Mastering Engaging Virtual Events - But For Real

Rachel Cossar: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode in conversations in the future of work. I am your host, Rachel Cossar, And today, we are gonna be talking about mastering, engaging virtual events, but like, actually. Right? And who other to welcome on to the show than the Inimitable John Chen. Hello, Rachel. So good to see you. How are you doing today?

John Chen: I’m great, John. Thank you so much for being with us.

Rachel Cossar: You’re a master when it comes to engaging people virtually, and you have been for many years. I’d love to just pass it over to you to give a brief introduction and whatever you feel is most relevant to share with our audience. Thank you, Rachel. My name is John Chan.

John Chen: I’m the CEO for engaging virtual meetings. This is my 37th year of meeting online. For those who are a little on the OG side, I was on a service called prodigy, which was the 1st graphical based meeting space online long before AOL. And so, over the pandemic, I actually was going to face to face team building. And then, of course, March of 2020 had 15 canceled events And so I’m sitting around my office saying, what am I gonna do? I don’t make vaccines, but I do know how to make your virtual meeting better because we’ve been studying it for years, but the funny part, Rachel, is nobody would buy it before March of 2020. Nobody saw the value of having more engaging virtual meetings until March of 2020. So I put a class up on Eventbrite, and over 5000 people took it. And my publisher came back and said, hey, John. Do you wanna write your second book? And I did. And the fun part, Rachel, is that, that I publish her, what I sometimes like to say is the cruelest joke they played on me, they said, hey, John. We don’t know how long this coronavirus thing is gonna last. So will you rush the book? So I wrote that book in 9 weeks, 60 1000 words, Rachel, and it came out October 2020 as the number 1 Amazon hot new release called Engaging Virtual Meetings. And so the last 3 years has definitely been a journey of putting all these ideas that I had, into practice over the last 3 years, and I’m excited to share those not only on the virtual part, but on the hybrid arena too. Awesome.

Rachel Cossar: Well, let’s, I mean, let’s, let’s dive in. So first question and, you know, building on what you just shared in your introduction, you’ve been running virtual events for a while. And so what has obviously, yes, there’s been a pandemic video come online as a core channel of communication. But what else have you founds really changed over the past few years?

John Chen: Well, as my good friend, Tyler Paris, likes to say, 2020 was like a grade school, and 2023 is like college. And what I mean by that is that you could get away with all sorts of stuff in 2020. You could have terrible backgrounds, you know, crackly mics, you know, all sorts of, you know, scrambling video in 2020. Forget that you’re on mute. And for the most part, people were like, oh, that’s okay. But they’re here in 2023, you know, now people kind of, like, private chat each other, and they’re like, I can’t believe the speaker can’t figure out how to unmute themselves. Right?

Rachel Cossar: And so the expectations I think are much higher.

John Chen: And I think that it’s on 2 arenas too, Rachel. One of the things I’ve been looking at is We really need a lot of what we can do to make meetings better is just purely can be done without technology. It’s how we actually run the meeting. And then the other half is how we use technology, which Rachel, I know, is big technology fan. How do we use technology to make our meetings better and I see both of those. And and in my most recent program, Rachel, I actually had those separated, and now I’m really actually starting to combine both of them. Like really advanced or or high end engaging nontechnical techniques combined with really high end technical.

Rachel Cossar: I love a number of of things you just shared, but the change in expectation, I think, is something that if people don’t realize it, they need to. Right?

John Chen: Like, there was a level of leniency during the pandemic that was required because I mean, it was so new and people didn’t have a choice. There was no choice.

Rachel Cossar: You, you know, you had to set up your computer in your closet if that’s all you had. Right? But now, as you said, like, this channel, some people have really leaned in and become very sophisticated virtual sapiens as I liked call, call them. But, but then a lot of people, mistakenly, I think, continue to think that video is somehow a, like, 2nd class citizen, which couldn’t be farther from the truth. So I I’m glad you brought that up. And the other component that I think we will will get into more in a moment, but do you find that there’s a little bit of an obsession with some of the technology around video when people are sometimes missing that, like, the human skill development piece. Yeah. Although I’d rather them air on the side of some better technology because, you know, not having the better technology can really hurt you.

John Chen: So here, let me give you one like this right here. Like, I got a microphone today, and it sounds simple. But, When you meet somebody and it sounds like they’re in their bathroom, right, because they’re using the default my cuts on their laptop, You gotta listen to that for 30 to 60 minutes as as opposed to this. I’m trying to do my best. Radio voice. That’s right. So at least in the right?

Rachel Cossar: Then it’s pleasing.

John Chen: You know, there’s that you you don’t want technology to hurt you. Right?

Rachel Cossar: And that’s one way that I see over and over again where technology hurts people.

John Chen: Then then the second part is in is, I I got the chance to meet an author of an article on a PR website about how she really felt like virtual meetings were already broken before the pandemic because they were meetings that were already doing things that were wrong. And and the worst part is is that just virtual just really magnify it. So there’s simple things like have an agenda, right, you know, greet people when they come in, you know, other things like that. And then it gets on to, like, how to really facilitate the meeting. So here’s here’s one of my my latest principles, Rachel, is this. In your next meeting, allocate at least half of the time for somebody else to talk of than you. And it sounds simple, but let me tell you that 80% of the meetings that I attend don’t do this. Mhmm. Right? There’s somebody thinks that they because they have the mic and they’re their host and they gotta talk the whole time. Yeah. Alright.

Rachel Cossar: As opposed to the inverse is this.

John Chen: If Rachel’s in my course and I ask her to ask, you know, answer a question, right, you know, what’s changed for you in the past few years, right, when she’s answering me, It is impossible for her to be disengaged, right, because we’re having a conversation. It’s impossible for her to be texting somebody else without, you know, violating a whole bunch of social protocol And looking weird going, why is Rachel texting in the middle of a question when she’s on stage? So so I think that’s one of the secrets is is is getting other people to talk, like, actually really facilitating a great conversation as opposed to a one way presentation that you could have sent a video for.

Rachel Cossar: Right. Right. Absolutely. And that, that facilitation skill, I think, is valuable is especially valuable on virtual, but it it’s also just as needed and valuable in person. I think the other thing that I noticed was There’s been this, like, glorification of the in person meeting. And I’m like, no. People, like, also hate in person meetings. Like, they’re also poorly run. So I think you’re right. It’s been like almost like a magnifying glass into some of the meeting best best practices that we can hone just across the board. Yeah.

John Chen: I can validate that because I did go to a conference that I was gonna speak and my con my my speaking slot was at the last day. And so I watched through all the keynotes and all the breakouts. And It just the what my analysis or or, conclusion at the end of that conference is that in person needs engaging training too. Totally. 100%.

Rachel Cossar: Let’s, let’s move on to the next question. You’ve mentioned a few pieces of technology that can really up up the ante, right, like a good webcam, a good microphone. What are, you know, what are some of the surprises when it comes to AI in particular and some of the advances that have happened recently. Like, AI Technology And Communication, what has what has surprised you? The most when it comes to the way we’ve leveraged these tools or the way these tools have come online.

John Chen: I think the number one is that If it can coach you in the moment, that’s where humans, right, we love the present moment, that if it can coach you in the present moment that I think you can actually make change And this is the best part is when, you know, I’m here in San Francisco. Right? And have you heard of the company Waymo yet, Rachel? Yeah. So Waymo is Google’s deal, which is like, self driving cars all through San Francisco. And I think that’s kind of like mean, the fact that they got in this level that the cars are actually driving around a city with real people in it is is pretty high. And so let’s just take yours, right, virtual safety and sidekick.

Rachel Cossar: When you come into it and you run it, right, for a long enough time, it gives you enough feedback to tell you too what mistakes you’re making, and then it it, props you, right, or or gives you incentives to do it right.

John Chen: And I think as humans, the majority of us, I can everyone’s wired a little different, but for the most part, if you reinforce things that people are doing right, then you you get rewarded for it, and you’ll do more of it. And so things like this, right? Okay. Like, just alright. I’m in position.

Rachel Cossar: This is somebody else’s giving me this trick.

John Chen: You take four fingers sticking on top of your head. And that’s that’s how you know where the camera should be because your eyes should be around the frame level.

Rachel Cossar: Again, I should be in the center. And if I moved off to the frame, I’m gonna feedback and saying, John, we’re you’re leaning off to the side. Where are you going? Yep.

John Chen: And then other parts that the fact that the technology can know that it’s measuring only when I talk. So it can, of course, you know, hear it again. The data’s not going anywhere. Rachel’s all screwed me and all the correct things here. But that if you take that time to train yourself to look straight at the camera when you’re speaking, not all the time, because otherwise you’d be like a weirdo. But when you’re making key points, all of these things add up. And I do love all of Rachel’s, research and feedback on virtual presence because I think that, again, you can do things that hurt you. You could do things that help you. Right. And I really actually love to and Rachel last year, your your top tip came from people who vary their tone. Like, they should sometimes slow down. Sometimes they should whisper. Right?

Rachel Cossar: You know, like, if you do some of these vocal tone variations, a lot of presenters were not doing them.

John Chen: And if you could do them, you could easily be in the top set centers online. Yeah. Right. Totally. Absolutely.

Rachel Cossar: I mean, and and thanks for, you know, referencing so much of the work we do at virtual Sapiens, but I think I I think you’re right that there’s a magic almost in technology’s ability to be with you in real time. And, it’s something that, you know, we’re we’re never seeking to replace the human coach with our technology because we think there’s so much nuance and and power in that form of coaching. But one thing that a human coach can’t do is be with you every moment of every call or every presentation or every event, right? And so having technology at your fingertips to democratize some of the access to that kind of real time feedback is pretty pretty powerful. We’d agree as well.

John Chen: So talk about surprising too. I did recently get asked to write a white paper for meeting professional international about AI’s use and events. And so I really have been deep diving over the last time I I saw you. And one of the most astounding things to talk about surprising. Yeah. And I think it’s surprising where people definitely have some reticent part but there’s a company called render media, render media dot ai, and they can do something like put you in a studio, and they take a digital likeness of you. And then they can feed your likeness, a script. So now Rachel can actually deliver a perfect script that I maybe I wrote you know, for something. But the key here too then is that it can also create the videos in different languages. Italian branch. Right, Rachel could speak perfect German if she if she didn’t know the perfect German because her likeness can do it. And so there’s a lot of potential, and, but this definitely the alarm goes go off for other people. There’s a lot of concern about digital like this. And so that’s something to keep an eye on over the next year. Totally. And I’m glad you mentioned that.

Rachel Cossar: Like, I think, you know, you you mentioned the thing about eye gaze. Right? Like, training yourself to look into the lens when you’re speaking. Is a virtual communication skill. Right? There are, like, eye gaze redirect features through Nvidia and a handful of other softwares that I actually think are a little problematic because they what they take away is your ability to decide. Like, actually, no. I I wanted to give the user a break for a second. I wanted to Right. Consider what this person said.

John Chen: And instead it’d be like, You know, and, like, that kind of thing is just creepy to the max.

Rachel Cossar: So Yeah. When when technology doesn’t represent human things well.

John Chen: And and we, as humans, come back and going, something’s weird. What’s going on? Right? That that’s it sends alarm bells in it.

Rachel Cossar: Like I said, then then the tech is hurting you, not helping you.

John Chen: Right. 100% uncanny valley.

Rachel Cossar: So let’s let’s take I I’d be curious, like, from your perspective of hosting and and training on virtual events today, what do you find is the biggest challenge that that people are facing.

John Chen: In a virtual event, in a virtual, yeah, in a virtual event, engagement is still the number one problem. Like, I I do lots of polls throughout the years, and people are still complaining about engagement, and no cameras on and no one responding when they have questions. And it’s so funny that that our number one response to that is going, what are you doing as the host of the meeting, as the speaker of the meeting, to help people feel safe So, Rachel, I’m pretty sure you you’ve read a Google Aristotle’s work. Mhmm. Yep. So for those who don’t know, Google Aristotle did a great research project. You should look up. And Google cert, did research for 18 months on what were the all the common factors that are high by performing teams. And it’s not what you think it is. It’s not how much they pay them. It’s not the composition of the team. It’s not the leader. It’s not what building they put them in. It turns out the number one factor, and by the way, read the research for the other 4. Is psychological safety. Yeah. And Rachel and I are big advocates of talking about this, but actually doing it as a presenter is a skill and a a that you really need to work on. And so I find that that ability to change the culture from a camera off to a camera on culture is all about making it feel safe and having people feel safe enough to turn the camera on and contribute to the conversation as opposed to, I wanna hide behind a black wall. Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Rachel Cossar: One thing that we found to talk about surprises for us at virtual Sapiens is when people get a little bit of, personalized feedback and encouragement and kind of then an increased level of comfort and confidence in their skills as a communicator on video, they themselves report that they’re more likely to turn their video on. See?

John Chen: And and and I think those are the parts that more hosts need to do and they actually are in control of it as opposed to blaming the attendee. And I can tell you, I was in another meeting just this week where It was a new platform. I’ve never seen it before. I I logged into the meeting.

Rachel Cossar: They were just, blabbing away.

John Chen: And the worst part is that they they had like a table metaphor for breakout rooms. And everyone was confused about what to do during a breakout. And then the whole thing went camera off. Like when they came back to the main room, everybody turned their cameras off. And so I think that’s was a missed opportunity Yeah. From this amazing platform that has the capability to do all these things that they, you know, widdling me or unwittingly you know, preference people to turn their camera off. Right. Right. Yeah. No.

Rachel Cossar: That’s, that’s crazy. The other thing that your comment surfaces for me is, some of the studies that have been coming out recently about how effective video can be. And, whether they’re focusing on, you know, the the effects of zoom fatigue, over stimulation or under stimulation, you know, things like that. What’s what’s always so interesting to me is if you read the primary source study, It’s very clear that it’s it’s not saying that video is not an effective channel communication. What it is saying is that video is not being used effectively.

John Chen: And that is the reason that so many people feel disengaged or disconnected or fatigued and exhausted on these poorly run video calls or meetings or events. Well, Rachel, you’ll love this too. I don’t know. I’ll have to get her a full name with the research, but there’s, a woman Carmen. I think it’s Carmen Simon. Oh, yeah. But who spoke at the presentation, Summit and recently showed her latest research, which they did a sales pitch in all the permutations like hybrid, in person, virtual on a phone, And it turned out that the the and they’re doing, like, the all the biometrics are doing eye gaze and and they’re tracking. It’s really amazing research, and they actually found that virtual was the best platform for this particular thing. It was, you know, a sales pitch That was about 10 minutes long that it drew the most attention to the presenter and the data that they were presenting.

Rachel Cossar: And so There are things where virtual can actually be better and research is just starting to find that out.

John Chen: Yeah. Totally.

Rachel Cossar: I mean, I’d love to if that’s available, I’d love to take a look at that. Because I I think that the keys are, like, what is the purpose of this gathering event meeting? And then how is the facilitation executed? Right? Like, how what is the engagement like within the within the event itself? And is is it is it appropriate to the channel? Right? So totally. I mean, so much. There’s so much more. Well, I wanna add one piece on here too that where where do you find the biggest challenge in a an engaging hybrid meeting too.

John Chen: That’s a place too where I do think the technology now can really hurt or help you. Yes. And I recently developed something called hybrid in a box because one of the top challenges with hybrid is that you need enough equipment that it takes you hours to set it back up somewhere to move it from your place to somewhere else. So I developed something called hybrid in a box that that keeps all the equipment. In a rolling container, it’ll fit in the SUV and that, I can actually be up and running in 60 minutes or less from rolling into a venue. And And when then when it gets to that is that I’ve developed all these things so the presenter can still see the preview of their slides.

Rachel Cossar: We can mix it any way we want not for the in for the virtual audience and for the in person audience and that we can actually make a virtual attendee a full member. Right?

John Chen: We talk second class citizen. That’s the other complaint about hybrid is that often you feel like a second class citizen because you can’t talk, can’t be seen. Yep. And we reversed all of that and allowed people now where the speaker and the person who’s virtual can actually have a full blown conversation in the middle of a presentation And so while that does take more technology, I think those is that’s how we solve the biggest challenge in hybrid. Fascinating. No.

Rachel Cossar: That’s I mean, that’s It’s like a great approach to that because that is a huge challenge. Let’s, let’s move on to the the final question here. If there’s one thing that listeners can do to immediately up their virtual engagements.

John Chen: I know you’ve given us already some amazing takeaway, but Well, you’ll love this ritual. It’s that we call it the the maven merry-go-round. Right? And maven is five letters, and it sounds for me, right? What can you do is change yourself which is either your background or your appearance or your show? You don’t dress up. Right? Me a is audio. V is video. I is here, Illumination, right, and n is network. And so, you know, if you had to change one thing, I mean, if if you are on the bad part, I would probably start with network mainly because, like, you can’t do anything till you get that. Yep. Second thing I would change if I had to was your audio. You know, for $50, you can get a mic that is way better than anything that your laptop could ever have unless you have some kind of amazing laptop. Right? So there’s a few. There are a few of the max. I have microphones I actually like, but the majority of them don’t. And then after that is your camera. So even this camera, I have a built in to my, laptop, but I’m carrying an external, because this camera is better. And you can it makes a noticeable difference when you can find some of these equipments. So I would give you this though, Rachel. It’s like, Rachel’s seen my home set up too. I’m traveling today. I’m in San Francisco, but when I’m home, I actually have, like, this crazy set up fourteen screens. You know, 3 computers running simultaneously. And and I don’t I don’t tell anybody to try and make that set up. But what I do tell people, is I show that setup. So I hope to inspire you to think about, which is one thing that you could do different. Yeah. And so, hopefully, it’s one of these you know, 3 things, your network, your internet, or or your audio, and then up to that, your video. I hope that you would think about what could I do to do that because I will tell you this, Rachel. Every minute you’re online, that piece of technology will pay you back. Yep.

Rachel Cossar: Yeah. Awesome. Well, on that note, John, thank you so much for being with us for sharing. You’re incredible. Masterful expertise. I mean, tons of takeaways. How can our audience engage with you and your thought leadership and your work directly? Yeah.

John Chen: Come to the website, engaging virtual meetings.com. And from there, you can find linkedin profile or anything I do post regularly about other things. And what I love too, Rachel, Rachel, of course, has been a guest here at the engaging conference. This year, October 1st through October 3rd for 2024, but it’s every October. And I recommend that you come there because every year, we’re trying to push the format. For what an engaging conference looks like. And, Rachel, I’m excited to let you know this will be the 1st year we’re running hybrid ourselves. Wow. Yes. And if if you see, I’m gonna preview a bunch of things from now until October of showing people what a really engaging hybrid format can look like. We’re gonna do that here in Seattle, but you can again log in anywhere in the world. And there’s even a free ticket for those, you know, who may not have the resources, but we want to get this education to you. So check it out. Engaging virtual meetings.com for conference, and you can register for a ticket there. Awesome. Great. Well, that sounds amazing, John.

Rachel Cossar: I’ll look forward to that. And, as always, thank you for the conversation. Thank you, Rachel. To all the virtual sapiens out there, we wanna see you online. See you next time.

John Chen: Bye bye.