How Speakers Should Integrate Social Into Their Presentation

Whether you’re a professional speaker, company representative, or panelist at a conference, you must develop a social strategy during your speaking.

The Audience Continues To Gain Power Over Speakers
A few years ago, the first major eruption occurred from the audience hijacking the attention at SXSW during an ill-fated interview on the main stage. Even weeks ago, Kanye’s debacle was commented on by Twittering attendees despite them not even having the mic.  (Update, a speaker gives her first hand story of an audience revolt on Twitter)

This week, an audience revolt happened at the Higher Education Conference, you can read about it here, here, here and here.  Although I was miles away, I was watching it unfold in real time on Twitter search –I felt horrible for that speaker who likely didn’t even know what was happening till someone posted his phone number on Twitter and people were texting him how horrible he had done. Ouch, the audience was vindictive and felt injured and wanted to get back.

Savvy Speakers Will Engage With Audience In Real World –and In Digital
Critics would suggest that monitoring the backchannel is counter intuitive to what a speaker should be doing: focused on presenting.  Yet, I’d argue that some power has shifted to the audience –and with that comes responsibility of the speaker to respond to the power shift.  As a speaker (I’m now represented by Monitor Talent), I feel empathy and at the same time am scared this doesn’t happen to me.  The best way for speakers to avoid this revolt is to make sure that they be aware of the changes in power shifts and develop a plan to integrate social.

How Speakers Should Integrate Social Into Their Presentation:

Prepare More Than Ever.  This is baseline. I could give a long list of speaking dos and don’t but there’s been books, classes, and private coaches that provide that (something I’m going to continue to invest in as I grow). It boils down to: know your audience, have strong content, practice, repeat.  The change here is that the audience will scrutinize you, grade you, for all to see.

Know Your Audience’s Social Technology Adoption. While the first audience revolt was at SXSW, a new media tech conference, where adoption of new communication tools is likely.  The Higher Education conference wasn’t focused solely on technology (update: in the comments, I learned this was a technology conference), so this revolt has moved out of the technology scene.    You’ll need to pay attention to this more at conferences where social is active, first gauge the discussion in chat rooms or twitter using search tools.  Find the conference hashtag (if there is one) to determine level of activity.

Monitor the Backchannel While Speaking. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Guy Kawasaki keynote a large conference, he monitors the body actions from the crowd and commands attention of the audience, he’s making micro-tweeks to his presentation to engage and react.   Just as speakers do this in the real world, they must be monitoring the verbal, explicit reactions in the backchannel like Twitter or a chat room.   Ask coordinators to display a monitor on stage facing you to see hashtags, use your mobile phone, or have your computer on stage to quickly see the stream.

Develop Backup Resources to Monitor. Some speakers have told me this is nearly impossible for them to do as they are focused on presenting content, here’s two tips for you. Speakers who are unable to monitor the backchannel should have a buddy attend the speech, sit in the front row, or off stage, and indicate if there’s something out of the ordinary they need to respond to.  If your speaker content is rehearsed –it should be second nature to present it.   Scoble is known for taking “Twitter breaks” during his presentation every 15 minutes to gauge the audience feedback.

Interact with the Audience: If your speech is going well, a majority of the tweets will be echos of what you’re saying then retweets.  However, some speakers should monitor and look for questions, comments, or interesting new information that would add to the presentation.  For example, at the Web 2.0 expo, I saw an audience member say my panel was boring on twitter, so I immediately shifted to Q&A which kept the audience interest.

Practice Two-Fisted Speaking. In the future, we may start to see presenters with two devices in hand: the presentation clicker in right hand, and cell phone in right hand, monitoring the flow of conversation.  Despite the presenter having great control with the clicker controlling the flow of conversation, ultimately the audience has more control as they scrutinize, talk to each other, and shape a complete other conversation.  Speakers should practice integrating input as they output in real-time first in private, then integrate into their performance.

I’d love to hear from you how speakers should respond to the power shifting to the audience, I know there’s a lot I can continue to learn in the craft of speaking.  What should speakers do?

Related Resources:

107 Replies to “How Speakers Should Integrate Social Into Their Presentation”

  1. Excellent post Jeremiah, thank you!

    Great demonstration of how social media amplifies
    WOM effects also in conferences …
    before, during and after.

  2. Grade AFTER. Let the speaker have his say. This is just high-tech heckling, mob rule, sniper-fire by text. Your petulant-myopic interests might not be universally shared, others might be actually enjoying the speech, don’t ruin it during. You think this would work in a church? Or say a Presidential address? Or at a paper-presenting Academic/Scientific speech? Even if a paid conference, a certain level of professionalism should be maintained, on both sides.

    This is really just a symptom and outgrowth of the thousands of tech conferences that have no reason to exist other than to highlight the profile of the speakers and create networkingese social-media events unto themselves, it’s not a speech, it’s an ego-worship-fest — such is a rich fertilizer bed for poor speakers, and the out-crowd having actually paid to attend, is understandably miffed. But heckling is not the answer.

    Wayyyy too much noise, in monitoring the back-channel. Anyone on that potato-chip-thin level of short-attention-span micro-bursts should be clinically evaluated. And Twitter breaks kill the flow, and cause tune-outs, takes at least ten minutes to get back to where you left off, any schoolteacher could tell you that. The buddy system would work best for all things, but per the PA system, temperature and everything outside the scope of the speech itself, should be the conference organizers responsibility, don’t lay that on the feet of the speaker.

  3. One observation – in an article about engaging the back channel you can’t post a reply using your twitter profile?

    I was at the Health 2.0 conference in SF last week and the internet access was so poor that many people gave up on any attempt at using the back channel and the resulting frustration colored our perception of the speakers. We felt trapped.

  4. This is a very interesting set of suggestions. I went to a conference earlier this week in which the backchannel was extremely active, and I’m watching the stream for another at this very moment that is even more so. Both are providing excellent discussion.

    I think of the backchannel almost as a form of active reading — it’s a way of engaging with the presentation and developing ideas. No longer to I have to sit and passively ingest the presentation, but I can engage with it.

    But, I wonder one thing here. If the speaker, especially one the backchannel users don’t know, so openly monitors the channel, does it lose its benefit? How different would the tweet streams become if the users know they are being surveilled?

    Part of the answer depends on how the speaker is using the info percolating from the backchannel. If he or she engages with it, that’s one thing. To simply monitor it might make users feel they are being watched — like bad kids passing notes in class.

    There’s a fine balance to walk here for presenters. Feedback is certainly a necessary and wonderful thing. But, backchannel spaces have persistently emerging and difficult to define ethical standards, as well.

  5. Please allow me to remind you all that the tweets from #heweb09 were primarily for those who were part of the conference. Had it not trended, most of this recoil would’ve never happened.

    I understand that Twitter is a public way of sharing your feelings/thoughts but no one outside of the conference, save a few people, would have known this was happening. Please read Tony Dunn’s blog regarding the shared experience of the 2nd keynote. See here – http://bit.ly/TdJDG

    A clear indicator that the audience is not listening?… when all of their faces are illuminated by the glow of their laptop/iphone screens. Then you’ve lost them. Heads were down. That would have been a time for the speaker to stop, take a breath, and acknowledge that it is time for dialogue.

    Despite the level of venom that was released, if you look at the back channel that you’ll see that besides the comment regarding the drop shadow, people were giving him the benefit of the doubt. That initial comment was merely for the very lame slide that sat on the screen for maybe the first 10 minutes of his intro. That was too long by any standard. Get to the meat of what you’re talking about.

    I’m sorry but I feel that the crowd of #heweb09 is now being seen as this lynch mob that is ready for it’s next keynote disaster. That is just not the case. We all shared in the experience, we’ve absorbed it, and now it’s time to move on. I would hope and expect now after this debacle and the ensuing good and bad of it that next year’s keynotes will be very primed and ready to go.

    Thank you Jeremiah for using this as a lesson. Now let’s evolve.

  6. No offense, but this reads like a 6th grader’s essay. It’s difficult to take your suggestions seriously when the writing is so grammatically incorrect, and incoherent.

  7. I was at the now-infamous keynote address, and I have to say, it wasn’t as brutal as some have suggested. (And no one was texting the speaker “to tell him how awful he was.”) It was effectively people cracking jokes to keep themselves entertained once they got bored. It was exactly the kind of comments people would write in notes to the people next to them in the past–only now it’s much, much more public.

    I can’t imagine trying to stay connected to an audience while at the same time reading their tweets. And quite frankly, this speaker would not have needed to do that. He could have just looked up and seen that the vast majority of his audience had disengaged and were transfixed by their laptops. Some common sense could have told him to make “microtweaks”–also known as adjusting his presentation to keep his audience engaged.

    The truth is, the audience has always had power–the power to whisper each other, to work on something else, to heckle, or to get up and leave. The only difference is that the audience is a lot more comfortable commenting when they can do it without standing up and disturbing the presentation, and that “tweckles,” unlike old-school heckles, can be heard ’round the world.

  8. Great post, Jeremiah.

    As a speaker, whenever I can I ask people to feel free to interrupt, ask questions, comment etc as part of the interactive process.

    As a conference organizer and sometimes informal adviser to others about speaking, I encourage them to do the same – everyone gets so much more out of it that way.

    Backchannel displays facing the audience and the speaker is a natural extension of that. I’ve been in situations where someone else is monitoring and as an audience member found it led to the presentation seeming a bit disjointed.

    Having read the commentary about the #heweb09 at other sites and the backchannel transcript, to me there’s a bigger issue than just the responsibility of the speaker.

    Responsibility of the audience: An .eduguru blogger wrote in trying to defend the audience’s behavior: “And once the tweeting started, it simply became more fun to be in the stream than put up with the presentation. In a way, it was less about being snarky towards the speaker, and more about amusing each other by sharing and exaggerating the pain.” Really? So a bit bored, we egged each other on?

    Responsibility of the organizers: At some point, the #heweb09 conference organizers selected the speaker, so they must have seen value in having him present? Heard him speak? References? Briefed him? I don’t feel sorry for them, it sounds like poor due diligence.
    I saw this tweet from Jon Hussey (@auwebmanager): “Must be a bad keynote. But after seeing the backchannel, I have to wonder if I ever want to present to this crowd.”

    I doubt anyone would, it casts an ugly shadow on the event.

    Considering social as the sole responsibility of the speaker alone seems pretty one-way (to me at least) – if that’s the case, as a society, we’ll lose the opportunity to hear some great ideas I think.

  9. Just to finish: – With power comes responsibility. I’d like to see conferences organizers set community-type rules about backchannels – they’re being used as a commons after all. It should be as routine as people being back on time, muting their phones, not smoking, etc., Passive-agressive mob behavior, whether you’re paying money to attend a conference or not, seems pretty uncivilised.

  10. As a professional speaker, there is need to deeply know the nook and cranny of the topic you want to present, you need to know your audience. You need to be dynamic in your presentation delivery in order to carry your audience along althrough your presentation with your body movement, eye contacts and various example for proper understanding.

  11. I just spoke at the UK's National Creative Industries conference in London, attended by a wide ranging group of folk from government, media, talking about the 'digital economy'. There was no backchannel at this event, but it was clear that the topic is so enormous that it would be impossible to cover all the bases for everyone. I love asking the audience questions – what are your top three hot topics – what does innovation mean to you – that sort of thing to get a more focused discussion going, and make my presentations more useful and relevant. Not all speakers are happy to adapt on the spot though.

  12. Having a backchannel does not always add significant value for the audience or presenter, and can have a negative impact on learning outcomes of a session.

    Note: There is a difference between presentation and facilitation. I am talking about the former, not so much a large conversation or Q&A panel.

    As an audience member, just because I like to be constantly plugged in and having my own conversation with peers on Twitter, on topic or off, does not mean that the online chat I will have will be a more valuable learning experience for me than entirely focusing on the presenter's offline stream. Taking notes on a backchannel is different than having conversations (posted on my blog). Personally, I know that I do not always know or do what is best for my learning, and given the temptation to make well-timed wiseass remarks on a giant screen for hundreds to see, well, no comment.

    The backchannel 'voice' or power shift given to the audience is the equivalent of handing them all microphones. A lot of people have gotten really excited about that. Most of these people are not presenters themselves. This is not necessarily about the desire for power. Yes, I agree presenters need to understand backchannels versus just killing the backchannels all together. However, there are some things we need to further understand about how our brains work with language.

    Personally, I disagree with the screen onstage in many (not all) presentation dynamics. This is not about 'relevance', it is about the human brain's limited capacity for attention. Having a backchannel of converstaion to type into or read from creates two language source inputs into our brain simultaneously, and we can truly only toggle between them, not take in 100% of each.

    Since backchannels in general are unavoidable, presenters must learn to garner respect through content, delivery, and savviness of backchannels all at the same time.

  13. Hi Jeremiah: This was a good post. It is amazing that audiences, and all of us, have the power as close as our fingers or thumbs nowadays, and can shift the groundswell one direction or another, or in multiple directions at the same time. With that power comes the responsibility to use it wisely, or constructively. It is amazing that people feel somewhat anonymous by engaging in mean-spirited, somewhat condescending, conversation in the back channel without remembering there is a real live human being in front of them. Given that, this practice will only grow and get a bit crazier, so talking about how to handle it is a very useful and valuable thing for you, and all of us, to do. Thanks for taking the time to do so.

  14. Really this great post, I had never idea about PowerPoint Twitter before. I learned new things from your blog.

  15. Really this great post, I had never idea about PowerPoint Twitter before. I learned new things from your blog.

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