There's a lot of different technology that will help your audience interact with you when you're giving an online presentation. Skype is different from Google Chat that's different from the YouTube chat aspect that's different from GoToMeeting. My advice to whatever system you're using, you've really got to get familiar with it. And you need to practice before the actual event because sometimes there's a little chat box here. If you don't know it's there, you're gonna miss it, you're gonna think, Wow, no one interacted at all. I'm on popular and maybe there were 50 messages and you didn't see them.

It's very, very hard to learn a new technology when you're giving a speech. Let me tell you right now, I don't care how often you do it. There's a little bit of adrenaline flowing and when you know that 50 100 maybe 1000 people are watching you or listening to you. That's the absolute worst time To learn a new technology, so don't try, you simply want to go with the flow and be in the moment presenting when you're doing that. So that's why it's crucial that you learn the technology platform, you're in exactly how the interaction goes. Now worst case scenario, give people your email address.

There's no I've done that plenty of times, especially if the chat box was supposed to work and it didn't work. Give people your email address, because you can just quickly pull up your Gmail, whatever service you're using, and read an email question from someone or read an email comment from someone. There's no perfect way it's just you need to know exactly the technology someone can use. Now, some more advanced systems make it relatively easy for someone to just speak. That's the best of all possible worlds, but you've got to make sure if that happens, the people not speaking how have their mute button on otherwise, you're going to get all sorts of feedback, dog noises around there, there's going to be too much clutter and people won't be able to hear it. So I certainly do recommend allowing other people to have their voices on but you've got to really monitor that so that the feedback doesn't overwhelm it.

Bottom line, learn the technology of the platform you're using for interactivity. And then make it easy for people to do. By the way, this applies even to when it's not live. If you are shooting a video, and you're putting it on YouTube, make sure you enable it so that people can leave comments. I mean, it's basic stuff. But too often people are worried about Oh, what if someone says something critical or I don't like it, grow up.

Criticism is a part of life. Believe me, I get criticism all the time, especially on YouTube. A lot of it's nasty, personal, vicious. beady eyed ball ugly, stupid guy. Look if you have to put it to the comments to be approved first. But make it easy for people to communicate back with you.

You've got to master that technology of interactivity and you got to make it so that the people you're speaking to now you want comments on your YouTube videos, tell people please comment here. And let's start a discussion. That's what you want. The best presentations in the world are more group discussions than they are one way communication