Webinar Wire

How To Embarrass Yourself In A Webcast

Posted by Ken Molay April 22 2009 8:14 PM EDT

I just saw a news story with a public apology issued by a communications company. It seems that the radio station employees making rude, racist, and sexist remarks during a football game webcast didn't realize that their mike feed was going out to the internet audience. Oops!

There's a lesson here for all of us. During a live webinar or webcast, ALWAYS assume your communications are public. If you put your phone on mute, don't start talking trash to yourself about the current presenter. Some day you are going to realize that you didn't press the mute button hard enough, or that you accidentally pressed it twice and the presenter and audience can hear you muttering, "Is this joker every going to shut up?"

If your web conferencing software lets you send private messages to other hosts/presenters, take care with what you choose to communicate. Sure, there are times when you want to say "Watch your time" or "Speak louder, Ken!" If you accidentally have your dropdown selector set wrong and the message goes out to all attendees, it's not a calamity. But if you are trading catty messages with your moderator and say, "Can you believe we have to listen to this tripe?" you are setting yourself up for disaster when you find that somehow you hit the public response button instead of the private response button.

I don't care how careful you are. Do enough webinars using "private" features and eventually you will slip up. When that happens, you want the accidentally broadcast item to be as innocuous as possible.