Twitter-a-Flitter at Your Events
By Robert Swanwick
In the recent past, if one looked out over an audience and saw heads buried in mobile devices, it was definitely a sign of an un-engaging session. Now, with Twitter.com, the opposite may be true. While there are some who believe that anything less than full attention is less than ideal, here is an alternate viewpoint.
-
Tweets mean the listener is interacting with the content and third party teaching. Re-presentation of content has been shown to significantly increase retention.
-
Tweets mean your event is getting exposure to tweeters’ followers
-
Tweets mean free marketing for the speaker to tweeters’ followers
Please stop reading here if your audience isn’t using Twitter. If some of them are and you want to support those folks, let’s move on to HOW to integrate Twitter into an event.
Twitter is nothing more than millions of individuals sharing information in 140-character chunks. The vast majority of that information is completely irrelevant to your event. To carve out the relevant and leave behind some lady in Saskatchewan talking about what she fed her cat for lunch, you need everyone to use a hashtag. Here are some ways to do that.
-
Market your hashtag on every communication to registrants and prospects.
-
Have all your speakers mention the hashtag.
-
Show the hashtag stream on monitors in common areas.
-
Project the hashtag stream inside of sessions (but make sure speaker is comfortable with that).
-
Take Q&A questions from the Twitter stream.
-
Make sure that someone from your team is monitoring the stream and quickly dealing with issues that attendees tweet about. Let attendees know you are listening.
-
When there are complaints, at the very least tweet back that you appreciate the input. Preferably, respond to each complaint with what you are doing about it.
-
If you have more than one track at your event, create a hashtag for each track.
Now, once you have all the tweets coming through your hashtag, you may want to display those tweets to your audience either in lounge/lobby or possibly write up on the big screen during a session. There are two ways you can present the Twitter stream: unfiltered or filtered.
Unfiltered is less work, but runs the risk of inflammatory, SPAM or useless content cluttering the stream. If too much noise creeps into your display, people may stop paying attention, or worse yet, it may detract from the session.
Filtered will ensure higher quality, but it means you will need a filtering application, and you will have to assign a resource to do the filtering. That person will need to make a value judgment as to what gets in and what does not. It may be challenging to make that choice. Here are some apps to try for unfiltered presentation of Twitter streams.
Other apps will do the same as above, but also allow for filtering
Another Twitter use for events is on-screen, live polling.
- Polleverywhere.com (free up to 30 votes, monthly plan beyond 30, can also take votes from SMS)
- SAPWeb20.com (beta, free up to 100 votes, can run on any hashtag)
Finally, there is an interesting application in early stage development for tweeters to identify where they are sitting in an audience. Keep your eye on A Seat Apart.
Olivia Mitchell has some great blog posts on the topic of Twitter in presentations.
ROBERT SWANWICK is the CEO of Speaker Interactive, and his past clients include ExxonMobil, Metlife, Westinghouse, Aflac, Marriott, British Telecom, Renault and more. Contact him via Twitter @SpkrInteractive or via e-mail at rswanwick@speakerinteractive.com.
For more Event Bytes, click here.
Tags:
event bytes robert swanwick tools twitter
Comments (0)