It’s not about Twitter etiquette: “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 was working on a post on social media and association governance for this afternoon, but then I saw a link that David Gammel kindly shared on Twitter and I decided to switch gears. If you haven’t seen it yet,……

Something I found really depressing was this post about this same issue:
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/11/24/spectacle_at_we.html

First of all, I feel horrible for the speaker and second of all, I hope associations never get to the point where men are openly making crass remarks about female speakers while they’re presenting. I kind of can’t see it, thankfully, but reading that blog post just makes me wince. I think there’s quite a difference between tweeting disappointment that a speaker isn’t equipped to adequately address what he/she is speaking about and openly objectifying a female speaker.

All I know is I have enough trouble just concentration on what I’m doing–if I have to divide my attention between presenting and following what people are saying on Twitter at the same time, I feel sorry for that audience!! I think the idea of having someone monitor Twitter for questions during a presentation is great, but posting the stream so it competes for both the speaker’s and audience’s attention? Not so much.

Filtering is not nice I guess, specially because lots of people are checking the livestream on twitter. On the other hand, I have not read a single negative tweet about Tedx for example.

I also agree on the fact you can’t please anyone, and I speak for free wherever I am invited. Though reality is that the quality of people talking about social media is dropping steadily and tweckling is in most instances just a result of that.

I am also questioning myself on the real value of livetweeting since as I am getting bored of endless streams of tweeting from events.

Maybe twitter lists will be of use in this perspective. For sure Google Wave is a great solution to that. Since they released more invites, we’ll experience more adoption and case studies.

I guess we still have to figure out a way to do it properly.

Great post

Julius

I have to share that I was recently doing a presentation during which several people were most disruptive and they weren’t on twitter. I stopped the presentation, said you can see the rest of my slides on Slideshare – let’s talk about about what’s important to you and what you feel I’m not getting to. My evaluations by the way were very good (much to my surprise, although there were a few disparaging remarks) because, I believe, I responded. So, I think a back-channel that is being monitored can be useful. I also believe that as attendees we have a right and responsibility in seeing that we have an good educational experience. Audience participation is critical and the back-channel is another way of participating.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by maddiegrant: On Tweckling during conferences http://ff.im/-bW7Nt...

With respect to being a great speaker at a conference – I think it is impossible to please everyone. And audience members need to realize that and respect that someone has volunteered their time to share their expertise or facilitate a conversation. It’s not just a function of the speaker of course. The conference staff should be making efforts to ensure speakers are covering what was published/advertised and the quality of their presentation is up to par. To often I’ve spoken at a conference and been left wondering if anyone from the host organization was in the room before, during, or after my session. With the number of volunteers most organizations have at their disposal, it seems like there should be some coverage of sessions. Also, I usually chuckle when I see my reviews and there are a few that are extremely negative while the huge majority are extremely positive (I never get that). I agree that the speaker registration discount isn’t an incentive to speak. I suspect we both speak because we are part of this community and are active participants by nature – as well as the obvious (potential) business benefits.

Bottom line is you have to be good and you should be good. Attendees need to consider the fact that everyone in the room might be at a different level for a lot of ‘general’ sessions. Comes with the territory.