and noticeable. The effect is that your moving hands distract your audience, as your guests start immediately to follow your gesturesand lose focus on your words or – which is worse – your presentation.
Third rule; don’t miss the importance of body language. Your shoulders, neck, face and half-bust is well shown during a conference, and anyinvoluntary movement gets magnified. However, natural gestures are useful to make your guests feel comfortable and you look human. Nobody likes talking statues. The only precaution to take is to maintain the seize of your gestures appropriate (not too large) and avoid your arms/hands flailing outwards, because it could scare your audience.
Last rule, adjust your microphone. If your microphone is too high, your voice is distorted and it sounds not human; if it is too-low, your audience cannot hear. You’d better make some trails before your conference. usually, video conferencing platforms allow you to speak to the microphone , hear your voice and adjust the microphone consequently. It is also important to remember to keep your head not too far while speaking.
Are you interested in virtual conferencing? You are going to find more resources and interesting articles on video conferencing best practices on R-HUB`s blog at http://www.rhubcom.com