Mastering Virtual Presentations

Remember when we thought video calls and virtual presentations were just a quirky pandemic experiment? Turns out, they’re here to stay, and mastering them is now as crucial to your professional toolkit as knowing the difference between BART and MUNI to get where you’re going.

Virtual presentations aren’t just about sharing information — they’re about creating connections that feel authentic. Gone are the days of boring slide decks that make your audience wish they could Alt-Tab to something more exciting. We’re talking about presentations that capture attention, spark dialogue, and leave people feeling energized and motivated. 

One thing other guides on remote presenting are not going to cover is how to deliver a successful virtual presentation that takes into account the San Francisco Bay Area’s exceptionally diverse and highly tech-savvy professional landscape. That’s why I’ve put together some of my best tips based on years of public speaking work with professionals across that nation and tailored specifically for the Bay Area’s unique professional work culture.

Professional communication has undergone a transformation that makes even some parts of Silicon Valley look a bit old-school these days. Virtual presentations now demand the same level of creativity you’d use to navigate Civic Center during Pride — with agility, awareness, and a bit of improvisational magic.

The challenge is real: How do you keep people engaged when they’re simultaneously in a meeting, monitoring Slack notifications out of the corner of their eye, and wondering if they left their phone charger somewhere? It’s like trying to perform improv comedy while everyone has one foot out the door — tricky, for sure, but far from impossible.

Some strategies that I like to suggest encourage my clients to think outside of the box.

Set the Vibe
If it fits with your workplace culture, you can try one of my favorite opening techniques which is to start with music playing as folks are joining the call. Choose something energizing yet professional, and make sure the lyrics match the vibe. Also, check that the volume is not too loud — you don’t want your audience feeling like they’re about to attempt a conversation at a concert! Logging in on a separate device like your phone is a great way to check.

Start with a Hook
Make people care from the get-go! So many people jump right into the weeds. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen eyes glaze over because they are immediately overwhelmed with details that they don’t have an emotional connection to. It’s important to cultivate buy-in and engagement so try starting with a hook like a story. For example, put up a slide with just an image — maybe something that makes them wonder, “Ooh, what’s this?” — and use it to tell a story.

“More Passion! More Energy!”
Energy is contagious — even through a screen. Before diving into a virtual presentation, take a moment to elevate your energy. Whether it’s listening to your favorite playlist or watching a funny video, find something that lifts your mood and helps you connect with a feeling that you want to carry into your presentation.

The other day I was in a virtual training webinar and the speaker’s voice was so monotone that it felt unbearable. I realized twenty minutes in that I hadn’t really been listening and knew that it would be a waste of my time to continue since I wasn’t truly engaged. I left the training. Yikes!

Your voice in a virtual presentation matters! Think of it like a singer’s — to make a melody, you need more than one note. Trust me, I’m no Céline Dion, but the great news is no one has to be to use their voice in a way that draws your audience in. The key is changing up your volume, pacing, pitch, and tone. Together, these four create the expressiveness of your delivery. 

Think of vocal variety as the audio equivalent of a roller coaster — sometimes fast and exciting, sometimes slow and deliberate, and still other times rising upward and then dropping down. This is how you keep your audience wondering what’s around the next bend. It’s not just about surprise so much as building expectation through variety. Imagine telling a story in the same tone you’d use to read a list of numbers on a spreadsheet. Who’s listening to the latest best-selling book-on-tape drama as read by an automated voice messaging system? “Anyone? Anyone?” Yeah, not me! 

Here’s the thing: our brains can’t help but tune into the natural melodies of speech. We’re social beings that are hard-wired for it because it helps us to know the difference between safety and danger, acceptance and disapproval, value and unimportance, and so much more. People connect with emotions more strongly than ideas. And we remember emotional information better, too. 

We want a storyteller, someone who can make all these little bits of information into a symphony of highs and lows, risk and reward. It’s nothing personal — we actually can’t help it! By changing up the mood in your voice, using high and low pitch to emphasize key information, and speeding up or slowing down to add drama to the impact of your storytelling, you are tapping into your audience’s brain wiring and turning that one note into a melodic symphony of information.

Imagine your virtual presentation as a potluck where everyone brings a different dish — some people want visual appetizers, others crave auditory main courses, and a few are looking for interactive desserts. The most memorable presentations are those that offer something for everyone, much like the Bay Area’s legendary food scene.

Digital whiteboards aren’t just fancy drawing tools — they’re your presentation’s living image. When you start mapping out ideas in real-time in a visual way, you’re essentially inviting your audience into the kitchen while you’re cooking up brilliance. Visual learners can see connections between ideas and spatially-oriented thinkers can see how topics group around each other.

But don’t stop there. Making use of multiple interactive tools won’t just help your audience, it will also show your skill and comfort with the virtual format. This matters even more for Bay Area audiences who are hardly new to virtual presentations. This means that the bar is set higher here than other places. 

So here are the other tools that will help you maximize your use of the virtual format: polls, the chat function, and emoji reactions. They’re not just side dishes — they’re your way of turning a one-person monologue into a collaborative banquet worthy of Mister Jiu’s.

Polls: Polls are great at gathering information from a lot of different people efficiently. For longer virtual presentations or larger groups, have your audience vote for topics or questions that they would like you to cover. This gives your audience a proactive role in setting the course of the presentation and also helps you know what they find most valuable. It’s all about finding ways for your audience to feel like they are helping to shape a shared experience.

Polls also really shine when it helps your audience feel like they have expertise to offer everyone else while also getting to benefit from the shared knowledge of the group. Think of ways to poll your audience to quickly gather insights across organizations and professional experiences. This could look like a poll on who uses what software or program functions for certain tasks, which is really useful particularly when there is a mix of representatives from small and large organizations. If you are talking to different members within a single, large organization, poll them on the most common type of customer or internal request that their department or role handles. Lastly, you can poll just about every group type on information that can be turned into numeric ranges or broad categories, like the number one issue or pain-point they run into with a particular scenario.

The Chat Function: For a lot — and I mean *a lot* — of folks, the chat function feels like a safe, comfortable, and low-risk way to contribute without having to jump into a fast-moving back-and-forth and risk cutting someone off or speaking over someone else. It’s a good idea to remind folks every now and then that the chat is available. One way to subtly do this is to narrate when you’re checking the chat every time you do so by saying, “Just taking a quick peek at the chat again,” or “Let me see how our chat is doing.” Just by saying what you are doing out loud, you are letting the group know that the chat window is an active and important part of the conversation. This becomes even more important when you have a mixed audience of in-person and virtual participants so that those who are remote don’t feel secondary.

At times, you might run into a situation where one or two people are dominating the discussion while the majority of your group is looking on and the chat is a ghost town. In this scenario, you should ask a question to the group and tell everyone to go into the chat and write a one sentence response. Then, pick some responses, and ask the person to unmute and say a little more about their response. Help keep the group on the same page by saying the responder’s name out loud and something like, “Amina, you wrote ‘Being a team player.’ Would you like to unmute and tell us a bit more?”

Emojis: Different programs use emojis in different ways, so be sure to play with the emoji and reaction options whether you’re using Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams. In Google Meet, for example, you can use emojis to react to and acknowledge chat comments. This is helpful particularly when there may be several questions or comments in the chat to address. This lets folks know that their chat message has been seen by you as the presentation leader and lets them return their focus to the discussion. If you’re in Zoom, you’ll want to type a quick response.

You can also give specific meanings to particular emoji reactions to help make interactions feel even more meaningful and to help avoid mixed messages. Here’s how you might do this: “If you hear a really great point or observation, put a clapping emoji in the chat (or use the clapping emoji reaction). If you hear a question or issue that you also have, hit the thumbs up.” When you do this, it’s important that the meaning you are giving to an emoji makes obvious sense and also that you limit it to two or three so that it’s easy for everyone to remember.

When the audience covers a wide range of ages where the meanings of certain emojis might be different from person to person, I think giving specific meanings to certain common emojis is an important way to encourage participation. Have you ever seen the memes going around about parents that text their millennial or Gen Z children with just a thumbs up emoji? What it gets at is what a thumbs up means. Most people would say that a thumbs up means that you like something. Okay, but what if someone puts a thumbs up in response to a negative experience that someone just shared? Does the thumbs up mean, “I appreciate that you shared this with us (even though it’s tough),” or does it mean, “I like that you had that (terrible) experience”? If your virtual presentation covers challenging topics, you may want to define what the thumbs up or other common emojis mean or, if it makes sense, ask the group to agree on a definition. This is not only about avoiding hurt feelings — it also helps encourage participation from people who might otherwise hold back out of worry about a reaction that they perceive as negative (but that actually isn’t) or about having their own reactions taken the wrong way.

The old-school approach of lecturing at a bunch of people came from an era when virtual presentations were literally science fiction — delivered by intergalactic robots to magical space wizards. If you want to keep your audience engaged, you need to create conversations. This is because in a conversation, participation matters which also means that attention matters. As it turns out, if you have to respond and contribute, staying engaged is rewarded rather than simply expected. Thinking of your virtual presentation as a dialogue with your audience makes all the difference.

There are many ways to go about this. I’ll offer a few ideas here, but if you are interested in learning more, you should consider signing up for one-on-one coaching with me where I can help you tailor your presentation and learn to present with confidence and authenticity.

A few of the tried and true ways to create group dialogue are:

• • Ask lots of questions that have no right or wrong answers. “What are some things that come up for you when I say, ‘XYZ’?” or “What are your goals for…?”, etc.
  • If you want to invite participation about a topic that some people might feel like have right and wrong answers, try framing your question in a way that depersonalizes the response, like: “What are some more common ideas or solutions out there in the industry about how to handle XYZ? What have you run into or seen other people try?”
  • Start a group brainstorm and be specific about what kinds of responses you want to gather.
  • Create breakout rooms and partner people up in small groups to talk through a specific problem or scenario. Ask them to pick a spokesperson to report back on two or three key points from their discussion.

Many of these suggestions work well with use of the group chat function, so keep that in mind. 

Remember that creating dialogue in an online presentation means creating plenty of opportunities for participation from all sides. Making people feel comfortable is key, and you can do this by reducing barriers to participation. When someone thinks they are risking their reputation because of how their answer might be perceived — that’s a barrier to participation. This is why creating low-risk ways to contribute to the discussion involves turning away from issues of right and wrong, true or false. Don’t make it an exam — find invitations to participate that emphasize thinking through larger ideas collaboratively. This will make it so much easier for everyone to join the conversation.

Two of the things that I will never stop loving about the San Francisco Bay Area is our commitment to people and our immense diversity. We are famously community-minded. This means that building an authentic micro-community in a virtual meeting setup requires thoughtfulness and planning. Diversity is one of our greatest strengths, and keeping this in mind is one of the best tips I can offer for those looking to master their next online presentation.

Let’s talk names. When someone in your virtual meeting offers a comment, acknowledge them by name and summarize in a few words their main point. “So Andrea says response time should be our top priority. What else?” Repeating the main point is not just about repeating the information — it’s also about making people feel like their name and presence in the conversation matter. It also helps everyone to keep track of who said what. Your approach should vary based on the particular situation and pace of the conversation. If lots of people are jumping in, try batching summaries together, like, “Francisco thinks we should aim for a March launch, and Jamal said his department would need feedback by January.”

If you are the type who sometimes struggles with names and pronouncing them correctly, be sure to take notes when you do introductions and write down phonetic spellings for folks you do not already know. Speaking of which, here’s a phrase to drop from your professional vocabulary: “I’m probably going to butcher this name.” If you regularly have your name mispronounced in go-arounds and roll-calls, or even worse — from people who you’ve already corrected before, I know you already know what I’m talking about. Even if that’s not the case for you, though, imagine how you would feel to have someone talk about your name like we talk about deli lunch meat. It’s not a good way to start a dialogue.

The San Francisco Bay Area is one of the most culturally and ethnically diverse places on the globe, which means there’s a lot of variety to names and how they are pronounced. Sometimes even a name that you’ve seen plenty of times before might be pronounced in a way that is new to you. When it comes to unfamiliar names, rather than starting from the mindset of “I’m going to mess this name up,” instead try looking at it as another chance to make a connection. No one expects you to know how to say every name on the planet. But that’s a whole other question from being open to learning the names of the people you actually are interacting with. Try these approaches:

• • If you are mostly sure that you can pronounce an unfamiliar name respectfully, say, “I might need your help making sure I’m pronouncing your name correctly.” Then give your best attempt and ask them to confirm.
  • If you are completely unsure, spell their name out loud and ask, “Would you mind helping me pronounce that correctly?” Thank them for helping you get it right.
  • If you have access to attendee names before your presentation, look up online “how to pronounce” and the name. There are hundreds of videos available.

Keep in mind that if you can’t say their name back correctly after their first attempt to help you, you may want to ask for them to say it one syllable at a time. Be sure to thank them for their patience after you ask and assure them that you are committed to getting it right. Beyond two attempts can result in a not so great experience for many, especially in front of a group, so if the second try does not work out either, let them know you’ll message them directly in chat (and definitely double check that it is not in the group chat!) and ask for a phonetic spelling. If they ask you to call them by a different name than the one that you have in front of you, go with it without question — no need to insist or comment. There’s also no need to make up a different name to call them. Remember, a person’s name is very personal, and it’s important to take your cues from them.

Virtual presentations are more than just information delivery — they’re about creating connection. This is all the more true here in the Bay Area where authenticity and a sense of community are so important, whether we’re talking about Berkeley or Oakland, the Sunset or SoMA. We’re not just sharing slides — we’re building bridges and bringing together diverse perspectives with the same creativity and inclusivity that makes our small corner of this planet so extraordinary.

So the next time you’re preparing a virtual presentation, remember: You’re not just speaking to a screen. You’re creating an experience, sparking conversations, and proving that great communication knows no physical boundaries.

Now virtually go out there and wow them!