How Speakers Can Manage Twitter- and Live to Talk About it
Posted by @Mark Ivey, 4/2/09 Ion Digital
photo by Sean Dreilinger
Susan’s Note: The world is changing rapidly you gotta keep on investing in your practice. Twitter offers another challenge read on.
Pretend you’re a speaker approaching the stage at a big conference. As you walk up to the stage, you notice two big screens–one for your Powerpoint presentation, the other for Twitter.
Guess what? You’ve got company. Your audience will be joining you on stage, tweeting about your presentation.
Public speaking is nerve wracking enough. Now speakers will get to deal with Twitter and a new era of “participatory” presentations. Right now the “Twitter factor” in speeches is microscopic, mainly confined to a scattering of techie conferences. But it’s coming.
As usual, it’s starting with the tech savvy types who are itching to join what they see as a public “conversation.” The more voices, the merrier (see a recent post in the Pistachio blog). Corporate speakers cringe; they see a public brawl coming.
Corporate presentations are ripe for change. Many are simply boring and they fail to involve the audience enough. This is where Twitter comes in–the mere presence of it introduces its own “back channel” discussion, thrusting the Twitterers into the presentation.
This can enrich a good presentation when managed. But it can also wreak havoc, as it did at SXSW in 2008.
That’s when a BusinessWeek columnist came up short interviewing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Some audience members tweeted that she was flirting too much, asking softball questions and wasting time. The Twits rebelled and disrupted the interview.
Speech experts like Bert Decker warn of future replays. He believes Twitter will have a huge disruptive affect on speakers if allowed free reign.
A friend and former colleague of mine, senior corporate speechwriter Ian Griffin, says: “Twitter gives the audience a voice in the presentation. But it can be a little too much, like drinking straight whiskey for a speaker.”
The goal, of course, is to channel the Twitter discussion into a force that works for your speech. For speakers (and communications managers) it’s time to reassess presentation styles and start planning to adjust.
First, keep these thoughts in mind:
1) You’re not in 100% control of your audience anyhow. Audiences have been dozing off during presentations for eons, and the introduction of the Blackberry just gave them something to do. Now we have Twitter.
2) You can’t really stop the back channel conversation. Twitter will keep growing so a rising percentage of your audience will be tweeting. Better to think about how to channel that energy than fight it.
3) Your “message” is only as effective as your performance and ability to deliver a complete experience. When I saw Seth Godin speak at Cisco’s #Velocity09 in February, he clearly had a message; but it was his overall delivery—entertaining, clever, creative—that allowed him to deliver it effectively.
4) People want to explore, play; they want to engage—not just passively sit through a long speech. Twitter gives them a chance to get involved.
5) People buy into compelling stories and issues that affect them directly, not your talking points and data. Watch how they engage when you tell a personal story. Twitter is about humanizing communications.
6) People want to hear what you really think; not corporate-speak. You.
7) Twitter isn’t going away.
So it’s time to start engaging Twitter, like it or not.
Some tips:
1. Start early: If you’re leading up to a conference, try to start tweeting a couple of months ahead of time. Get a feel for what people are looking for and slowly introduce yourself—your ideas, your philosophy, etc. Ask people about their burning issues, what they’d like to see in a presentation. Wouldn’t it be neat to build part of your presentation online?
2. Be prepared. This goes without saying: know your content. You can’t fake it, and you don’t want to expose yourself to the glare of Twitter (just ask the BusinessWeek columnist).
3. Engage the Twitter audience. Manage the “back channel” and transform the Tweets into a positive force. You might have a break every 20 minutes or so to address Twitter questions (have a staff member monitor). Handle like an ongoing Q&A— be prepared to answer on the fly. Be flexible. See the Pistachio blog for more tips.
4. Tell engaging stories: A personal, engaging story is hard to interrupt and cuts through the Twitter noise vs data and hard arguments, which are easy to second guess.
5. Ask questions: again, you’re engaging. Ask the audience how they feel about XYZ subject, or if they’ve ever had a time (fill in XYZ experience). This brings the audience into the speech, fully engaging them.
6. Have a clear, compelling theme and argument: If you know your content and have a strong argument, people will respect you—even if they don’t agree with you.
7. Be yourself: Don’t try to bullshit the audience into thinking you’re someone you’re not. Talk about the issue from your experience, your perspective.
These tips are nothing new to experienced speakers; they already cover these.
But techniques like involving the audience are even more critical in the micro-blogging era. This will be more true of workshops, training and breakout sessions vs big keynotes. But even in keynotes, I see Twitter coming into play.
Even speakers like Seth Godin, with all their flair, won’t be able to ignore the Twitter force–in fact, he could be one of the first to embrace it. More voices, more drama, more interest. Good speakers will be able to leverage this to get the audience more involved.
One other value of Twitter: presentation evaluations. Until now, speakers were graded mainly by audience members filling out those pesky evaluation forms—usually as they’re running out the door. Now speakers can get real time feedback, and people even outside the conference will be able to follow.
This speech evaluation can live on in archives indefinately. Imagine being able to go back to a presentation you made 10 years ago to see how people really felt about it.
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