Audience atwitter?
Recently several people have been talking about the impact of Twitter on presentations. I haven’t actually experienced it; or perhaps I just haven’t been conscious of it! Mostly it appears to be used in IT conferences, but it seems to be spreading wider than this. If it is becoming more common, it is worth thinking about how to manage its impact.
If you think of Twitter as being the expression of extraneous thoughts, related or not to the presentation, to some extent it has just brought to the surface what has always gone on for audiences anyway.
In ’self-help speak’, I wonder if it is useful to think about the challenge from a position of either scarcity or abundance?
Using the scarcity response, you would ask people to switch off their mobile phones while you are speaking. That would probably work okay with obedient audiences. I did see one speaker who announced that he would be so riveting we would discover that we wouldn’t be interested in our mobile phones – he wasn’t! One person I talked to had been part of a negatively twittering audience. He thought in that situation, the negativity was in danger of becoming a group-think response. Certainlysuch spreading criticism could easily lead a presenter to react from scarcity.
Using abundance could mean deciding that Twitter is a valuable opportunity for dialogue with the audience. You could decide that the people twittering are at least thinking about your content. You could respond to the tweets using a gatekeeper colleague, rather like the chair of a panel discussion. The colleague could monitor the tweets, looking for lines of discussion and suggesting some threads for your commentary. If you had lots of practice and could think quickly, you could even perhaps manage this dialogue yourself.
There’s an interesting post on Pistachio: Micro Sharing Macro Results. Have any of you experienced the Twittering audience?