Last week James Gurd from eConsultancy.com asked whether speakers need to weave social media into their presentations. With the prevalence of smart phones and real-time updates, it seems as if speaker feedback is more immediate and accessible than ever, and before you even give your presentation you can get lots of advice and help crafting your message thanks to various social networks. Below are some ways you can integrate social media into your presentation before, during and after you give it.
Before
- If you’re pitching to speak at a conference and need to come up with a session or presentation idea, reach out to your colleagues via Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and ask them what they think would be an interesting/valuable topic to cover.
- Once your session’s been established and you know what you’ll be talking about, you can pull a Winfield and ping your colleagues again with questions related to your presentation. Feature their responses in your presentation, or use examples or case studies they’ve brought up to help illustrate your point. Make sure you have their permission and attribute proper credit!
- Blog about the upcoming event to build some buzz and awareness of your upcoming speaking gig. Encourage people to comment and leave questions about the panel that you can strive to answer during your session.
- Share tips related to your presentation via your blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc, and conclude with something like “You’ll hear more great tips about how to test and optimize landing pages at my Landing Page Testing & Tactics session December 5th at XYZ Conference!”
During
- Tweet/update Facebook right before your session starts and remind people that you’ll be speaking momentarily and that they should attend if they’re at the conference.
- Tweet to your followers that if they’re shy but have a question or if they’re not attending but have a question for the panel, they can forward it to you or your fellow panelists to address during the session. Try to compile some questions in case there’s a lull during the Q&A portion (this is an especially good tip for moderators, but it won’t hurt for you to do it, either).
- Be sure to use any predetermined conference-related hashtags for anyone who wants to follow all the action going on during the show.
After
- If your fellow presenters did well, give them proper kudos! Tweet something like “@brentcsutoras gave a stellar presentation about social media. Was a pleasure speaking alongside him!”
- Write a followup post on your blog detailing (if you’re allowed to) a couple nuggets of information from the session and the conference. Include your contact information (or link to it) if anyone wants to get a hold of you (Always Be Closing, baby!) and a little call to action like “If you enjoyed the session and would like to get in touch regarding some questions/information, contact me at” yada yada.
- Ping attendees for feedback — ask them what they thought of you presentation, how you could improve, highlights, etc. You should always be striving to make each speaking gig the best it can possibly be, and collecting/listening to feedback is the most important way to do so. Be sure to pay attention to any unsolicited buzz or feedback floating around and act on it promptly — manage that reputation, yo!
What other ways can you think to integrate social media into your presentations? Respond below or tweet at 10e20!
11 Comments
Chris has mastered the art of having other people do the work for his presentations while he takes all the credit :.)
It's because you are all just so much smarter than me! And I always give everyone involved the credit Todd
Hi Rebecca
I like all the tips you've given. Here's another possibility – use Twitter or other backchannel tool such as Backnoise or Today'sMeet to proactively get the audience to participate. These tools make audience participation scaleable. You can now do the sorts of things that before could only be done in small groups. So as well as suggesting that audience members ask questions via the backchannel, you as the presenter can ask questions and ask them to reply via the backchannel.
Olivia
Great suggestion, Olivia! I wonder if any panel's tried it before and what level of success they've experienced with it.
[...] Integrating Social Media into Your Presentation Process, 10e20 [...]
Rebecca – BackNoise was used during a conference recently, here’s two views on it’s ability to get an audience to participate.
Con: http://www.tagcommunity.org/blogs/unexpected-learnings-backnoise-can-be-toxic.html
Pro: http://blog.weatherby.net/2009/09/dont-blame-backnoise-atlanta-new-media-conference.html
Some great tips! Thank you! We will use them for our upcoming seminar.
Well while I was on my studies I have a subject called "Preparing a presentation". It was very interesting. As well as your post
Thanks, Peter! Glad you liked it.
[...] is about asking questions. To Chris it is just a tool for communication. What exactly is “pulling a Winfield”? It is using questions as tools to help accomplish tasks. Twitter wrote a blog post for him. [...]
Interesting article – the only thing I doubt a bit is that you'd really get more audience if you tweet/update right before the session starts. Maybe someone who had already wanted to attend and only forgot, but to make someone think "hey, I don't want to miss that one" a minute before the start, it would have to be a VERY interesting subject. Reminds me of the importance of subject lines in newsletters