Webinar Wire

Phone vs. Keyboard Q&A

Posted by Ken Molay January 6 2009 10:23 AM EDT

2 comments

Today's topic gets us to the halfway point on our top ten list of Webinar FAQs. "Does Q&A work better over the phone or through typed questions?"

The answer is going to look suspiciously similar to my answer about using video of the presenter. Letting the audience ask questions by voice adds immediacy and a sense of personal interactivity to your session. In small group meetings or small classroom settings this is definitely the way to go. You want to encourage a conversation with a small audience.

But I am not a fan of taking telephone questions in a large audience webinar or a presentation given to the general public. Here are the reasons:

1) Control over what gets asked. When looking at questions coming in via typed chat, you can pick and choose which questions to address in which order. If you see the same question coming from many different people, you can answer it first and elect to spend more time on it. If you see a question that is highly specific to one person or something that is counterproductive, you can elect to skip it.

2) Seed questions. If things are going slowly in a telephone Q&A, you can't pretend to have a caller. You have to be obvious about asking one of your own questions. And then you never know whether you still have a lot of interest or nobody waiting in the queue. You might be rambling on, filling time, while real questionners impatiently wait for their turn. When you see the list of questions in a chat queue, you know when the queue is empty and you can read off one of your seed questions as if it came from the audience -- no one is the wiser. Similarly, you can see when you start getting real questions again and can jump back to them more quickly.

3) Focus and conciseness. I can't tell you the number of times I have heard a telephone question start off like this: "Am I on? Oh, okay. Hi, Ken! I really love your presentation. I've listened to a lot of them in the past. Here's my situation. You see, we give a lot of webinars ourselves... Well, not really a lot... Maybe one every two months. Is that a lot? Well, anyway... When we are giving one of these presentations it seems like there's often a strange thing that happens. Let me try to explain. You see, first we..."   Arrrrggh!!! The rest of your audience has long since stopped listening and you are having a hard time figuring out what the question is. When people type their questions, it forces them to be more concise and gives you the opportunity to further focus the message and get right to the heart of the question when you read it out loud.

4) Record keeping. Most web conferencing software lets you save a log of the chat queue. This is useful for answering skipped questions later, building FAQ lists, gauging interest from specific attendees for sales or customer service followup, and so on.