We are working on our user guides for the beta tests of SWIFT Mobile at SES New York and CHI 2009. SWIFT Mobile is designed to let you use favorite Twitter client to post updates to SWIFT. You can also post directly from SWIFT to contribute tweets to the conversation during a presentation.
This week Olivia Mitchell wrote a guest blog post on Laura Fitton’s Pistachio blog on how to integrate Twitter into conference presentations. In her post and the comments that follow there are a number of really good ideas on this topic. The substance of Mitchell’s suggestions are really about integrating the collective intelligence of the audience into your presentation.
Audience members are able to focus better by contributing and reading during the talk. This is one of those paradoxes/problems of attention. This has been called “continuous partial attention” by Huffington Post blogger, Linda Stone. Distraction is bad. Yet Olivia Mitchell quotes people who find that twitter keeps them focused:
Dean Sharesky: The more I’m allowed to interact and play with the content the more engaged and ultimately the more learning happens. The more the presentation relies on the back channel, the more I focus. Knowing that my comments are going to be seen by the presenter or live participants, seems to make me pay more attention.
We are going to learn a lot more about how to manage this as we roll SWIFT out in the next months. So stay tuned.
The audience gets more content as people add their ideas to the presentation. Olivia Mitchell nails this one:
The best presentations are the ones that spark insights and ideas for your audience. Encourage them to tweet these ideas.
In fact, people find that the back channel conversations can be equal to or better than the presentation itself, which leads us to think that SWIFT Mobile can contribute to upping the quality of presentations.
Audience members are able to connect with people in the audience who say interesting and intelligent things. This is a key feature of SWIFT Mobile — the open social connections found and made during events based on the smartness of your comments and tweets. If you say smart things, people will connect to you. We built this into our design because we feel it is a much better way to find the right people at events than closed recommendation systems. When we previewed SWIFT Mobile for Chris Shipley at DEMO, she confirmed our design choice: “they simply don’t work. You are much better off finding someone based on something they say than a factor-driven engine.”
Immediate Feedback. For the presenter, the main benefit seems to be that you get immediate feedback. This is one of the reasons I wanted to build SWIFT. As a regular conference speaker, I find that it can take months to get evaluations from the conference organizers. And I really want to know how well things went down and what needs to be improved in my talks.
An audience of typists. It can be disconcerting to be giving a talk to a bunch heads bowed over their computers and/or phones. But Olivia Mitchell quotes Robert Scoble on the new realities of giving a talk and incorporating the audience:
I hate being captive in an audience when the people on stage don’t have a feedback loop going with the audience. We’re used to living a two-way life online and expect it when in an audience too. Our expectations of speakers and people on stage have changed, for better or for worse.
Broadcasting your talk. One of the biggest benefits of twittering presentations is that the highlights of your presentation are being sent out to an audience much bigger than those in the room. If you have something truly insightful or newsworthy to say, your message may be retweeted far and wide.
Engagement Tips. Andrew McAfee has been using a very simple but effective model to elicit engagement over Twitter. It is called #andyasks. The link takes you to an aggregation of search results on Twitter for questions that Andy asks. The current flow is a response to a question about your favorite tough guy movie. There have been a lot of really fun queries. I can easily see this being adapted for a presentation. Query people through the twitter conference feed and then incorporate the feedback into your talk.
The rest of the tips below come from the comments on Olivia Mitchell’s article
One engagement activity - is to have the audience type in just three words about how they are feeling about the content so far, or if you are teaching a topic to type in words they think that describe.
I particularly appreciate the idea of a back channel manager or “microblog pause” for gathering the feedback during a live session. Will be definitely trying this out.
I look at it a different way and believe that it makes me actually listen to an entire thought before I start typing away on my iPhone. If I don’t fully understand, I can clarify in the meeting itself and others’ points of view can be jotted down as well (see above). In my mind, its extremely valuable to be able to turn a complex idea into a sentence that people can understand. Micro blogging meeting minutes reinforces that concept.
The same is true for pretty much any presentation you see these days. Computers, Phones, IPods etc. etc. they are all being used! You present some excellent ideas for acknowledging that these items are there and using them in a meaningful way. Wouldn’t this be an interesting innovation for @slideshare? To be able to integrate audience tweets into slides that are being presented at a conference into an archive for distribution. Sort of like what some of the video conversation tools are doing where folks add their notes to the video.
As a presenter, I like the idea of offering multiple means of communication and avenues of engagement while, at the same time, getting instant feedback and the opportunity for adapting (changing on the fly) one’s talk based of people’s interest, Q&A and meaningful commentary. As a participant, I enjoy being able to post comments or questions without disrupting someone’s presentation or discussion, and to have the session’s blogs and microblogs logged for immediate or future review.
Extending the reach of the event is tremendously valuable and important. I believe the smart conference organizers will learn to tap into this. You attract interest and participation from a much wider audience, AND you offer a networking tool to help attendees remain in contact after the event, extending the perceived value derived from it.
We completed our first beta test of SWIFT Mobile this week at the 
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