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Guest Post: 7 Ways to Use Twitter to Engage Your Audience

Olivia Mitchell — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 07:15:18 +0000

You’ve been there before. You’re speaking at a conference and you scan the audience. You see the flood of laptops, iPhones, and Blackberries in the audience furiously Tweeting away or using some conference IRC back channel to chat about YOUR presentation. Instead of ignoring it or asking your audience to turn off their electronics, this week’s guest blogger Olivia Mitchell has some great advice on how use Twitter and your Tweeting audience to your advantage. In this post, Olivia gives us seven compelling ways to use Twitter to engage your audience. Thanks Olivia.

GUEST POST FROM OLIVIA MITCHELL:

Audience engagement and participation is a common goal for presenters. But participation in particular can be hard to get by traditional means. People enjoy the comfort zone of being passive in the audience and often need significant prodding to do anything.

But now we have a new tool to get engagement – that’s Twitter. Many presenters are scared of presenting while people are twittering. But as Dean Shareski says:

The more I’m allowed to interact and play with the content the more engaged and ultimately the more learning happens.

Twitter makes it easy to engage. There’s not the risk of humiliation which is always present when you say something out loud. And if there’s a power heirarchy in the room, it gets flattened somewhat – everybody has 140 characters to have their say.

So rather than seeing the Twitter back channel as an intimidating third force in your presentation, embrace it.

Later this month, I’m going to be presenting remotely from New Zealand at PresentationCamp in San Francisco. I’m going to experiment with using Twitter as a channel to get active participation from my audience.

Here’s a variety of ways that you could use Twitter to engage your audience.

1. Introductions

If you would normally get people in your audience to introduce themselves, why not do it via twitter. Many people dread the round-robin introduction – doing it on twitter is quicker and less onerous.

2. Poll your audience

If you haven’t been able to find out about your audience before the presentation (which I do recommend), then ask a question and get them to respond on Twitter. In the past, I’ve seen presenters ask their audience what they want to get out of the presentation by going round the room and writing it up on a flipchart or whiteboard. This can get tedious. Ask out-loud, but get the responses on twitter. Ta-da. Instant recorded feedback.

3. Encourage questions through twitter

Instead of waiting till the end for questions, encourage people to tweet their questions as soon as they occur to them.

4. Active engagement with the substance of your presentation

My session at PresentationCamp is on developing the core message of a presentation. My plan is to have people tweet their core messages (which conveniently should be under 140 characters long) as they develop them through the session. How could you get your audience engaging, rather than just listening, with the substance of your presentation?

5. Encourage audience members to add their own ideas to yours

The best presentations are the ones that spark insights and ideas for your audience. Encourage them to tweet these ideas.

6. Get input and feedback from your audience

Consultation-type meetings have always been tricky. I’ve used flipcharts, post-it notes, forms for people to fill in. With a twitter-enabled audience, all that paraphernalia will be a thing of the past.

7. Gather evaluations

Presenters have already realised that twitter is a great way to get real-time evaluations by reviewing the stream of tweets that happened while you were presenting.

Paul Gillin Having recently waited six months to get audience evaluations from one presentation, I can tell you that the immediacy of the tweeted feedback was wonderful.

So make it official – at the end of your presentation – ask your audience to tweet their evaluation of the presentation.

Practical stuff

To create a stream of tweets just for your presentation, you’ll need to create a special hashtag for your presentation and then use an application that tracks just those tags (hashtags.org, spy, eventtrack, twitter search).

You may also want to display the tweet stream on a screen so that everyone – including you – can easily see it. If you want the stream to be on display all the time, you’ll need a second laptop, datashow and screen. But you could also display the stream at certain breaks in your presentation, in which case a second laptop plugged into the datashow will do fine.

Your thoughts

Have you used Twitter to engage your audience? What ideas do you have for how it could be used?

About Olivia Mitchell

Olivia Mitchell is a presentation trainer and blogger from New Zealand. Olivia blogs at Speaking about Presenting. Visit her blog for more tips on how to prepare and deliver an engaging presentation.

Did we forget how to talk to each other?

Chris Spagnuolo — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 16:28:17 +0000

Twitter is cool. Wikis are neat. SharePoint is, hmmm, good? And email is email. These tools are all useful in helping us communicate with each other when we’re separated by great distances. They help us bridge the gap by providing fast, efficient means of communication. It doesn’t get more efficient than Twitter’s 140 character limit. But take a close look at these tools. They all share a common characteristic. They’re all based on written communication. While the written word may be very efficient for transferring information, it is not very effective at persuading people or making a real impact. And there is a tremendous difference between being efficient and being effective.

When it comes to organizations and team work, nothing is more important to success than communication. If your organization or team is is striving for continuous improvement, it’s imperative that really rich communication occurs between all team members, from top to bottom and everywhere in between. So why, if this is such an important practice for the success of organizations, do most of us choose to put some of the most important impediments to our success into emails or Wikis? Sure, we transfer the information that something is wrong and needs to be corrected. But that’s all we do, transfer information. Emails, Tweets, Wikis, and SharePoint don’t help us move others to action. Action, not information, is what moves us toward continuous improvement and success. And nothing moves people to action more than the spoken word.

I’ve been reading Bert Decker’s book You’ve Got to be Believed to Be Heard. It’s a fabulous book, and if you haven’t read it yet, you should. In his book, Bert asserts that the written word is the information channel and speaking is the action channel. According to Bert:

Speaking is like a multichannel Surround Sound experience, in which dozens of channels simultaneously feed information to the human mind. These various channels communicate a richly textured, multilayered message from speaker to listener. These channels consist of :

Posture

Facial expression

Energy level

Eye communication

Vocal inflection

Vocal intonation

Volume

Gestures and other physical actions

And more

All of these non-verbal cues help transfer not just the information of the narrative, but the emotion and urgency of the message. They do so more effectively than any number of !!!‘s or URGENT‘s in an email can ever do. And it’s this emotion, this passion, this energy of verbal communication that motivates and persuades others to action. When you come to understand this basic premise, you then understand why communication, VERBAL communication, is essential to the success and improvement of any organization. Success and improvement require action, not just information. It requires that people in the organization are motivated to action to do the things that need to be done to improve the organization and their products.

I’ve written about the different levels of richness associated with different communication mediums, and I’ve also provided a list of tools to help distributed teams communicate more effectively, and I hope they’ve helped. But, please don’t misconstrue the message about the use of these tools for communications. Tools are good second alternatives for transferring information. But, when you need to transfer emotion and move people to action, don’t rely on tools for communication. Remember how to talk to each other and remember that face-to-face communication is the real power behind the most successful organizations and teams. So, the next time you find an impediment that needs to be removed for your team to be more effective, don’t send an email to your manager about the problem. Walk into his or her office and use your verbal skills to persuade him or her that something needs to be done, now. Move him or her to action today!!!

Tools for Distributed Teams

Chris Spagnuolo — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 16:40:08 +0000

These days, it’s not unusual for development or product teams to be geographically dispersed. It could be that your team members work on different floors, in different buildings, in different states, or even in different countries. Although I believe that collocation provides the greatest advantage in terms of high performing teams, it’s a reality that we have to find ways for distributed teams to become just as productive as collocated teams.

Ronica Roth, one of my colleagues here at Rally, recently suggested that our team try using Second Life to provide our team with a sense of collocation. Our team has several “remote” team members, and those that are “collocated” are frequently on travel. We rarely get to see each other in person. So, I find the idea of using Second Life for virtual meetings and collaboration intriguing. From the looks of it, we’ll probably give it a try and see how it works. I’ll keep you posted on our successes and/or failures with Second Life.

Ronica’s suggestion got me thinking back to a post I wanted to write some time ago on tools for distributed teams. One of the main challenges a distributed team faces is a barrier to good, collaborative communications. But, there are many tools and technologies that bring the level of collaboration between distributed team members to a higher level. Although these may never be as rich as face-to-face communications, I do believe they can help distributed teams perform better.

I’ve already written about how you can use Twitter to increase your productivity and there are tips in that post about how distributed teams can use Twitter to stay up to date on progress and tasking. In addition to Twitter, here is a brief list of other tools that I think distributed teams can communicate better:

Adobe Connect: A really good web conferencing and eLearning platform
Wikis: One of the best ways to share information amongst team members. There are tons of free ones out there that are easy to use. One I really like is PBWiki.
SharePoint: Yes I know, it’s Microsoft, but it works pretty well and makes sharing of information very easy.
Rally ALM: Not to be a fanboy, but Rally is really good for project management, planning, and tasking for distributed teams (disclaimer: I work for Rally, but I was a user before I worked for them)
CardMeeting: A collaborative meeting space with virtual sticky notes. Great space for distributed brainstorming
Windows SkyDrive: Again, yes Microsoft, but a good file sharing platform.
Weave the People: Customized, private and focused networks enable conversations to be centered around what is important to your team. Check out a demo here.
CrossLoop: Another good web conferencing and collaboration platform
BaseCamp: Shared to-do lists, project plans and files
Skype, and Babble: “Free” VOIP services
QNext: Free audio, video and document sharing
Convoq: Video, audio, screen sharing, presentation, IM,presence
And of course the ubiquitous Webex…hopefully no description needed for this one

This is by no means a comprehensive list, but it’s a good starting point. If you have other tools or technologies that you use for distributed collaboration, let us know Sharing is always good.