How Backchat Makes Your Presentation A Killer
I recently caught this bit of brilliance from presentation expert Olivia Mitchell. In her post How to Present While People are Twittering she did a fantastic job hitting the main reasons an audience talking amongst itself can be an amazing thing:
Benefits of the back channel to the audience
- It helps audience members focus
- The audience gets more content
- Audience members can get questions answered on the fly
- The audience can participate
- The audience can innovate
- You don’t have to be physically present to participate
- You can connect with people
- You can do something else
What about the speaker?
- The typing means you’re provoking interest
- Your colleagues can answer questions for you
- You’ll get immediate feedback
- They won’t fall asleep
See the full blog post for details, as well as a follow-up including feedback from the comments. She also expands into some great ideas on how to manage the backchat - manage it or it will manage you!
How this fits in with Clever Zebra’s virtual events is pretty obvious. Every event we’ve ever run has had backchat built right in: the speaker in the virtual world uses the voice channel, and the audience uses the built-in local text chat from the same environment. We’ve even experimented with fielding questions from the audience this way, although on that end we find people tend to want a private aside with the moderator instead of asking publicly.
Your best bet: build backchat into your event strategy. Don’t let a tool this powerful go to waste!
March 15th, 2009 at 11:12 am
[...] Caleb Booker: How Backchat Makes Your Presentation A Killer - “Every event we’ve ever run has had backchat built right in: the speaker in the virtual world uses the voice channel, and the audience uses the built-in local text chat from the same environment. We’ve even experimented with fielding questions from the audience this way, although on that end we find people tend to want a private aside with the moderator instead of asking publicly.“ [...]