Hybrid Presentations: Expert Coaching Makes The Difference

March 24, 2023 // Educational Series

Your pulse is beginning to pound. Dozens of tiny faces are looking at you expectantly. You’re sharing your screen, and vainly searching for the right spreadsheet in a mountain of tabs. You’re stammering, fumbling, and worrying about the unflattering close-up picture that your laptop’s camera has been delivering to your audience. What you’re experiencing is an acute onset of Virtual Stage Fright, but here’s the good news: metroConnections has a cure.

“We saw it happen to everyone—professional speakers, C-suite executives, you name it,” chuckles Bill Sather, metroConnections Vice President of Technology, “No matter how experienced you are with public speaking, it can be really difficult to connect to your audience through a computer screen.”

Whether you’re hosting a fully virtual event, or simply need to provide a virtual option for remote audience members – metroConnections has the team and technology to guide you from the planning phase through final presentations. metroConnections offers their in-house solution VEX Pro to assist in creating that virtual reach. VEX Pro is a virtual platform that allows conference and marketing professionals to produce a very polished virtual experience while providing analytics and security.

During the ensuing years since virtual and hybrid meetings and presentations became commonplace for businesses all over the world, Bill and his staff at metroConnections have helped clients of all sizes execute thousands of hybrid and virtual meetings. From massive, public-facing branding exercises like QVC’s Beauty Bash [LINK], to targeted breakout sessions with small, tight-knit teams, metroConnections has the expertise to help companies get the most value out of their hybrid and virtual events. That process all starts with your first point of contact: A dedicated Show Producer like metroConnections’ own Chris Daniels.

“One of the advantages that we have with virtual presentation components is that there are more opportunities for preparation with speakers and transitions between live and pre-recorded content ahead of the event,” Daniels explains.

“Show producers will often conduct speaker prep meetings with our presenters well in-advance, which gives us extra time to iron things out that we wouldn’t have with only on-site rehearsals for an exclusively in-person event.”

Often hybrid events are some of the best-rehearsed productions from client teams. Daniels says that these speaker prep sessions can be a big difference maker, regardless of a presenter’s level of confidence. Show producers like Daniels use these meetings to better understand the presenters and the content they’ll be delivering, and to assess each speaker’s respective experience level. metroConnections then provides speakers with tips and best practices if necessary, and coordinates with their speaker to make sure that the technical side of their remote set-up is going to be up to the challenge.

Because of their extensive track record in the virtual space and their ongoing enhancements to VEX Pro, metroConnections can also make recommendations for content and visual style tweaks that will help make your show memorable and engaging for your audience. Utilizing equipment and techniques borrowed from the broadcast media world, their staff can provide a cinematic flair that elevates your events above the competition’s.

“We’ve had multiple clients and speakers tell us that working on hybrid and virtual events with us felt like making a successful movie or TV show,” says Daniels, “We love to get that kind of feedback because in a way, that’s exactly what we’re doing.”