Using Twitter During Presentations

Yesterday I had the opportunity to give a presentation on SQL Azure to the newly formed Hartford SQL Server Users Group. I wanted the talk to be as interactive as possible. I brought along the usual bribes giveaways that speakers use to solicit some interaction from the audience (three copies of my book, DBA Survivor, get your copy today) but it didn’t seem like that was enough. More to the point, it didn’t seem like it was unique enough for me. I wanted something different. And these days, when I want something different, I turn to my tweeps on Twitter.

How Twitter Enhances Your Presentation

Naturally, it really depends on how you use Twitter during your talk. If you are standing in front of an audience and simply using Tweetdeck then it may not be all that exciting for your audience. In fact, it could be rather annoying. It would be no different than if you answered your phone during the talk. An interruption is exactly that; an interruption. But I still thought I could find a way to allow Twitter to have a role in my talk without it seeming intrusive.

I thought about this for a while, just going over the idea of how to incorporate an interruption into the flow of a presentation without it being annoying to those folks that have yet to embrace Twitter as their new Social Overlord.  How would I answer a phone during a talk? A more practical scenario (especially for my talks that actually have people show up) would be to deal with a heckler. Is there a way to deal with a heckler and make it seem like it is part of the show? (Yeah, just ask Andy Kaufman. Oh, how I wish he was still with us these days with Twitter and Facebook!)

Free Twitter Tools for PowerPoint

A while ago I had heard about some free tools that you can use to incorporate Twitter into your presentations. I’ve tried them sporadically before but yesterday I decided to go a little bit further in how I would use them. I knew I couldn’t engage people in a conversation on Twitter and give my attention to my audience at the same time. Or could I? I suppose I could if I could find a way to let both groups know about the other, right from the start.

The tools allow for you to send tweets as you advance to your next slide. You can do this by enabling an add-in for PowerPoint and using the notes section. So, I put this into the notes for my first slide:

[twitter]#hssug is starting! Click to join: http://tinyurl.com/yeypmyn 888.320.3585 PC24537740[/twitter]

For my live audience they saw my introduction slide and a brief message box that said ‘your tweet has been posted’. Immediately that let everyone know that I was not only in the room, not only broadcasting in LiveMeeting, but I was also on Twitter. And that tweet also served notice to the handful of people that wanted to join in on the LiveMeeting broadcast that the presentation was starting at that very moment. I had a few other tweets, such as begging people to buy my book, to join PASS (because we smell like #bacon), and to thank them for attending.

Now, I wasn’t going to be using Tweetdeck to respond to anyone while I was talking, so I needed to have a way to carry on a disconnected conversation while being connected to the people I was physically located with in the room. The answer for me was simple: solicit and use feedback. I could use Twitter to submit a question to my tweeps, ask them for an answer along with a hashtag of #hssug, and then I could display their responses in a later slide. This allowed for me to engage everyone within my reach, to solicit feedback, and to share that feedback with everyone as well. The key to this approach was simple: I could manage this myself.

There are more than a handful of ways to reach out to a larger audience, but many of them require you to have someone moderate the responses on your behalf. Here I was able to control the questions, view the responses, and address them if necessary all without having to jump over to Tweetdeck or anything else. I never had to leave PowerPoint, which was a huge plus as I am trying to avoid interruptions. Not having to bounce back and forth between a myriad of social media applications allowed for the talk to have a continuous flow.

The Power of #Hashtags

I think the biggest area for me to focus on is the use of proper hashtags in Twitter. For those familiar with the #sqlhelp Twitter hashtag you are probably already familiar with how valuable that can be. I used the simple #hssug hashtag yesterday to make things easier for me, but I could have organized things better. My next talk is in two weeks on SQL Server Audit and I may want to start floating questions now using two hashtags (#sqlhelp, #audit) in order to have enough responses already in place before my talk begins, as opposed to hoping my tweeps will answer me in the few minutes between slides during the actual talk.

Was it a success? I really don’t know yet. Will I use it again? Yeah, probably. There are a handful of tools available that I want to try, I have only scratched the surface so far. But what I need to be mindful of here is my ultimate goal: to help as many people connect, share, and learn. And I think these tools allow me to do exactly that.