Social Media as a speaking crutch? The case against Twitter in presentations
Weeks ago, I had a podcast and posted articles about using Twitter jointly with presentations.
I wrote that it would be a good idea to develop immediate feedback with an audience. But is there an argument against it?
When doing the podcast, I was thinking of an argument against incorporating Twitter in presentations. I failed at the time.
So I thought about the concept and test drove a theory in one of my classes and found something interesting.
Twitter distracted my speaking.
It interrupted the flow of my delivery and an odd question can throw my off track. I also find that I am looking more and more at the screen on the wall to read the question instead of the audience.
Or worse, if I did not have Internet-access on my computer, I would have to be looking at my phone to answer questions. That is an interesting problem because it is a drawback. A speaker would have to be very good OR very knowledgeable about their subject to do PowerPoint Twitter well.
Jeff Veen had a solution.
His idea was to have someone act as a chat moderator. So there would be a person to stage left or right of the speaker or in the front row monitoring the backchannel and forwarding questions to the speaker.
That would be a great idea if speaker had a cohort willing to do this. The speaker can focus on the information she or he will be giving to the audience. The moderator can get questions from Twitter to the speaker.
So there is a drawback to including Twitter in your presentations. But there is a workaround for that. There is another drawback that I will mention later. It is about a speaking needing to “read a room”.
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