The Future of Engagement

I presented a Social Media 101 workshop for a group of Synopsys colleagues on Friday. The attendees were terrific: engaged, attentive, inquisitive – everything one hopes for when standing in front of a room to share insights and knowledge with others.

So when I received a link from my manager later that day to a blog post titled How to Present While People are Twittering, I stopped to read it right away (thanks Karen!).

Presenting while your audience is twittering – what a dismal thought. It's bad enough when a dining companion starts thumbing a Blackberry during table conversation or you find yourself in a conference room where various others have more important things to do online than fully participate in the meeting at hand. But presenting to a roomful of people who are busy twittering while you're trying to make a little eye contact and stay focused on delivering your personal best as you fulfill your objectives and obligations as a speaker? Not so much.

Yet Tamar Weinberg (the blog's author) suggests multiple benefits of such emerging Twitter behavior for audience and speaker alike. Referring to Twitter interaction as a "back channel" for the audience, she says, "There are huge benefits to the individual members of the audience and to the overall output of a conference or meeting." Tamar's list includes 1) Twitter helps audience members focus, 2) the audience gets more content, 3) audience members can get questions answered on the fly, and 4) the audience can innovate as well as participate.

What about the speaker? Tamar says, "We're used to having eye contact with our audience and using that eye contact and audience reaction to measure how well we're engaging the audience. Now when you say something brilliant, instead of nods of appreciation, there will be a flurry of tapping. Here's the positive spin… the typing means you're provoking interest, your colleagues can answer questions for you, you'll get immediate feedback, and they won't fall asleep."

To be fair, Tamar's blog focuses on conference environments where audience size is often orders of magnitude beyond that of a training workshop. But who's to say how human conduct will continue to morph and evolve through time? If twittering tweets in a room full of a thousand people is the hot new trend, what about a roomful of 100, or 20? There are already those who are perfectly comfortable interacting in cyberspace at a table for two, so what forms of interconnected conduct will we find professionally (or personally) acceptable in future years?

What do you think?