Using Zoom? These are the 3 biggest mistakes people are still making

The pandemic is hopefully in our rear view mirror some time in the near future, but zoom meetings are here to stay. So it is important that you are reasonably good at it and understand what you should and shouldn’t do.

Recently, Briar Goldberg, TED’s Director of Speaker Coaching outlined the 3 most common mistakes people are making when speaking over video.

1. Looking at the audience, not the camera:

This is pretty easy to fix. Your eyes tend to look at the other people on the call but should be focused directly on the video monitor camera as you are speaking.

2. You either read it or wing it:

Honor your audiences time by practicing in advance. Reading from a paper or your phone as you speak can easily become monitone and trying to wing it while stumbling with, “um” and “ah” doesn’t cut it either.

3. You let everyone turn their video off:

Can looking at everyone staring at your be distracting and stress inducing? Of course, it can. However, if you let everyone turn off their video monitor you will have no idea how your presentation is being received. It is perfectly fine to ask everyone in attendance to turn on their monitors.

Here is a link to her complete post with 4 other tips as well: https://ideas.ted.com/7-zoom-mistakes-you-might-still-be-making-and-how-to-raise-your-video-skills/