Will Twitter Help Or Hurt Your Meeting?

A Look At MPI’s MeetDifferent 2010

I had the opportunity to chime in on a recent conversation on the MeCo (Meetings Community) list regarding using Twitter in meetings, specifically MeetDifferent 2010.  There have been a couple versions of this conversation being passed around in meeting and conference association publications.  I’ll repeat it here as an additional resource.

Below is a copy of my post from that discussion:

I should be able to shed some light on this from a couple of angles. I was the host for MPI’s MeetDifferent in Cancun and had to design the best way to integrate the Twitter feed into the general sessions. Since the sessions were broadcast live on the web, we needed to include the virtual audience during the Q & A.

Glenn interviewing Marty Neumeier at MeetDifferent 2010 - Photo by Reflections Photography and courtesy of Meeting Professionals International (MPI)

For the general session:
I believe it is a bad idea to have a live Twitter feed on the screens. It’s distracting for the audience and the speaker. Hence, no Twitter feed on screen for MD10. A member of MPI’s content team was backstage, monitoring the Twitter feed. Then, she would post comments and questions from the feed that were relevant to the conversation I was having with the keynote speaker, directly to the confidence monitors. I was able to acknowledge the virtual audience and respond to their questions in addition to those from the face-to-face attendees.

For the hybrid meeting breakout:
We still did not have a Twitter feed on screen. However, as the tech moderator, I monitored the feed and would chime in during the presentation with relevant comments or questions from our virtual and face-to-face audience (I had a microphone as well). Many in the face-to-face audience still used Twitter to comment and ask questions. I felt that Twitter enabled attendees to ask more questions because they didn’t need to speak into the microphone to ask them.

A couple of notes:
If the session is being broadcast live over the web, you will definitely want to have someone moderating the Twitter feed and sending pertinent comments and questions to the speaker via the confidence monitors. This is especially true if your speakers are having any type of interaction with the audience. It allows your virtual audience to be part of the action.

If the session is not being broadcast, and there is not going to be any interaction between the speaker and the audience, there’s no reason to have a feed. Just keep an eye out for comments about the session.

If you broadcast to your attendees that there is a hashtag for the event, you have signalled that the Twitter feeds will be monitored and interaction via Twitter is encouraged. Make sure your entire team (and executive leadership) is on board.

I do not recommend using Twitter in private corporate conferences. You wouldn’t want to have attendees losing their jobs because they are ‘accidentally’ tweeting about an upcoming product launch (beware of confidentiality and trade secrets).

That’s my $.02!

What experience have you had using Twitter in your meetings?

Glenn Thayer is a professional master of ceremonies that specializes in strategic content delivery, hybrid meetings, and conference moderation.  He is a professional member of the National Speakers Association (NSA) and Meeting Professionals International (MPI).  He can be contacted at glennthayer.com or @glennthayer on Twitter.

Comments