I recently gave a humorous Zoom speech about my aquarium. This is what happened and what I learned.
It was an ambitious experiment, I’ll admit. It was the first virtual meeting for a Toastmaster club I belong to. I wanted to give a humorous talk about my aquarium showing the aquarium LIVE through my laptop lens.
A friend of mine was in the room with me on the same Zoom call on a second computer. We recorded the talk. You’ll see many of the glitches. Many I edited out because it was, well, embarrassing!
This is what went wrong with my zoom speech experiment and what you can do to prevent the same errors
Introduction
The person introducing me say did not pronounce my name right.
It is best to make sure the person introducing you can pronounce your name. It makes both you and them look better! If giving the introducer a written introduction, include the phonetics of your name. For example, Linnaea Mallette would be Li-Nay-ya Ma-let.
The audience was not muted during the zoom speech
With Zoom, if the viewing audience has their audio on, Zoom will showcase their face when they make any noise – like chuckle or laugh. For the optimal focus on just one person, the speaker, everyone else watching should mute their audio and have the speaker pinned. (To pin a speaker, you hover over their thumbnail image in Gallery view and click on the three dots in the upper right. Choose “pin speaker.”)
In this video, you’ll see that when my friend in the same room laughed, the camera changed views from my face to my butt. Not flattering. Additionally, the zoom occasionally flashed other audience members’ faces when THEY laughed.
Did not do a complete rehearsal
I did minimal practice. I did rehearse my talk – but only the speaking part. As far as showing the aquarium, all I did was point my laptop at the aquarium to see if it showed up and it did. However, I did not rehearse the entire talk actually demonstrating the aquarium and recording the results on a Zoom call to see how it all looked. BIG MISTAKE! Here’s what happened when I delivered the talk live:
The Snafus
It was now nighttime, so the laptop light reflected off the aquarium glass. Instead of seeing the inside of the aquarium, you saw the reflection of my laptop. I had to reposition the computer, which required repositioning myself.
That was the root of the second problem. Ideally, I wanted a partial view of my face while showing the aquarium. That required me to shift positions DURING the talk. But because I didn’t rehearse that, the result was not pretty. After moving, I didn’t have time to figure out how to sit, so I had to squat. The attempt to show my face and the aquarium at the same time was futile. Every now and then, you could see a small piece of my big fat face interchanged with views of my big fat rear end each time my friend in the same room laughed.
Lessons learned
In this Zoom speech experiment, I accomplished my primary goal. I made everyone laugh. My audience was thoroughly entertained.
What I learned is how critical it is to rehearse a talk completely, thoroughly, including the use of any electronics, props, video, etc. to the fullest extent possible.
I also learned that the audience members should be muted on Zoom calls for optimal attention to the speaker.
To this end, I humbly show the video of my talk titled, “The Uninvited Pest.”
