Jan
I have to admit, I hadn’t really bought into the idea that micro-blogging (i.e.: Twitter) might provide any real business value until just recently (last Monday to be exact). While attending Affiliate Summit I watched presenters project their computer screens onto the wall – as they spoke – displaying the latest “tweets” from conference attendees on a big screen in front of the room. Distracting? A little. Dynamic? Very!
CNN’s Rick Sanchez and Anderson Cooper now feature Twitter as part of their interactive TV broadcasts – taking comments from hundreds, maybe thousands, of viewers, and responding to comments on the air.
Presenters at Affiliate Summit did something similar last week - allowing people in the same room to have a voice during their presentations. It sounds like the same thing the CNN anchors are doing, but in the case of each Affiliate Summit conference session, the key difference was that the tweets were being sent and received all within the same room, from a relatively small group of constituents. In other words the relevance of the Affiliate Summit tweets was extremely high – better than would be expected from CNN’s massive and diverse audience – the tweets were all coming from affiliate marketing professionals, at an affiliate marketing conference. The tweets were relevant; sometimes insightful; often interesting.
Occasionally presenters would pick a tweet from the list, and respond to it on the fly. Other times they would just let the tweets scroll down the screen – quietly broadcasting the Twitter conversations to everyone in the room.
It’s a perfectly valid argument to say that Twitter is a distraction. Perhaps in some presentations it wouldn’t be useful. But the fact is that these Twitter conversations would be happening whether or not the presenters display them on the big screen. But by broadcasting the tweets, the presenters are including themselves in the conversation, and inviting non-Twitter-ers in the audience to be a part of it as well.
The conference of 3,000 attendees – probably 1/4 of them on Twitter – contributed to the most interactive bunch of sessions I’ve ever been a part of. In the sessions where I saw it used, and where the presenters embraced it, there was an amazing show of interactivity.
Carolyn got the Twitter bug months ago, and has been blogging about it ever since, but I was a little more skeptical. To me, Twitter seemed like a plain old time drain. But just like e-mail, telephone, tv, and any other media, it’s all in how you use it. And as far as I’ve seen, this method of micro-blogging to interact with presenters and broadcasters has to be one of the most innovative and useful uses for this new medium.
P.S. This is just one of the many ways Affiliate Summit improved this year. Way to go AffSum team.
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