Having attended a number of events lately, I’ve been fascinated by watching how interaction during conferences – formal or informal – have evolved.

“People used to whisper to each other or pass hand-scribbled notes during presentations. Now these notes are going digital on Twitter or via conference-provided chat rooms.

Up until now, this back-channel has been mainly confined to the Internet industry and technology conferences. [...]

So the next time you present at a conference, instead of being confronted by a sea of faces looking at you, you may be phased by a sea of heads looking down at their laptops.”

Laura Fitton, otherwise known as Pistachio, goes on to give tips to public speakers to avoid feeling left out of the conversation.

At events I’ve attended recently, the speakers have encouraged conversation on services like Twitter by using a hashtag (eg. #taptu) which ensures that anyone who uses the tag will see their words on the big screen. Others have used Meebo and similar backchannel services to give people a chatroom in which to interact. It takes very little pre-planning and anyone with a phone in their pocket can usually contribute.

There are huge benefits in contributing to a panel or presentation in this way:

• You can give your two cents without having to wait at the microphone to ask a question
• You can say something fairly trivial, which might not justify putting your hand up to comment
• You have the power to give the presentation some direction – an intelligent presenter will use the feed to get a sense of what does and doesn’t interest the audience, shaping the presentation to focus on the best stuff
• You can hear what others think without whispering or passing notes across the room

While, as Laura suggests, it can be a bit disconcerting to get less eye contact than the presenter might be used to, it’s a wonderful way to communicate how you feel and share thoughts.

Next time you’re listening or giving a presentation, crack out your phone or laptop and interact!

[Image source: Keith Burtis on Flickr]

This entry was posted on Monday, May 18th, 2009 at 5:06 pm and is filed under Community and social networks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.