We have all been on them, you know the webex where the presenter just drones on and on, flipping from slide to slide or clicking through a demo without ever changing the inflection in their voice. Presenting via webex or any remote tool is tough, as a presenter you are missing the immediate feedback loop that you get when standing in front of an audience just by looking at their faces. When you are presenting via webex you can feel flat as a presenter, I know I did.

That is until my friend Brian Tobia told me what I was doing wrong. “Stand up when you are presenting, and act like you are in front of a live audience.”

Holy cow that is so simple it’s not even funny, so I set to improve the way I present remotely. Here are a few tips that I have found work for me.

1. Speaker phone or wireless mic are key. I talk with my hands a lot so holding a phone just doesn’t work this is an easy way to make it feel like I am talking to people who are in the room with me.

2. Stand up, Tobia was dead on, I stand and walk around while I present in person why shouldn’t I do the same thing when on webex. This works to increase the energy in your voice and make you more comfortable.

3. Use a big display. When I present remotely I leverage Air Play on my apple TV and push the presentation or demo onto the 42” TV in my office so I can feel like I am presenting in a conference room.

4. Close the loop, you have to ask questions to make sure the audience is listening and engaged. I do this in person, so it only makes sense that I do this remotely. It works you just have to give them a second to come off of mute and pretend that they are formulating a question 🙂

5. Have fun seriously this is true of any presenting but if you are having fun your audience will have fun. Unless you are a funeral director giving a bereaved family their funeral service options you can make jokes and keep the crowd and yourself entertained.

That’s it pretty simple it’s like dodgeball, if you can dodge a wrench you can dodge a ball, except in this case if you can treat it like an in person presentation you can make your webex more engaging.

What are your tips for presenting remotely?

Dear Hollywood,

Please stop making cyber crime story lines, you have no clue what you are talking about and to anyone with half a brain it makes it hard to watch. I work in IT, not InfoTech or the Cyber team, seriously who comes up with this? Do you hire consultants, if so are they IT consultants or does their business card read InfoTech? I watch prime time tv with my wife and recently I have noticed an uptick in the number of “hackers” in your story lines. Here’s the thing I have found myself yelling at the TV so I feel the need to write this open letter.

So you are aware, “hacking” isn’t running a -t on an ping, neither is running a proper post mortem diagnostic. Graphics and screen savers do not actually depict an algorithm running, nor a brute force password attack. The majority of hacking is done with social engineering and phishing.  When you use terms like “trace the IP” when the “hacker” is on a coffee shop wifi, you are basically saying you are going to find the IP from that wifi, not tracing the hacker back to his house.  Using an anonymizer on a laptop doesn’t prevent the authorities from finding the source IP of the ISP, you can catch someone with an onion router inside your network by having a solid firewall and intrusion protection and intrusion detection systems.

Most secure environments tap all in-bound traffic, and monitor all out-bound traffic. Really secure environments have constant scans for rogue wireless networks and devices and can narrow down to the person with the cell phone in their pocket in minutes. IRC is not “the deep web”, or “the dark web” or whatever you are trying to call it. Thousands of people use IRC it’s pretty standard actually.

“Enhance” I swear to all that is holy, when they say that while looking at a digital image on any detective show and then can magically zoom in and clean up an individual pixel to show a reflection. That’s something they did in Bladerunner to show what the future would be like on floppies and a kodak printer with voice control, but it’s not reality.

All I can hope is that this reddit thread, where a guy claims he is a TV writer and just puts this techno-babble nonsense into shows as a joke is real. Otherwise I need to just stop watching the second the term “we’ve been hacked” gets uttered for my own sanity.

Thanks,

The Actual IT Community
Since these folks won’t actually respond what are your favorite, worse hacker shows or movies? In terms of pure bad mine are The Net, Hackers, and any CSI show. Oh and Scorpion that show is beyond stupid.