Advisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.
I’m doing some wild things to stir up my Zoom calls. These ideas may be too radical for you. But humor me, read on and let me know what you think.
Muy sabrosura!
Between work and homeschooling my kids, I have so many Zoom calls that I find myself rejoicing when someone cancels on me. It is partially due to the fact that it is hard to look at yourself for eight hours straight. Other times, it’s sheer fatigue.
I think a lot of people are in the same boat. Is anyone else “zoomed out?”
I know some of you reading this will roll your eyes at the mention of doing anything novel, fun or cool. I’ll start with the least wild of my ideas for jazzing up a boring webinar or Zoom call and work my way to the most (as Antonio says in Spanish) sabrosura!
Vamonos!
- Fun background
Most of you know that you can put up a customized background on your Zoom calls. You don’t even need a green screen to pull this off. Zoom offers a few socially acceptable options such as a bridge, a picture of the solar system, etc.
You can download a stock photo from a site such as pexels or unsplash. I opted to jolt my audience into paying attention with wacky photos such as jellybeans and penguins. Sometimes I even change the background in mid-call to keep my audience awake. You can even put a video up behind you.
What should I try next – guinea pigs or hamsters? How about E.T.? Comment on AP Viewpoint and let me know.
Caveat: don’t put a picture of a beach. Whenever I see that, I get angry because it makes me want to go to the beach with Antonio and my kids instead of being on the Zoom call. I’m not exaggerating; I actually get angry about being reminded that I’m not at the beach.
Some ideas to get you started:
- Motivational image such as someone finishing a marathon;
- Picture of the company’s office (if you are doing a webinar for a particular company); or
- Picture of you doing an appropriate hobby like fishing, sailing, or playing chess (ice breaker if having a meeting with a new client).
- Break the boredom using breakout rooms
Advisor meetings are so boring, and the longer they get the more excruciating the boredom becomes.
Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?
Create breakout rooms in Zoom and even pre-assign participants. This is best for a longer presentation, as these long ones can get really boring. For compliance reasons you may want to use this for only internal-company presentations. Meetings with the public (clients, prospects, etc.) may be harder to moderate if you have four breakout rooms going on at the same time.
- Trivia games
Break up the boredom by doing a fun trivia game. Don’t make it about something boring like IRS facts. Try using something like the Kahoot app and ask these trivia questions:
- Name three of the 10 most famous artists who died unappreciated and poor? (use this as a segue into explaining why patience pays off).
- In what year was Star Trek cancelled? (Shatner went broke after the show went off the air – use this as a way to teach a lesson about planning for the unexpected).
- In what town did Axl Rose grow up? (Just ask this question because everyone loves Axl Rose. Don’t you?).
- Scavenger hunt
Among my four kids under six years old, two are in tele-learning due to the pandemic. I haven’t become institutionalized yet due to all this, but every day I wake up saying to myself, “this is going to be the day they send me to the loony bin.” One of my kids’ teachers did a scavenger hunt and I thought it was cool. Tell the audience they have to find something in their home and award points for the person who does it first, does it best, etc.
Try finding these things:
- Something special a family member gave you (estate planning webinar);
- Something with numbers on it that you do not understand (tax webinar);
- Something that spins around and goes really fast (market outlook webinar); or
- A picture of somewhere you want to visit (cash flow planning webinar),
- Filter fun
Use an app such as Snap Camera to put a filter on yourself during a webinar. I’m pretty sure Snap Camera does not work with Zoom, but it can be used in a variety of other virtual meeting applications.
Are you bold enough to attempt these?
- Turn yourself into a tomato to express the idea of the market being ripe for a correction!
- Put on a confetti filter at the point in the meeting when you give them good news about their portfolio rebounding after the pandemic market dip!
- Put on puppy ears filter at the point in the meeting when you ask for a referral to their business partner.
Grillo, my clients will think I’m crazy, you say.
Maybe.
But some will find it cute and appreciate the laughs you gave them. You see, even if you mess up and make a total buffoon out of yourself, it’s okay as long as people remember you.
The enemy of marketing isn’t incompetence; it’s being invisible.
And even if someone never talks to you again for applying a Snap Chat filter to their meeting about this year’s RMDs, you can just say, ”Well, at least I enjoyed myself.”
Sara’s upshot
Hopefully nobody had too radical a response to these wild webinar ideas. If you survived and still like me then join my membership and you can see wild webinar behaviors like this firsthand.
Sara Grillo, CFA, is a marketing consultant who helps investment management, financial planning, and RIA firms fight the tendency to scatter meaningless clichés on their prospects and bore them as a result. Prior to launching her own firm, she was a financial advisor.
Read more articles by Sara Grillo
