Times are changing. Web 2.0 technology is moving the balance of power from the speaker to the audience.
A case in point is the recent South by Southwest Conference (www.sxsw.com) in Austin Texas.
The plenary interview with 23-year old billionaire Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg went awry. Neither he nor the person interviewing him was prepared. As the unfocussed topics meandered for 45 minutes, the audience grew increasingly restless.
So did they do? They pulled out their cell phones and started “twittering”. Twitter (www.twitter.com) is a Web 2.0 phone-based networked community (think text-message meets the chat room). Text comments about how “lame” the session was started flying in the hall. The audience increasingly became dissatisfied. Someone posted a dare to yell out “Zuck you suck.” Someone took up the offer. And the whole session devolved from there. As the social media took over, the crowd started shouting out questions on their own. The session went off the rails from there.
The session was, first of all, an example of the need for speakers to have great delivery skills and compelling content for any presentation. But, also, is shows how Web 2.0 social media are shifting the balance of power to the audience.
Audiences will increasingly demand a say at meetings. Wise speakers and meeting professionals will recognize this trend, prepare for it and even embrace this technology to their benefit.
Fortunately there are opportunities for speakers, interviewers and meeting hosts to give the audience this voice.
One simple Web 2.0 example could have occurred before the meeting. Zuckerberg’s interviewer could have blogged the group in advance asking potential attendees what they wanted to know from the speaker. What should be discussed?
However, during the presentation there are a number of “twitter-like” tools emerging to manage questions and to poll what the audience is thinking – to harness this energy. In short, there are phone-based methods of engaging the audience to give them their say.
Vuku at www.VukuWeb.com is an example of a text message audience polling product. A speaker or meeting planner can set up an account for about $200 per year for unlimited use. For this, they will receive a phone-based audience polling and question system and a private webpage to set up and retrieve the responses. When a speaker or meeting host wants to receive questions or conduct a poll, all he or she has to do is to ask the audience members to pull out their phones, and send a text message to a unique 6-digit short code. This message can either be a text question, or a numerical response to a multiple choice question – similar to, but more capable, than American Idol text message voting. Responses are immediately tallied and displayed at a password protected page on the ZukuWeb website. This page can be projected to the audience on a screen for everyone to see just like traditional audience polling systems, or reviewed by the speaker or moderator to respond to questions.
Audience members can ask questions anonymously, and surveys can be conducted at a fraction of the cost of traditional electronic audience polling systems which cost on average about US$10/audience member per day.
Other similar products are Log-On (www.log-on.nl) in Europe and QuickMobile (www.quickmobile.com) in Canada.
Taking it to the next level, the iPhone and similar smart phone products, using advanced mobile web browsing capabilities will provide a whole new level of audience interactivity.
Right now, VisionTree (www.visiontree.com) provides full audience polling, text questions, conference messaging, conference agenda services and more using the iPhone and other web-phone products. They will come to your meeting, set up a local wireless network, and will pass out iPhones to those attendees who are not already carrying them. Audience polling becomes as easy a filling out a basic mobile web form using the phone. Questions can easily be submitted anonymously to the speaker. And much more!
As these smart phones become the standard to many audiences it will open up the communication lines between the speaker and the audience. When a speaker wants to poll the audience on what they feel about an issue, or to receive questions, or to receive immediate evaluations at the end of the presentation, all they will have to do is say: let’s pull out our phones and say “Let’s vote. We will see the results in a second.”
So, whether you like it or not, your audience will increasing demand a say in what they want to hear during presentations. They may even try to take control and demand it as happened at the SXSW conference. The wise speaker and meeting professional will recognize these trends and work with some of these tools to help direct this conversation.
