The Twitter Effect
In a fascinating article in Fortune - “Welcome to Conference 2.0″ - Dan Fost reported on a SXSW interview that was completely disrupted by backchannel via Twitter. His description of the pandemonium that erupted was most excellent:
“Consider author Sarah Lacy’s disastrous interview of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the annual South by Southwest Interactive Festival here. Lacy, a Business Week columnist and author of a forthcoming book on Zuckerberg and other Web 2.0 titans, drew the crowd’s wrath by asking Zuckerberg too many questions about his age and his company’s outrageous $15 billion valuation and not enough questions about issues more fundamental to how Facebook operates - things like trust, privacy, and accessibility to software developers. On top of that, Lacy interrupted Zuckerberg, seemed to flirt with him, and then grew hostile as the crowd turned against her.
And did it ever turn. Many in the audience started posting their thoughts on Twitter, a service that broadcasts instant messages, and the ire built. The crowd began hooting and jeering, and finally, when she opened the mike to questions, the first person asked Zuckerberg: “Other than rough interviews, what are some of the biggest challenges Facebook faces?” Lacy turned to Zuckerberg, asked, “Has this been a rough interview?” and the audience member said, “I wasn’t asking you, I was asking Mark.” The crowd went wild.”
I’ve been blogging conferences live for years. It’s a great way to share the love with folks who aren’t able to attend…. but what I’ve been doing is spreading what’s largely been a one-way conversation, barely brushing the collaborative (and yes, sometimes disruptive) potential that new social media tools can unleash.
At SEMpdx on Monday, I listened to people who said they Twittered their notes in conferences, and I actually enjoy watching what people are thinking as they’re listening to speakers (the beauty of the immediacy of Twitter) - I was fascinated by the accounts of SXSW discussions I read on Twitter myself.
But facilitating disruption in the room? It underscores for me as a speaker and panelist, that I’m going to be held even more accountable to the audience in providing solid, factual, and (yes) entertaining information EVERY time I step on stage. That’s good for me, and great for conference attendees everywhere.
While it might be interesting if you were in the room and seeing other comments without interrupting the speaker, I find it difficult to believe backchannel Twittered discussions are a productive way to absorb a presentation: If you at the event it is dual tasking like driving a car and talking on a cell phone at the same time. If you aren’t there, then the conversation is incomplete in lieu of the presentation context.
Although I think your point is technologies such IM, and more recently Twitter, can supplement communication, I think in general they are accelerating the degradation of quality (although not quantity) of discussion in an already fragmented, schizophrenic, and ever-more unfocused business community. I have found virtually all discussions of value (note: almost all teenagers’ discussions can be excluded from this category) are complex and thus require context, clearly written sentences, and logically constructed arguments. Punctuation is a plus too. In my opinion, quick-messaging techniques are useful in very limited cases, but since these cases are not well understood, quick-messaging could turn into the business world’s Gomorrah.