Twitter and Presentations

At President Obama’s State of the Union address, there was a fair amount coverage by the media and by the Congressman in attendance. Several dozen Congressmen have twitter accounts and many were sending out messages during the address.

Is this Good or Bad?

What about people in the audience when you are giving your next presentation?

Is this Good or Bad?

At my recent presentation with Bruce Carton, Web 2.0 – Leveraging New Media to Maximize Your Securities & Compliance Practice, Bruce and I kept an eye on the Twitter backchannel. I had published the #SecuritiesD hashtag and publicized it on a blog post and Twitter. There were a handful of twitter users during the presentation asking questions and publishing notes about the webinar to their followers. One tweet corrected an outdated statistic I cited. David Hobbie of Caselines used Twitter to keep his notes about the webinar and to capture soundbites from me and Bruce.

I also had the experience of participating in a conference through Twitter. I did not attend LegalTech New York this year, after having attended it the last few years. Fortunately, several people I know and several people I follow on Twitter did attend. They were able to relay their thoughts about the speakers, relay soundbites and communicate with each other during the conference. I even asked a question on Twitter that got relayed to speaker, answered and relayed back to me through Twitter. The use of Twitter spread the conference beyond the four walls of the convention hall. That is very powerful.

Is Twitter a good thing during presentations? Yes!

Try integrating it during your next presentation. I will.

See also:

• This great piece on the Pistachio website: How to Present While People are Twittering.
• Is Twitter a good thing while you’re presenting? by Olivia Mitchell
• 8 things I learnt about using twitter as a participation tool by Olivia Mitchell