Virtual Presenting I: The Magic of Using the Bird’s Tail

Welcome to a new four-part series—inspired by the feedback we’ve received from our earlier posts on Virtual Presentation Skills. Every salesperson, marketing professional, entrepreneur, and executive has been tasked by our current reality to become charming and charismatic online, but few know how. This series will help lower your stress and elevate your skills online—and I hope you’ll share it with anyone whose virtual presence supports your brand.

 UPCOMING:

Virtual Presenting II: Is It a C, B, or A Presentation?

Virtual Presenting III: The Critical First Minute

Virtual Presenting IV: Planning Ahead for New Platforms 

Powerful and effective presentations win business, make relationships happen, and bring teams together. But the virtual version is really, really hard. Even experienced presenters—who can walk into a physical room and captivate—feel out of their depth as they try to connect through the tiny lens of a webcam. The frustration is growing, and most advice hasn’t gotten to the heart of the challenge.

In the last twelve months, my team and I have been in the trenches helping companies solve this problem. Here’s what we’ve seen: When COVID hit, we all dived into virtual, hoping it was a temporary shelter. We did not optimize, we managed. And as the managing and managing went on and on, month after exhausting month, that managing-level of quality, rife with sloppy habits, became solidified (you should see what I’ve seen out there—like the VP pitching a million-dollar project in a backward baseball cap with laundry behind him). We rationalized our meager effort by hoping it would just be over soon.

Not only it is not over, but we’ve also come to realize that virtual presenting of all kinds—that is, one speaker driving a topic, leading a dialogue, or presenting through slides—is now a permanent part of our professional world. Teams will need to learn to be bi-lingual in both the in-person and virtual set of presenting skills.

But most are not. The experience honed throughout one’s presenting career doesn't always translate. How do you read the room with no feedback? Where do you look as you speak and interact? How do you anticipate what clients and executives are expecting in your visuals? It’s tough—and teams all over the globe are making subtle, costly mistakes.

I want to make presenting easier for you and to accelerate your abilities in this new medium. Therefore, in this series I’ll share with you a small selection of the tips and tools that have been most helpful for our clients. Use these simple practices and you’ll be more informed, more prepared, and more confident for every virtual presentation that comes your way.

There are many mistakes you can and may make on camera but there is one that’s the most risky, one that will immediately and perhaps permanently drop your status in the eye of your viewer. That is, reading on camera. Reading any text of more than a few words on camera is boring. It removes your eyes from your audience, and it drains the perceived expertise of the anyone presenting. Anyone can read a pitch, presentation, or story, but it takes a pro to simply tell us instead. And it’s so easy to fix this mistake.

Meet the Bird’s Tail. It’s a semicircle of rectangular-shaped Post-It notes placed around the top and sides of your computer. It’s by far the favorite tool of the teams we’ve trained and using it will immediately upgrade the way you come across online.

Here’s how to make and use one:

• Place your content in a clockwise arc with your first content to your lower left and then around your computer’s edge in the order spoken. Just don't cover the camera!
• Use different colored notes to separate your sections or to cue you to turn slides on or off.
• Then practice with these prompts, letting your eyes “grab” a little content when you need it by flicking to the Post-Its and back to the camera. This mimics the way our eyes move when thinking.

And because the Bird’s Tail Post-Its are small, they force you to speak from bullets instead of sentences, assuring a more natural read. That’s it. Prepare your talk, presentation, or pitch with these Bird’s Tail notes and you’ll see the rise of your own sense of engagement and the responsiveness of your audience.

Don’t forget to circle back to our next issue, where I’ll share a way for you to drastically reduce the pressure you place on 80 percent of your virtual appearances while really hitting a home run on the other 20 percent.

Our wonderful micro-learning course on this subject, The Secrets of Virtual Impact, is available free to anyone who has lost their job in the pandemic and needs to be impactful online in their next interviews. Please let us know if you need a little help (or if you would like to enroll your team!).

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Featured in Forbes and Fast Company, Juliet Funt is a renowned keynote speaker, tough-love advisor to the Fortune 500, and founder and CEO of WhiteSpace at Work, where she helps organizations like Spotify, National Geographic, Anthem, ESPN, Nike, and Wells Fargo liberate their talent and speed execution. Her first book, A Minute To Think (HarperCollins), is available for preorder.