Danah’s story

Danah had prepared a new presentation for the conference and she was working from a script. She was initially rattled by the set-up: a flat lectern, a Twitterstream displayed on the screen behind her, and bright lights blinding her. But it got worse – here’s what she experienced:

And then, within the first two minutes, I started hearing rumblings. And then laughter. The sounds were completely irrelevant to what I was saying and I was devastated. I immediately knew that I had lost the audience. Rather than getting into flow and becoming an entertainer, I retreated into myself. I basically decided to read the entire speech instead of deliver it. I counted for the time when I could get off stage. I was reading aloud while thinking all sorts of terrible thoughts about myself and my failures. I wasn’t even interested in my talk. All I wanted was to get it over with.

Here’s what had happened. People had started giving feedback on Twitter that she was talking too fast. Then some wits made some smart comments – hence the laughter. When danah later heard that the initial problem was simply that she had been speaking too fast, her response was:

OMG, seriously? That was it? Cuz that’s not how I read the situation on stage. So rather than getting through to me that I should slow down, I was hearing the audience as saying that I sucked.

Danah was the only person in the room who didn’t know she was speaking too fast. The one person who needed the feedback didn’t have it. If somebody had just told her that she needed to adjust her pace, the presentation meltdown could have been averted.

Decide what backchannel feedback you can respond to

That’s why I now think that you should have a system for receiving backchannel feedback, so that you can do something about it while you still can.

Now I totally get that just getting through a presentation can be challenge enough – without having to think about adjusting to feedback that you get from the audience. But what would you prefer? To get the feedback that you’re talking too fast, or to go through the emotional trauma that danah went though?

But you don’t want to receive all the backchannel feedback in real-time – that would be overwhelming. And I don’t believe that it’s possible to genuinely connect with your audience and monitor the backchannel at the same time. So you need someone to help you – a backchannel moderator who will filter the backchannel and only pass onto you the feedback that you can respond to during the presentation.

You need to be the one to decide what type of feedback you can respond to during your presentation and what you can’t. To help you work this out I’ve grouped the feedback you might receive into five categories:

Delivery issues

For example:

• you’re speaking too fast or too slow
• I can’t hear you
• I can’t see your slides
• I can’t hear the video/ the video is deafening me

These are all issues for which you could take remedial action. To ignore this feedback is a missed opportunity to improve the audience’s experience of your presentation.

Understanding issues

You might get feedback indicating that people don’t understand your content. For example:

• what does “xxxxx” mean?
• I’m confused

Ignoring this feedback will have an impact on your audience’s attention – those people who don’t understand will start to tune out. Responding to this feedback may require you to adjust your content a little eg: using a different word or phrase, or explaining what you mean. And then you can get straight back into your prepared content.

Level of your content

You could receive feedback that your content is too basic or too advanced:

• I’ve heard all this before
• I’m ready to move on

This does require some on-your-feet dexterity. Depending on how you’ve organised your material you may be able to react to this in real-time. For example, say you’ve planned your presentation to first cover background and then get into practical details – it may be that you fast forward to the second part of your presentation. If you prepare your presentation as a number of discrete modules you’ll find that adjusting your content to audience feedback will be much easier.

Disagreement with your content

For example:

• I disagree that…
• What about the point of view that…

If you’re totally in command of your material and have the ability to respond without preparation, you might choose to respond to this feedback. But this type of feedback has more potential to throw you off course and your lack of response won’t affect the ability of the audience to understand the rest of the presentation.

Environmental issues

Note that there are also environmental issues eg: room too hot or too cold, sightlines etc. that could affect your audience. The host should be monitoring these issues and taking action to fix them without you having to be bothered.

Discuss with your backchannel moderator

Share these categories with your Twitter moderator and discuss with them:

• what category of feedback you want to be told about
• the number of tweets in that category that should trigger them to alert you. If only one person out of 500 tweets that you’re going too fast it’s probably not a big problem.
• how the moderator should alert you to the feedback. They could pass you a paper note or you could set up a monitor on the stage that is used exclusively for them to communicate with you (open a private chatroom using TodaysMeet or other service).

Go well with your presentation…as with danah, being aware of this feedback could make all the difference to your success.

Related posts:

1. The two best alternatives to Twitter as a presentation backchannel
2. How to tweet during a presentation
3. Should you display the live twitter stream on a large screen?

I’ve written a free eBook “How to present with Twitter (and other backchannels)” to help you avoid that fate. There’s no sign up required. Just click and read.

I asked my trusted and expert community to review the book and say what they thought of it:

“Fantastic eBook! Outstanding information and well worth the read.” Jeff Hurt, @JeffHurt and MidCourse Corrections

“Wow! I really enjoyed this book. Very useful and very thorough. An eBook that every modern presenter and panelist should read.” Laura Bergells, @maniactive and More than PowerPoint

“Don’t get caught without Olivia Mitchell’s just-in-time guide to the technology, tips and tactics speakers need to navigate the Twitter backchannel when they’re presenting.  With steps to take before, during and after your presentation, Mitchell creates a useful path that underscores what it takes to effectively engage a live (and remote) audience today.  A must-read.”  — Denise Graveline, @dontgetcaught and  The Eloquent Woman

Download the eBook

Note: There are a lot of clickable hyperlinks in the eBook. You’ll find these easier to use if you download the eBook to your computer (rather than just reading it in your browser). To do this in Windows, right-click the link and then click on “Save link as’ or “Save target as’.

In the eBook I show you:

• The three stages of presenting with Twitter
• Simple steps to take avoid being roasted
• How to build your “Twitter team”
• How to respond to negative tweets
• The top Twitter tools for presenters
• Alternative backchannels to Twitter and when to use them
• How to use Twitter and other backchannels to encourage audience participation.

Download “How to Present with Twitter (and other backchannels)”

Updating

This eBook will get out-of-date very quickly. For updates click here.

Cliff Atkinson’s book

Cliff Atkinson (author of  Beyond Bullet Points) has written a deeper exploration of the impact on Twitter on presenting. His book “The backchannel: How audiences are using Twitter and social media and changing presentations forever” is being released on 30 November and is available to preorder on Amazon now. It’s an ideal companion book to my eBook.

Check out the book’s website www.backchannelbook.com .

If you buy it through this link I earn a few cents.

Related posts:

1. The two best alternatives to Twitter as a presentation backchannel
2. 10 tools for presenting with Twitter
3. Powerpoint Twitter Magic – now you can tweet from PowerPoint

Thank you Timo – you’re a star!

Go to Timo’s PowerPoint Twitter page to download the add-in. Open PowerPoint, and click on the Add-in ribbon. Then click on Autotweet – highlighted in this screenshot:

You’ll get this Dialog box:

Then type your tweet into the Notes pane of your PowerPoint slide. Type [twitter] before your tweet and [/twitter] after your tweet. Then when you click onto that slide, that tweet will get posted to Twitter.

This new tool is in alpha mode – meaning it’s not yet been thoroughly tested (Timo is looking for testers). In my first test it worked beautifully.

What about Keynote users?

You’ve already got an add-in. It’s called Keynote Tweet and works in much the same way.

Why would you want to do this?

There’s lots of tweeting going on at conferences. But often the presenter is the only one not taking part. This way you can be present in the backchannel of your presentation. And you can make it easy for your audience to retweet the main points of your presentation (make sure your tweet is easily retweetable by allowing space for “RT @yourusername” within the 140 characters).

One warning – create two versions of your PowerPoint show – one with the tweets and one without so that you can practice with your slides without sending multiple tweets several times over.

Related posts:

1. How to tweet during a presentation
2. 10 tools for presenting with Twitter
3. 8 things I learnt about using twitter as a participation tool

The advent of the backchannel is a tremendous opportunity for presenters. The backchannel is an online conversation that takes place at the same time as people are talking live. Audience participation didn’t use to scale easily beyond a small group. Now, the backchannel allows every audience member, whatever the size of the group, to be an active participant. However, if you plan to use a backchannel proactively in your presentation, it may be better to use a backchannel tool other than Twitter. This is because:

1. Twitter users won’t have to be concerned about overwhelming their followers with a series of presentation-specific tweets.
2. Anybody can access and contribute to the backchannel without having to register.

That makes the backchannel more inclusive – no Twitter-divide – and allows the backchannel to become a lot more intimate amongst conference attendees.

Nina Simon of Museum 2.0 has written a great account of using both Twitter and a no-registration backchannel tool, TodaysMeet, at the WebWise 2009 conference:

“Whereas Twitter provided the conference highlights to a wider audience, TodaysMeet allowed attendees to delve deeper into individual moments and questions.”

The other presentation-friendly backchannel tool I’m aware of is Backnoise (do tell me if you know of others). (You may have heard of Backnoise. It was used as a backchannel at the New Media Atlanta conference. There wasn’t a good fit between the speakers at the conference and the audience and the backchannel descended into snarky chaos.)

Review of TodaysMeet and Backnoise

Both TodaysMeet and Backnoise are ultra-easy to use. You go to the website, choose a name for your “room” and start chatting. That’s it.

There are other chatroom applications (Chatzy, Tinychat) but they have features which make them less presentation-friendly (eg: having to invite people to join by email) so I don’t recommend them.

Here’s a comparison of TodaysMeet and Backnoise:

TodaysMeet	Backnoise
Very easy to use	Easy to use
Twitter integration (introduced on 30 October)	Twitter integration
140 character limit	400 character limit
	Has “Buzzkill” function*
Have to put in a name (but you could put in an alias)	Can remain anonymous
	Can mute specific people from your own screen (other people will still see them)
Has a fullscreen display function	No display function but working on it
No archiving of content – but working on it	No archiving of content

*Update: Backnoise and Buzzkill

Initially the Buzzkill function on Backnoise could be used by anyone at any time to delete all the conversation content up to that point (and it still says this on the website). I didn’t get the point of this, and certainly thought it would be a disadvantage in using Backnoise as a constructive participative backchannel. Keith McGregor, the developer of Backnoise, has changed the way it works:

“Buzzkill allows a segment of the conversation to fade away. Repeated buzzkills by others fades the text further and further, until it vanishes. Each viewer gets a limited number of times they can buzzkill a conversation. This limits abuse by an individual. Collectively, however, the community of the conversation can fully mute portions”

This is definitely an improvement, although I’m still not sure how I would want to use this functionality in a presentation context. How do you think it could be used?

Which is best?

Now that both TodaysMeet and Backnoise have Twitter integration, TodaysMeet is the slightly better tool because of its fullscreen display.

9th November update: Charlie Osmond of www.freshnetworks.com has just let me know about using Google wave as a backchannel. Check out his post Google Wave vs Twitter at conferences.

Note: This is an excerpt from my forthcoming free eBook “How to present with Twitter (and other backchannels)”. If you’d like to know as soon as it’s released sign up here:

I’ll let you know when it’s released, and then when I update it. I won’t send you any other information or use your email in any other way.

Related posts:

1. How to manage feedback from the presentation backchannel
2. 10 tools for presenting with Twitter
3. How to present with Twitter and other backchannels

Presenting while people are tweeting is challenging – but also adds a new dimension to the presentation experience for your audience. Gradually tools are being developed to make it easier for you as the presenter to manage the backchannel.

Posting Tweets during the presentation

Crafting a set of tweets for the main points of your presentation and then tweeting them as you make those points in your live presentation is a great way to be part of the Twitter conversation.

Both Keynote and PowerPoint have add-ins which allow you to automatically send a tweet when you click on a slide.

Keynote Tweet

Keynote Tweet allows you put your tweet wrapped in [twitter] tags in the presenter notes pane for that slide and when you click onto that slide, the tweet gets published.

AutoTweet

AutoTweet is a new add-in for PowerPoint developed by Timo Elliot of SAPWeb2.0. It works in the same way as Keynote Tweet. For more information see PowerPoint Twitter Magic.

Monitoring Twitter feedback

I don’t recommend trying to scan the twitterstream at the same time as you’re talking. But you can take Twitter breaks – where your audience can tweet and you can read the Twitterstream for realtime feedback. Or if your presentation includes interactive exercises for the audience take those moments to look at the Twitterstream.

SlideSix

Todd Sharp of Slidesix is developing a desktop version of SlideSix which will have an extra pane in the presenter view of the slideshow, showing you the twitter feedback.

You can, of course, monitor the reaction to your presentation through your normal twitter client or any number of twitter search applications. But I love the idea of not having to switch applications, so kudos to Todd Sharp for this idea.

Displaying the Twitterstream within your slides

During a presentation (as opposed to a panel discussion) it will normally be most effective to only show the twitterstream at certain times during your presentation (see my post Should you display the Twitterstream? for thoughts on this). For example, display the screen when you’ve asked a question and want people to respond via Twitter or when you invite audience members to ask their questions using Twitter. There are two applications which allow you to pull tweets into your PowerPoint show. That means that you don’t have to switch to a different application.

SAPWeb2.0 Feedback slide

Timo Elliot of SAPWeb2.0 has developed a very elegant solution. You put in a search term at the bottom of the slide and it pulls in the most recent tweets with that term.  Here are the results for #pptlive on 12 October.

Timo has instructions on his website for how to create this slide in your own slidedeck. Update: In brief you just  cut and paste from his slide to yours. Update (25 Oct 09): Timo has made some brilliant improvements to his already excellent application. He’s made the Twitter avatars and links within tweets clickable. And he’s also teamed up with TidyTweets to allow filtering and tweet by tweet moderation:

Update 29 October: Tidy Tweets is free for personal use, but costs $10 a month for business use.

SAPWeb2.0 has another method for pulling tweets into a PowerPoint slideshow. It’s a Twitter ticker bar that runs along the bottom of your slides:

Generally, I wouldn’t recommend using this as it’s highly likely to distract your audience. During most types of presentation, I think it’s best to only display tweets when that’s what you want your audience to focus on. But there are times when it could be a fun addition.

Poll Everywhere

Poll Everywhere also allows you to pull tweets into a slide. But the procedure is a bit more complicated. You ask a question and the audience responds by tweeting @poll and including a specific number with their answer. Their answers are anonymous unless you upgrade to a paid version (the lowest price point for personal use is US$15 a month).

As you can see the look of the slide is not terribly exciting. You can change the color of the background and text and that’s it. If you want to remove the logo you have to upgrade to a paid version. One of their paid plans (US$65 a month) also allows you to moderate tweets before they’re displayed.

In the context of a live presentation, I’m not sure what this adds to simply asking your audience to tweet with a particular search term and displaying the resulting tweets on the screen. And if you want the results to be shown within PowerPoint, the SAPWeb2.0 slide looks much more elegant. However, Poll Everywhere does have the advantage that people not on Twitter can text messages (as long as in you’re in a country with coverage – not New Zealand!)

Voting with Twitter

Both Poll Everywhere and SAPWeb2.0 also have the ability to conduct a vote with Twitter. In decision-making meetings I can see this could be particularly useful.

Other applications for displaying the Twitterstream

There may be times in your presentation when you want to display the Twitterstream separately to your slideshow. There are many different applications for doing this. Julius Solaris has a round-up on his post 5 ways to visualize twitter at Events. But we have very different criteria. For him, the more distracting the animation the better. His favorite Visible Tweets reminds me of the worst type of PowerPoint animation:

I prefer a very plain display.

Simple systems for displaying the backchannel

Tweetchat is my favorite. It’s a simple display without distracting animations. Tweetchat allows you to block particular users (click on the user control link). And it has a pause function which is very useful if you want to discuss a particular tweet and you don’t want it to disappear off the screen.

Twitterfall is also presentation-friendly. It also allows you to exclude specific terms – which can include a Twitter username if a person is tweeting inappropriately. It’s only failing is that the pause function is not available from the fullscreen mode (Twitterfall calles this the Presentation theme).

More complex systems for displaying the backchannel

Paratweet has a free version which does auto-filtering (ie: screening out tweets with profanities) or you can upgrade to a paid version ($80 a month) which allows you to moderate Tweets:

I found it quite complex to use.

Twubs is free whilst it’s in beta. It also seems to have an easy method of approving tweets for display:

As well as allowing you to choose which tweets are displayed, it will also display other media – such as photos, videos etc. Twubs has lots of other features which will be of interest to event organisers.

Wiffiti also does a lot more than just display tweets. It’s primary use is to create “digital signs”. The site says that it allows moderation, although it doesn’t show how it’s done. Here’s a screen that I created for the #pptlive hashtag.

A neat feature is that you can upload your own background to the display.

A note on moderation

Moderation allows you to approve tweets one-by-one before they are displayed on the screen. There are two ways of looking at moderation. Either you can use it to screen out offensive or off-topic tweets. Or you can use it to highlight the most useful tweets. For example, if you’re asking people to ask their questions via Twitter, and there are far more questions than you can handle – you could pick out the questions you want to answer and display those. An idea for a future application is a system which picks out the tweets with the most retweets. Then you could ask the audience to retweet the questions that they most want addressed – and just display those.

If you do decide to use a display tool which allows moderation, I recommend having a colleague do this, rather than trying to do it yourself during your presentation.

And the application I couldn’t leave out

This is not primarily a presenter tool, but it’s so impressive and so useful I couldn’t leave it out. A Seat Apart was developed by Allister Klingensmith literally over night at An Event Apart 2009 conference in Boston. It matches a person’s twitter username with where they’re sitting. The virtual world of Twitter and the real physical world get integrated. I think this is a fantastic way to ensure that the community feeling that builds up on Twitter is translated to real life.

Each box in the picture below represents a seat. If the person is on Twitter it shows their Twitter avatar. This is a static screenshot but if you go to the A Seat Apart website you can see that when you rollover an avatar you see the Twitter username.

This application is not in general release, but I’ve emailed Allister and he says if you want to use it for your presentation, contact him through his website: www.getsugarspun.com.

What next?

I’m looking forward to more applications being developed to make presenting with Twitter easier for presenters. If you know of a tool that I’ve missed out, please let me know and I’ll add it in.

9th November update: Charlie Osmond of www.freshnetworks.com has just let me know about using Google wave as a backchannel. Check out his post Google Wave vs Twitter at conferences.

This is an excerpt from my forthcoming free eBook “How to present with Twitter (and other backchannels)”. If you’d like to know as soon as it’s released sign up here:

I’ll let you know when it’s released, and then when I update it. I won’t send you any other information or use your email in any other way.

Cliff Atkinson has written an excellent book “The Backchannel: How audiences are using Twitter and Social Media and changing presentations forever” which is to be released on 27 November 2009. You can pre-order it on Amazon here (if you order through this link, I’ll get a few cents).

Related posts:

1. Powerpoint Twitter Magic – now you can tweet from PowerPoint
2. 8 things I learnt about using twitter as a participation tool
3. The two best alternatives to Twitter as a presentation backchannel

The research

Tony McNeil reports on a survey of 103 people from a conference on learning technology in April 2009: More than just passing notes in class? Reflections on the twitter backchannel.

More than a quarter of the conference twitterers said that they had sent dismissive or dissenting tweets during presentations. These usually related to disagreements around the content of a presentation. One tweeter admitted to tweeting that a presentation was boring and a waste of time.

Some of these respondents claimed that their critical tweets were no different than what they would have been prepared to say face to face.

Are snarky tweets a problem?

However, it does seem that negative tweets can be a problem:

Marieke Guy says:

I’ve watched Twitter back channels at events for some time now and have on occasions felt quite uncomfortable reading some of the personal comments made. It’s almost as if people think that because it’s being said using a social networking tool (rather than in the ear of the person next to them) it’s OK. Quite the opposite. I’m sure there is many a presenter who has put themselves through hell reading the unkind comments written about them.

Peter Bromberg had this to say after a conference:

Twittering snide, insulting remarks about your fellow committee members while they speak and marking it with #ala09 hash tag to ensure that the widest possible audience sees your comment: REALLY VERY NOT GOOD

Are guidelines needed to minimize negative tweets?

McNeil asked his respondents whether they thought guidelines were necessary. Forty-nine people were against having guidelines, and 40 were for.

Some of those against guidelines said they trusted their fellow twitterers to use the backchannel responsibly. But there were others who were adamant that having guidelines was against the spirit of Twitter:

“If you constrain me, I will buck the system just because!”

“I would resent greatly an imposed set of best practices for this tool.”

However, 40 people did agree with having guidelines. Most of these were more concerned with practical than moral issues eg: consistent use of hashtags. However, a number suggested guidelines to minimize “snarky” tweets. For example:

“Do no harm ie: conduct the conversations with the same level of courtesy and respect that one would expect of any professional interchange. No publicly flaming speakers.”

“Only tweet what you would stand up and say publicly.”

What should be the guideline?

I think it would be useful to develop a shared etiquette around tweeting during presentations. I think conference organizers could include such a guideline in the conference programme (personally I don’t think much of the maturity of a person who will rebel against a guideline just because).

I like the idea of the principle that you should only tweet what you would be prepared to say face to face.

But in practice, it’s quite challenging. At Presentation Camp LA I tweeted this:

Being stimulated by Jeanne’s acting workshop. But not convinced that bringing acting techniques into presenting is useful. #pcampLA

Now, I think it’s a perfectly polite tweet and I could have said this out loud during the presentation. But I didn’t. Partly because it didn’t fit with the flow of the workshop and partly because I didn’t want to.

So was it wrong for me to tweet this? Not necessarily.

A professor using twitter in classes (I don’t have the link at the moment – will add it when I’ve found it) found that some students who had never contributed before, started contributing through Twitter, and some started contributing out loud as a result.

Many of us are frightened of challenging people out loud, and I think holding people to the standard of only tweeting what you would be prepared to say face-to-face would stifle valuable debate. Instead, how about seeing twitter as a channel for encouraging dissent and challenge which has previously remained hidden out of fear or politeness.

And possibly this will then grow people’s confidence so that the debate does take place out loud – which I agree is the ideal.

So my suggestion is that the guideline should be that you should only tweet what would be considered acceptable to say face to face. What do you think?

Related posts:

1. Powerpoint Twitter Magic – now you can tweet from PowerPoint
2. 8 things I learnt about using twitter as a participation tool
3. Is Twitter a good thing while you’re presenting?

I’m more impressed that somebody would write such a paper, than by the paper itself.

The paper reports on a survey of tweeters at five different conferences.

The methodology of the survey seems a little light. Only 41 people responded to the survey (the url for the survey was circulated using twitter and the conference hashtag). The paper doesn’t mention how many people in total were at these five conferences and how many of those were tweeting. But, 41 seems a pretty low number. There’s no discussion of sample size or statistical significance.

The authors of the paper (Wolfgang Reinhardt, Martin Ebner, Gunter Beham and Cristina Corta) do not appear to be native English speakers. I totally admire anyone who can write an academic paper outside of their mother tongue, but it does lead to awkward phrases at times.

Still, I’m not aware of anyone else having done a survey like this, so it’s interesting to see what results they got.

The purpose of the survey was to “understand the motivational aspects of the use of Twitter during conferences.” The researchers asked about the purpose of tweeting. I’ve reproduced below the actual chart of the results as it appears in the paper:

I assume the vertical axis is the percentage of respondents who ticked a specific purpose, and I assume they could tick more than one (this is not clear from the paper).

In summary, ‘ sharing resources’ and ‘communicating with others’ were the most important uses of twitter for these respondents.

The researchers also asked open-ended questions which resulted in comments very similar to the stream of comments you find on conference blogs about the use of twitter. The most interesting question asked the respondents’ opinions on the value of tweeting in conferences:

Twitter helps you reach out to others with similar interests, provides networking potential, and allows people who could not attend to gain some value from your experience.

You get to know unexpected but interesting topics and persons. This emerges networking and knowledge building [sic].

…alerted delegates to the emerging issues and discussion they might otherwise have missed.

Twitter can be distracting. For people actually there, they maybe spend more time with their computer or phone than talking to people.

So that’s it, the first academic paper (that I know of) on Twitter and conferences.

Related posts:

1. Should you display the live twitter stream on a large screen?
2. Is Twitter a good thing while you’re presenting?
3. How to tweet during a presentation

Sir Ken Robinson speaking at "Hacking Education" organised by Union Square Ventures. Photo used with permission from Fred Wilson

Having twitter on a large screen can enrich the conference experience. Here’s a report from the Museums and the Web conference 09:

So when the conference delegates arrived at the auditorium for the conference welcome and opening talk we found two computer displays: one of the speaker’s slides and the other a display of Twitter posts tagged with the #mw2009 tag, using the Twitterfall software,  And judging by comments made on the conference blog, many people found that this live display of tweets in the opening session provided a valuable way of developing a shared sense of community and active participation which continued throughout the conference, with many newcomers subscribing to Twitter, following the more well-established Twitter users and engaging with the discussions themselves.

Twitter can also allow the conversation to continue after the conference. At the Travolution Summit 2009 , 200 of the 1,150 tweets using the #travsummit hashtag were after the event. The organiser, Kevin May, comments:

Now this is where it gets interesting. Post-event analysis and continuing the conversation was, until now, the Holy Grail of event organisers.

However, there is a downside. Distraction:

Museums and the Web conference 09

Which is not to say that everyone found the Twitterfall display useful: some participants, for example, did find the display distracting.

Richard Mulholland at NetProphet 09

…looking around the room, more people are watching the twitter screen than are listening to Arthur’s great preso.

But you can get the benefits of conference tweeting without the distraction by choosing carefully when to display the twitter stream on a large screen. The decision depends on the nature of each session: is it a presentation, panel or a discussion? Let’s look at each in turn.

Live twitter screen during a presentation

My advice is to only show the twitter stream when it adds to the presentation- just like any visual.  With an actively tweeting audience, a twitter stream can move extremely fast. It will be very hard for the audience not to pay attention to the constantly moving screen – so it’s likely to be distracting. If it’s on the large screen it’s no longer an opt-in experience.

However, I think that Twitter can be a great audience participation tool. And it will be much more inclusive if you do display the twitter stream, so that non-tweeters can see it too. So have the twitter display ready to go (use the remote of the datashow projecter to hide the screen) and turn it on just when you want it. That could be when:

• you ask for audience input on a particular point
• you ask the audience for questions
• you take “twitter breaks” specifically to look at the twitter stream and address any issues which have been raised.

For more ideas on this see my posts 8 things I learnt about using Twitter as a participation tool and 7 ways to use Twitter to engage your audience.

Live twitter stream during a panel

Twittering during a panel allows the audience to have direct input into the questions being asked of the panel. It allows the tweeters in the audience to mould the experience in a way that otherwise would not be possible. This can take place without the twitter stream being displayed – but that excludes those not on twitter. Having the twitter stream displayed also allows panelists to refer visually to specific tweets as they respond to them. Mike McAllen (@mmcallen) reported back from  Blogworld 08:

In one of the panels I attended they had the breakout screen projecting a twitter search feed (http://search.twitter.com) To make it work the moderator made up a conference room tag #PR08 and the people sitting in the audience had a running dialogue with what the presenters were talking about. This dialogue was between audience members, and of course anyone else who wanted to see what was going on anywhere in the world (with an internet connection)

So the audience was real time commenting and asking and forming the best questions together for the panel. It was fascinating. I find panel discussions usually frustrating because each panelist is usually fighting for time to speak or someone drones on and on. This way the audience is the real moderator.

Live twitter stream during a discussion

This is where Twitter really comes into it’s own – allowing more than one person to have a voice at the same time: Fred Wilson describes his experience:

It is hard to moderate a conversation of 40 people and there are times when several people want to make a point but one gets the opportunity. I started to notice that the others would simply post their thought to twitter instead which allowed the rest of the room to see what they wanted to say in parallel with the point that was being made live.

Downsides of displaying Twitter

There are some other downsides of displaying Twitter on a large screen:

1. Spammers and trolls may be attracted by the attention they can get

And once the tag was included in the top tags of the day it, perhaps inevitably, attracted the attention of Twitter spammers, with a tweet from ‘PantyGirl’ - and an associated image being included in the live Twitterfall display. [from  Brian Kelly at the Museums and the Web conference 09]

Tweetchat allows you to block users if this becomes a problem.

2. Negative comments about the speaker or panelists

Most reports seem to be that people are courteous about what they tweet if they know it’s going to be displayed on a large screen. But there’s still a risk of this happening – and it’s something to accept.

3. Off-topic tweets

From Kevin May of the Travolution Summit

If the on-stage content started to wane, people would Tweet *other* observations, such as comments regarding the panel’s socks and footwear!

From the comments on Kevin’s post, it seems most people enjoyed a little light humor.

4. Libellous tweets

I haven’t found any reports of this happening, but it’s a risk to be aware of. This would be the one situation where it would be wise to pull the stream from the display.

Your views

What do you think? When would Twitter on the large screen add or detract from your conference experience?

Related posts:

1. 8 things I learnt about using twitter as a participation tool
2. New survey: How people are using Twitter at conferences
3. Is Twitter a good thing while you’re presenting?

Here’s what I learnt from my experience:

1. Design your presentation for Twitter

I used two strategies that took into account that my audience would be tweeting. These are the strategies:

1. Break up your presentation into small sections. Use the breaks between sections to pause your presentation and respond to questions or issues raised on Twitter. I had three sections and took a twitter break after each one.
2. Have “tweetbites” scattered during your presentation. Tweetbites are soundbites (under 140 characters of course) that will get picked up and tweeted by your audience.  Repeat your tweetbites so that people can tweet them easily. My most successful one was:

2. Encourage your audience to tweet

Let your audience know you would like them to tweet during your presentation and tell them exactly how. Set up a separate hashtag for the presentation. If your presentation is part of a conference with its own hashtag, I still recommend a separate hashtag for your session. That will ensure you can follow just the tweets for your session.

To set up a hashtag, first follow @hashtags, it will automatically follow you back. Then you simply create your hashtag by typing a hash symbol in front of your chosen tag. You can search the hashtags site to ensure your tag isn’t already in use. We found it took several hours for twitter search to pick up on our hashtag, so I recommend doing this the day before your presentation.

3. Don’t forget the non-tweeters

We did have a couple of people who were not twitter-enabled. During the twitter breaks they were able to ask questions. But it wasn’t an ideal experience for them. I don’t know whether this would be such an issue in a standard conference presentation (the fact that I was a remote presenter and that the presentation was about using twitter in a presentation – made it very tweet-focused). But thinking through how non-tweeters are going to participate is important.

4. Use multiple ways to monitor the Twitterstream

In my presentation, I suggested three ways you could monitor the twitterstream for your presentation:

1. Take twitter breaks to check out the twitterstream and answer any questions.
2. Appoint an audience member to be the Twitter monitor and to let you know when there are issues arising on the Twitterstream that you need to respond to.
3. Display the twitterstream live so that both you and the audience can see it.

I found I needed to use all three of these to try and keep up with the stream of tweets coming through (and even then I didn’t manage to keep up). There were only eight people in the room tweeting (some also tweeting remotely) but they managed to generate over 80 tweets in 40 minutes! Having the twitter monitor was the most useful strategy for me. My partner, Tony, monitored the twitterstream and wrote down the most critical tweets for me to respond to on notepaper and passed them to me.

5. Ask the audience to retweet (RT) the tweets they want you to address

This suggestion came out of a tweet interchange:

6. Let go of the illusion that you might know more than the audience

Twitter allows the audience to offer their expertise. This happened almost immediately in my presentation. We had set up a search for #prescampo at www.search.twitter.com to show the twitterstream. We used a firefox plugin called Reload Every to refresh the page every 10 seconds. Within a couple of minutes of starting @Jeffhurt (who participated remotely from Texas) suggested we use www.tweetchat.com. Wow! That was so much better. It refreshed itself as soon as new tweets came through and has a tweetbox so that you can also tweet from the page and it automatically adds the hashtag.

Thank you so much Jeff for all the expertise that you contributed during the presentation.

7. Tweet the questions you want the audience to respond to

I had planned four specific questions I wanted to ask the audience during my presentation. I had these ready to go, so that I could tweet them at the appropriate time in my presentation. I did this by having four separate twitter tabs open in firefox each with one question ready to tweet. It worked but please do tell me if there’s an easier way of doing this!

8. You don’t have to respond to all the questions during your presentation

That’s part of the beauty of using Twitter. The questions are saved for you. There were a number of questions that I missed and I responded to them after the presentation through Twitter.

This list is just my main learnings from delivering the presentation. There’s heaps more value that you can get by reviewing the twitterstream which summarizes my main points and includes the expertise of the audience. I’ve created a pdf of the twitterstream that you can download here:  twitterstream-prescampo. For those who would like the substance of my presentation, you can find it in two guest posts I wrote last week:

How to present while people are twittering

7 ways to use Twitter to engage your audience

Related posts:

1. Is Twitter a good thing while you’re presenting?
2. Should you display the live twitter stream on a large screen?
3. 10 tools for presenting with Twitter

On Chris Spagnuolo’s Edgehopper blog, I went to the next step and explored how you can use Twitter to engage your audience.

Both posts have generated a lot of buzz on Twitter and there’s a ton of comments on the TouchBase blog. There’s many useful points in the comments and I have summarized the main issues below:

Is Twitter a good thing while you’re presenting?

I actually didn’t cover this issue in my blog post on Touchbase because I thought that the debate about whether people should Twitter while people  were presenting had been had. And that most people had accepted that although they might not like it as presenters it was now a reality of presenting at technology-enabled conferences. I was wrong.

Is it rude to tweet while someone is presenting?

Some people feel vehemently that people should not tweet while there’s a presenter on stage. Here are some of the comments:

@HughBriss I still hate it when people don’t look at me when I’m talking. It seems rude, no matter what the reason. If I was an instructor I’d expect people to be taking notes but that’s a lot different than people tweeting about me or asking each other questions while I’m talking.

Mike Ashworth: Personally I believe that to constantly twitter (or talk, or text, or whisper) during a presentation (or meeting for that case) is rude. advise at start that you will be monitoring the twitter conversation and asking people to step forward to explain their tweets (pos and neg) to entire audience.

Kevin Baughen: I must be a ‘fuddy duddy’. How about we behave like grown-ups, show some respect to those speaking and try to engage in some real human skills? I’m tired of hearing technological development as the excuse for rude and impersonal behaviours.

Ira Basen: As someone who was never a big fan of passing notes in the back of the class, I see no reason to embrace its digital equivalent .

My response to this, is that rudeness is cultural. And that our perception of what is rude is changing. In the past, it might have been considered rude to interrupt a speaker to ask a question. Now, although the speaker may not like it (interrupts their flow, difficult to get back on track) it’s not seen as rude. Same with tweeting.

But tweeting while someone is speaking can still be rude

But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be used rudely. Conference tweeters need to self-moderate. Ira Basen wrote last week about being “twitter-trashed” during a presentation he gave. Here were some of the tweets:

“You can ask questions without propagating simplistic, misleading stereotypes. Ira Basen fails that test.”

“It would be easy to get angry at the odious caricature of public relations Ira Basen presents. But it is too extreme to be credible.”

They are hard-hitting. I can understand that Ira feels pretty resentful that these comments were made in a forum where he was unable to respond at the time. Would this tweeter have made these comments face-to-face to Ira at the end of the presentation? I think that that is the appropriate test. Don’t tweet anything during a presentation, that you wouldn’t say directly to the speaker.

The illusion of attention

In the past, we may have been able to enjoy the illusion that people were paying attention to us, but they could equally have been thinking about the row that they had with their spouse that morning. I believe that as speakers we need to make a cultural shift and accept that there are different ways for audiences to pay attention to what we’re saying.

Daiv Russell It’s very intriguing how the presenter feels that they “own the show”, and must have 100% visual concentration from the audience, failing to realize that greater back-channel participation is actually greater immersion in the topic at hand. Being one of those wholly-consumed audience member/participants, I’m glad, for one, to see that this perspective is shared by others, and that the benefits of discussing the material live-stream are being recognized.

Speakers embracing Twitter

Many speakers wrote about the benefits of their audience using Twitter:

Tom Collins: I enjoy doing presentations with live internet access, so I can jump to online examples in response to live questions. Can’t wait to add a twitter stream to that mix!

Sacha Chua wrote her own blog post inspired by my post: If you’re talking about the ideas that I’m presenting, fantastic! I’ve engaged you in a much better way than I could ever have if you just sat there passively listening. If you’re looking up examples I’ve quoted and bookmarking them for later reading, hooray! I’ve said something that’s sparked your interest, and you’ll take it from there. If you’re asking or answering questions about what I’m saying, wow! You jumpstart the discussion and save other people from being confused.

Dan Keldsen: Well, as someone who was thrilled to have @Pistachio tweet positively about my co-keynote at the Enterprise 2.0 conference last year, I have to say that Twitter (and things like it) add a whole ‘nother dimension to presenting. Magnifying the conversation OUTSIDE of the venue you’re in has tremendous benefits. I’d take my chances with participation of any kind, whether out loud in public or virtual, rather than just talking heads, any day of the week.

Ed Garay: As a presenter, I like the idea of offering multiple means of communication and avenues of engagement while, at the same time, getting instant feedback and the opportunity for adapting (changing on the fly) one’s talk based of people’s interest, Q&A and meaningful commentary.

Morriss Partee You left out a huge bonus to the presenter: key highlights of your presentation are being sent out to an audience much bigger than those in the room. If you have something truly insightful or newsworthy to say, your message may be retweeted far and wide.

The context of your presentation

Richard Kraneis raised an important issue regarding when tweeting is appropriate:

Presenting to 500 is different than presenting to 50, or 12. At what point do we recognize that a presenter has become a teacher and that his/her mastery/control of the class is important? Trust me, if you’re teaching someone how to use advanced Excel concepts such as pivot tables and someone is working on their laptop on something else, you’ve lost them as students.

In a small group, people can participate out loud. If we were to start using Twitter to participate in small groups it would be like that group of teenagers hanging out together and communicating through texting. The beauty of Twitter is enabling participation in large audiences.

Tweetbites

Here’s fantastic idea that came through in the comments. I’ve christened them “Tweetbites”:

Tara: I’d also suggest making presentations more soundbite heavy- easier for twitters to grab a good quote for their followers that way. I was recently at an education panel and I kept tweeting about only one guy in a seven person panel, because he had the great one-liners that would fit in 140 characters and would be snappy for those reading the tweet out of context.

Beth Kanter: I think that it places a good discipline to listen and boil down ah ha moments into 140 characters.

Ralph Basfeld: People try to put the essence of your message in 140 characters. That encourages them to think through what the core message is. They are being active, instead of passive. This is a good thing.

I connected with @apowerpoint on Twitter:  “I turned the table on people in audience who tweeted to actually give them sound bites”. His entire presentation was tweetbites.

What other comments and great ideas do you have?

Related posts:

1. 8 things I learnt about using twitter as a participation tool
2. New survey: How people are using Twitter at conferences
3. Should you display the live twitter stream on a large screen?