Audience Engagement in Webex Meetings and Events

[Mary_Gonzales]

Hello community, thought I would share some tips and best practices for Audience Engagement I put together.

Audience Engagement Considerations

Webex Meetings and Events
Mary Gonzales

TME, Cloud Meetings

Webex provides Hosts with many ways to promote and encourage audience engagement during a Webex Meeting or Event.  These options can help ensure your participants are engaged and paying attention, especially in the new Hybrid work environment.   When setting the agenda and scheduling your Meeting or Event, give some thought to the tone you’d like to set.  Is your message best suited for a formal controlled experience, or do you want a more casual flow of conversation and ideas?  
At a monthly internal all-hands Cisco meeting, one person tasked with answering questions has become quite popular and I look forward to reading the Q&A as the meeting takes place. I admit to sometimes falling behind in the main presentation content because I get so engrossed in the Q&A!  Striking the right balance between allowing your audience to be engaged without being distracted from the main content of the meeting itself can be the key to a successful Meeting or Event.  

Meeting or Event  
In a Webex Meeting there are Hosts and Participants. All Participants have the same base permission sets in a Meeting. Webex Events differentiates between Hosts, Panelists and Attendee, Panelists and Attendees have different base permission sets from each other.  In both Meetings & Events as the Host, you can determine if participants can control their own microphones.  

Chat  
Do you want participants to be able to chat with each other or just with the Host?  Changing the setting in a Meeting to “Chat only to Host” gives your participants a place to ask logistical or technical questions while leaving subject matter questions for the Q&A features.  In a more casual meeting, allowing “Chat to Everyone” might stimulate the type of banter that took place during a routine in-person meeting among colleagues.  If you are using the Chat feature decide if you’d like to save the chat before your Meeting or Event ends.

Q&A  
Consider how you will take questions during your Meeting or Event.  When Slido is integrated into your Control Hub organization, you can add it into Webex and Slido will show up as a Panel inside the Webex. (When using Slido for Q&A to avoid any confusion, you may want to turn off the original Webex Q&A panel to keep all questions in one queue.) 

Will you have enough experts at your Meeting or Event to respond to questions in real time, or would you prefer to use the Slido up-voting feature to respond only to the most popular items at the end of your session?   If you would prefer to screen all questions first before they are visible to attendees, turn on “Moderated Questions” in the Slido Q&A.  There is, of course, a raise hand icon for attendees to use if you’d like to recognize the people with questions or comments in a turn taking fashion.

 
Reactions
 Reaction Emojis are another way allow participants to share feedback in real time during a Meeting or Event.  For very formal presentations, this feature can be turned off.  I’ve noticed that people are often unsure if it’s ok to use this feature, so you may want to set the expectation at the start of your Meeting or Event if you’d appreciate getting feedback with these Reactions.  Names can be attached to the reactions that scroll into the lower left-hand corner of the screen.  Hosts can uncheck “Show display name with reaction” for anonymous Reactions. When the video of all participants is being shown on screen, the Reaction will be overlaid on the participants video panel.

Video & Audio permissions, Chat, Q&A and Slido functions now available in Webex all combine to help you create the perfect level of audience interaction and engagement for your Meeting or Event.  Set your perfect combination of preferences with the tone of your message in mind and host a Meeting or Event that your participants will feel connected to and remember.

[Cole Callahan]

What a great resource for our community members to refer to! Thank YOU for sharing your knowledge with us.

[Clare Davis, Webex SME]

This is great Mary!  

Thanks for sharing...