Since March 2010 I have been incorporating a a twitter back channel to most of my conference presentations. It is effortless; create a hashtag (i.e. #wpira, #neacuhoSM, #neacurhADV) and point people in the direction to use it. Now for most of the past 7 months I have been using these presentations to try to prove to people that there is a vibrant community of Student Affairs and Higher Ed professionals on twitter. I think it has worked, for the most part.
For the past 5 months I have even stolen a line that I heard from Dean Kenn Elmore of Boston University. Kenn said that he likes to tell people in presentations to “take out their cell phones, turn them on, and join the conversation.” This statement always gets some eyebrows raised when I use it, but I think it makes a lot of sense. Cell phones give you the opportunity to participate without raising your hand. To me if you are choosing to do other stuff on your phone; I am not doing enough as a presenter to keep your attention.
Last week I presented with John Mayo at the NEACUHO Fall Drive In, and we had two projectors set up, with one using our Prezi and the other dedication to a social feed for that session. Here is where the “must have” comes in. We brought Jenna Magnuski in at the last minute to sit up front and create the social stream for us. This was amazing because instead of sending out one or two tweets and waiting to see what came back while still trying to present, we had a session long conversation happening with people in the room and the people of the twitterverse. This was all facilitated by Jenna’s play by play of the session and engaging dialog with those whom were not in the room. This social stream was not distracting and it did not take away from our content. Rather I believe it added to the learning that was going on.
I have also come to believe that having a social stream should not be limited to just tech sessions. This dialog and shared learning could add a great dynamic to any type of session. I hope to take it a step further and add in a webcast feature to a conference session to let the people from the outside see and hear a presentation to help increase the outside social engagement. However this is hard with the differing tech capability of campus and conference sites. As is we had to bring extra computer and projector to make this setup work. Always be clear on knowing what tech capabilities your conference site will have, never assume.
My big suggestion for now is to try a dedication projector with a social stream (pick a hashtag and pop it up in a program like TweetChat). Then find someone that knows twitter and can engage people that are on twitter as well as share some of the main points of the session. That will free you up to do your presentation as you intended. This person can create the social stream for you from a distance, however it takes away the “play by play” aspect of what is going on in the presentation.
My special thanks go out to Jenna because she helped make our program extremely dynamic and did an awesome job on short notice.
How do you incorporate a social stream into your presentation? What are your reservations about using a social stream? Have you ever utilized someone to just do a social stream in a presentation?
