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On Tweckling during conferences

by Maddie Grant on November 24, 2009

Just read this interesting post – Conference Humiliation: They’re Tweeting Behind Your Back – about several instances of speakers being heckled on Twitter (“tweckled”) by people listening to their presentations, at the HighEdWeb Association’s conference, at an Educause conference and at a National Association of Science Writers meeting. Here’s more on the HighEd ruckus.

There was a minor incident like this at the ASAE Social Media Workshop, where the audience was disappointed by the speaker on legal issues having not even basic knowledge of social media. I did personally send out one tweet about this, which was not intended to be snarky but just my opinion. While I don’t remember tweeting anything other than that on the subject, there was quite a flurry of tweets from lots of people in the audience, none of which were particularly rude (that I noticed) but could certainly in aggregate be described as tweckling. I did hear from some participants (who were not necessarily used to the Twitter stream, this being a 101 conference) that the tweets about this did have the result of being distracting, as they were not in a position to know until then that the content being provided was not up to par (in the opinion of some).

This post is not about “twetiquette” and whether the Twitter conversation was appropriate or not. The first post I linked to above goes into this, suggesting some possible ways to pre-empt this kind of Twitter heckling – either by posting “social media courtesy guidelines” in the program, or by publicly calling out Twecklers, or by broadcasting the conversation on screen during presentations (the option I would suggest works the best, allowing speakers to engage directly).

The real question, for me, is this: if a portion of the audience does not like a speaker, who do you trust? The conference organizers, or the Twitterers? I don’t believe a great speaker is necessarily always the one everyone likes – but I also believe the audience knows when they are not getting the learning they are there for. If all of this forces conference organizers to really think about the content of their events, and forces speakers to make damn sure they either have the right content for their audience or that they are flexible enough to roll with the punches, that can’t be a bad thing, IMHO.

The conclusion from the eduGuru post (the second link above) is this:

So what’s to learn? … Know your audience, make connections, PREPARE. … There’s two real simple rules though that one can apply: Don’t be dumb, and don’t suck. You aren’t untouchable on stage, and it no longer means you get instant credibility. The web is a savage, competitive field where Darwin rules. And I’m not saying that you can’t shop around the same presentation at several conferences. But you do need to keep it up to date (6 months is really pushing it for presentation age in this era), and you do need to make sure some relevance is tossed in so your audience feels like you know them. Not doing so is like a slap in the face to them, and now the audience can slap back. If you can’t put in the effort, or you aren’t good at it, then don’t do keynotes. I think from the administrative side, a careful vetting process needs to be applied to potential keynotes. There’s no shortage of people out there these days with impressive looking résumés and credentials, but that means a lot less than it used to. A fast preview of this guy’s Powerpoint would have revealed the potential trouble to come pretty easily. And it might not hurt for official Twitter accounts to step into the hashtag and provide a polite nudge to maybe cool it down a little.

I do agree with this, but on the other hand, from a speaker’s point of view, we work really hard to create presentations for events where we very often don’t get paid. (And no, getting a speaker rate for the conference is not an incentive. Not even close.) So I don’t think the whole onus is on the speaker either. Which, again, to me means even more that if we can work in the dialogue on Twitter as part of our presentations then everyone can win.

I’ll tell you what Lindy and I do – whenever possible, we have someone in the audience tasked with monitoring the Twitter stream for us, and ready to raise their hand and pose a question from Twitter should there be one. If ever people were unhappy with what we were saying, I would hope we would be able to immediately address their concerns. And to be quite honest, I think if we had any friends in the audience – we do most of our speaking in our own association community, after all – someone would do this for us even if we didn’t ask them to. I know I would for someone else. At Jeff De Cagna’s session at ASAE09, I raised my hand to let him know that the people watching on Ustream couldn’t hear the audio – which of course I only knew from watching the Twitter stream. It was a minor interruption, but I would think he’d rather have known than not.

What do you think?

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Tagged: backchannel, conference, Twitter

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maddiegrant November 24, 2009 at 1:11 pm

On Tweckling during conferences http://ff.im/-bW7Nt

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