When you are next running a class or meeting wouldn't it be great to harness the power and energy of the audience to enliven your presentation? As they tap away on their laptops and blackberries - why not give them a secondary communication channel to capture their thoughts? By setting up a simple and free backchannel you can encourage your audience to get involved immediately with questions, suggestions, and free flow thoughts - all posted instantly to a real-time exclusive micro-blogging site.Using a backchannel requires a more exploratory and experimental presentation style (welcome to the web 2.0 world!) and to truely succeed requires a lot of flipping back and forth to the channel to check what was posted and reacting to the audiences input. You could use Twitter or even Yammer, although people would need to have an account and be registered. However, you could also jump to another option like Todays Meet - no need for registration, you just name a new channel and provide the web link to the audience. They can post directly to the site with or without a username. Ideally, its good to know who posted but the real objective is to get people actively contributing. Keep in mind this is a great tool to use for creative and open meetings where active input is needed and encouraged - this is where PowerPoint takes a backseat. With straight to the point, one topic presentations - maybe this is not the right option. Advantages:
- Audience become more engaged and participative
- No-one needs to wait until the end of the presentation to ask a question
- Prepare questions in advance and post
- Allow people not attending the conference to participate
- Provides a useful archive of the audience's feedback
- Presenter/Tutor gets realtime feedback from the audience
- Anyone can supplement what is presented with links, stories and contacts
Give it a try at your next meeting or class. If anything, it gives the Backberry users something to write about.
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