Live Tweets from Conference Suites: Help or Hindrance?

I was at the Communintelligence conference on internal social networking today. My mouth hung open as I looked across the sea of open laptops and heard a cacophony of typing punctuating the voices of the presenters. I felt like I had landed on Planet Rude in the distant future where no one could focus on anything but themselves. What in the world were they all doing? Checking email…working on a presentation….surfing the internet. I had to peek over someone’s shoulder to find out. They were tweeting!

Exponentially Extending a Speaker’s Reach with Tweets

At first I felt sorry for the presenters. They must have been frustrated not to have everyone’s full attention, right? What I quickly realized was that people in the audience were tweeting quotes of the presenters to their followers. Why would the speakers complain? The audience was exponentially extending their reach with their tweets. In fact, after the keynote presenter was done talking, she started tweeting too!

I must admit I have mixed feelings about this trend of conference tweeting. I certainly understand why the organizer of the conference, @jgerst, would like to live tweet, but does everyone need to?

What do you think?

As a audience member I found it distracting, but as a public relations consultant, I see it as an opportunity for my clients to extract more value from their speaking engagements. Also, as an avid user of Twitter, I have been on the receiving end of tweets from other conferences, and I have found them to be very useful.

Tell me your opinion. Should conference attendees live tweet away?

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some comments

There are currently 7 of them

Jeannette Paladino 18 June 2009 at 4:09 am permalink

I just finished the 4-week “2009 Social Media Success Summit” webinar today and at the opening of their talks each presenter encouraged the audience to be tweeting and messaging on Face Book and LinkedIn. In fact the organizer of the summit, Michael Stelzner, was tweeting nuggets from their talks. So it appears that tweeting while talking is now the norm. My conference was a webinar. I think it is a different situation at a live conference because it could be distracting to other members of the audience.
Jeannette Paladino
htt://writespeaksell.com
Steve Haag 18 June 2009 at 3:12 pm permalink

At the recent IBTTA Tampa conference (#ibtta) @patjonesdc encouraged the audience to tweet throughout. The “key clicking” and constant “look-downs” by the audience takes some getting used to; but I can see the value in spreading the word to folks that cannot attend the event.

I participated as both a speaker and attendee. The clicking/look-downs bothered me more while listening to others talk – did not bother me at all while I gave my talk.

Optimum value is achieved when the tweets are combined with a live look-in (video, pics, blog, etc.)

Steve Haag
Vice President – Technology Officer
HNTB Infrastructure
dmoon 18 June 2009 at 3:45 pm permalink

Interesting question, Amy. We hold a series of exclusive c-level seminars that promote interaction among the attendees. Tweeting to others outside the conference might run counter to that interaction, but there are lots of advantages to having participants promote our brand and intellectual capital. I think we’ll try some experiments about ways of “extending the conversations.”
Mike McCarthy 19 June 2009 at 1:29 am permalink

If the Tweets are legitimate insights into issues of interest, I should think it makes sense. owever, if attendees are just banging away on their keyboards without any sort of content discrimination, then I should think such behaviour is simply rude….
Lara Kretler 19 June 2009 at 4:37 pm permalink

I think this really depends on the subject matter of the conference. If the topics are related to social media and an official conference “hashtag” has been assigned to facilitate Tweeting, then clearly conference speakers should be aware of why this is happening and the value this online buzz provides to them as speakers and the overall conference itself.

However, if a conference isn’t related to social media, some speakers may be offended or hurt by the seeming lack of attention by audience members. As a conference attendee, I usually check with organizers to be sure that Tweeting is welcome/encouraged before I do so. If I get a blank stare, I may take notes the old-fashioned way and compose a blog post or a few relevant, insightful Tweets later, after the fact.
Lynne Baker 22 June 2009 at 3:48 am permalink

Hi Amy–good question. I still wonder how much people can really pay attention to a presentation and tweet at the same time–even if they are tweeting about the presentation. Yet I do believe there’s a generational aspect to our ability to mentally multi-task in this way. My 17-year olds have conversations with six different people through three different web tools (eg, facebook, aim, ichat) all at once, and they manage to keep the whole thing straight. I can barely manage one conversation in one medium! (But maybe that’s just me and has absolutely nothing to do with how old I am )

I suspect that we will see more and more of this in many settings: some universities are starting to require iphones for students so they can easily review lectures and yes–respond in real time and send questions into the professor as he/she is speaking.
Médard Schoenmaeckers 23 June 2009 at 1:13 pm permalink

This is a relevant topic, thanks for bringing it up. I spoke at a conference in Amsterdam last week, and both tweeted about other speakers and saw tweets about my own presentation.

I don’t like tweets appearing on a screen in the room while you are presenting – indeed this is distracting from the actual delivery. Also, discussions on twitter beyond content are inappropriate and should be directed to the speaker.

But I don’t mind people tweeting when I speak. Actually, I find that I am listening more intensely to speakers when I’m looking for the right facts to tweet. It also forces speakers not to talk any nonsense, but to have a clear and focused story with truthful facts.

As a principle, I would encourage event organizers to raise this very clearly at the start of the event: do Chatham House rules apply? Then no twitter. Is this regarded a public event? Then social media tools should be allowed (and a hashtag should be provided).

Best,
Médard Schoenmaeckers
Blog: shoestalk.wordpress.com
Twitter: Talkingshoe

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