Twitter is the biggest thing to happen to public speaking since PowerPoint.
And the worst.
Few presenters I know relish the idea of trying to engage an audience that is busy tweeting away with each other and the world. News accounts of conference speakers being roasted by Twitter-intoxicated mobs haven’t helped.
Harvard Business School professor Andy McAfee has his doubts.
He recently invited his Managing in the Information Age MBA class to tweet among themselves while he lead his usual session. McAfee is becoming a huge fan of Twitter and has written on its potential uses in the business enterprise. But the result in his classroom, as McAfree notes in his blog, was disappointing.
“I’ll ask my students what they thought about the experience, but I thought it was miserable. Class discussion limped along at well below its normal levels of engagement, interest, and insight.”
He discovered why when he reviewed the students’ tweets. “I found that a lot of them remarked on how difficult it was to pay attention to what was going on in the room and on their screens. And it was very clear that the screens won.”
I emphasized the last three words because the screens always win when given a chance. Say what you want about the general lifelessness of PowerPoint presentations, at least they get the audience focused on the message being delivered from the podium. Twitter is just a distraction.
So what’s a public presenter to do? The options as I see them are:
1. Pretend Nothing is Happening. Ignore the fact that a quarter of the audience you are trying to bathe in your brilliance has their head down and body swaying to the beat of 140 characters per tweet.
2. Co-opt Twitterers into the Presentation. This is what Twitter adherents suggest. Use this group to test your ideas to Followers in Luxembourg, Taipei and Jerusalem, just as you present them in the Banyan Room at the Toledo Marriott. Aggregate the intellectual firepower in the room around your content . Receive instant feedback from your audience.
3. Ban the Buggers. Tell your audience that electronic device communication can only be used outside the room.
For my money, the head-in-the-sand tactic just encourages distracting behavior. The co-opt method might work for some topics, but it requires the speaker to tailor the message to one particular segment of the audience, never a good idea.
No, I’m all for Ban the Buggers. This has the benefit of being socially acceptable (”Please turn off all cell phones during this presentation”), and benefits the whole (Tell me that guy sitting next to you at TED firing out staccato bursts from the keyboard isn’t a bit distracting.)
Public speakers, am I wrong about this? Twitterers, what’s your view?
