Making the most of conference hashtags: A tool for presenters

Recently I was planning for a conference presentation, which involved choosing a Twitter hashtag, sending it to conference organizers for use in the program book, adding it to the template of all my slides, and making sure I added an all-caps prompt in my notes to MENTION TWITTER HASHTAG! (my presentation notes are full of all-caps prompts). Oh, and I also wrote some content for the presentation itself.

With your audience sitting directly in front of you, why put all that energy into a social networking tool that has the potential to distract people from listening to you? And what’s the best way to integrate tweets into the conversation?

Tweeting at conferences is one of the most productive uses of the service. Not only do audience members tweet the main points of a presentation, they can also use Twitter as a way to have conversations related to your session without interrupting.

Twitter has the power to derail a presentation, but there is the potential for a positive outcome as well. At South by Southwest Interactive in March, audience members organized a spontaneous donation drive on Twitter to fund a music project in a Texas inner-city school. One of the panelists mentioned the program during a panel about online giving, but no one suggested funding it. By the end of the session, a teacher’s fundraising efforts were over, and his music students can now record and playback their tunes to their hearts’ content.

Aware of the possibilities of Twitter, I was excited to find these Twitter plugins for Powerpoint presentations. All you need is a network connection and you can pull live tweets into your slides. If you’ve set up your own hashtag it’s a useful way to get live feedback to your session.

I tried out the tool at a recent presentation on online engagement, and was pleasantly surprised. It allowed me to keep track of what the twitterverse was saying about the conference and panel at that moment.

I stuck a tweet slide towards the beginning of the presentation to give people an idea that their tweets would be publicized, then again close to the end to pull out discussion points.

As a presenter, this was a great opportunity to check for:

• Interesting questions that had not yet been raised verbally
• Outside examples to highlight
• Misunderstandings that could be corrected
• Critiques that could be brought up for discussion

What other Twitter/presentation tools would you like to share?