It used to be enough as a presenter to know your audience, have strong content, practice, and repeat.
Not any more.
Now you have to worry about the audience Tweeting about your presentation…as you’re giving it. And sometimes the comments are being projected over your shoulder, right next to your slides.
I can actually see pros and cons with this. On one hand, if you really know your topic and have practiced, this can be an opportunity to modify your presentation when you see the audience isn’t getting something or incorporate the answers to their questions right then and there, rather than hoping they’ll ask after you’re done.
On the other hand, monitoring Twitter could distract you from focusing on presenting and watching the audience for their reactions and lead you down roads that will undermine the preparation you’ve done.
And with Twitter, people who aren’t even at your presentation have an opportunity to weigh in and add to the confusion.
This issue has really come to the forefront with a recent incident at the HigherEdWeb conference in Milwaukee a few weeks ago. For some context, feel free to click on The Great Keynote Meltdown of 2009. Simply put, the presenter appears to have been ill-prepared, used outdated slides, and was a poor presenter who disrespected his audience. He took an ugly public (and private — people also texted his phone number to tell him how bad he was) beating. But this isn’t a new phenomenon.
I’m thinking about this as I prepare for a presentation on The Impact of New Credit Card Legislation on Students at a conference of financial-aid professionals in Orlando next month. Some will argue I should have already done this, but I’ll be asking the conference organizers on Monday about the level of my audience’s social technology adoption to determine whether I need to (or even can) monitor the backchannel while I’m talking. The next decision is whether I want to. What I do know is that I’ll be intensifying my preparation over the next few weeks to ensure I’m not “that guy.”
I wonder how people who Tweet during a presentation can be doing that and still pay attention. My 17-year-old, who IMs, Facebooks, and the like far more than I like, says he could — but that he would never use Twitter in that way.
I’d like to get a dialogue going on this subject. Should Twitter be banned from presentations or is it a reasonable way for the audience to interact with the speaker and just a sign of the times of the audience gaining more power? What strategies are you using in situations where conferences have a backchannel?
Bulldog Simplicity 