Have you been doing any presentations lately? Are people in your audience sending text messages or reading e-mail from their phones or laptops? Remember the good old days when people used to gaze quietly out the window or doodle on their notepads? No more! Today you are competing with a group of collective consciousnesses that can be critiquing your performance in near-real time.
Did you hear about the Mark Zuckerberg keynote interview at SXSW Interactive 2008? Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, was interviewed by BusinessWeek columnist Sarah Lacy. I was in the main ballroom with 2,000 of my closest friends. As the interview progressed, I found myself daydreaming, looking aimlessly at the SXSW session guide. The guy sitting beside me was whacking away on his keyboard and quietly laughing. Many people were doing the same thing: paying more attention to their laptops and BlackBerry screens than what Zuckerberg was saying. However, the smirks and muted laughter seemed to coincide with the interview. What were people doing?
They were using a group text application called Twitter (www.twitter.com) to send real-time comments to each other. Using a live group SXSW feed, anyone on Twitter could see what others were saying about the interview, and it was anything but complimentary. After several minutes of generic silent complaining, the session was opened for questions from the floor. The audience became openly hostile, and the rest is history. You can watch segments of the interview on YouTube, and you can see Sarah Lacy’s own analysis immediately following the interview at www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYDi7gV_4uk.
The flamed-out keynote became the talk of SXSW Interactive. Guy Kawasaki referenced the event in his panel discussion the next day and provided an interactive application where folks could send their real-time feedback to him directly, so he could “make sure we don’t suck.” How’s that for real-time adaptation?
Perhaps, Perhaps
Maybe SXSW Interactive is unusual. Fully one-third of the attendees are under 30, and most all are self-professed geeks. But my money says this is a glimpse of what is to come as the next generation of workers comes into the workplace.
Back in the 1950s, the organization man dressed in wingtips and a suit. He would sternly fold his arms and stare at the presenter, saying nothing when dissatisfied. He would leave the presentation and go about his business, following the hierarchical organizational line.
In the early 1990s, people in tennis shoes and business-casual attire would politely excuse themselves to attend another meeting. Back then, pagers were used to get “paged out” of a meeting — a polite measure that saved face for the presenter.
Now, as we approach 2010, the techie staff in flip-flops, blue jeans, and black tee-shirts flip open their laptops, join the Twitter feed, and decide at each moment whether to stay or go. The power of one mind is a force to be recognized and reckoned with in real time.
Wingtips. Tennis shoes. Flip-flops. What kind of audience do you have? The next time you look out into your audience, realize it may be actively engaged in critiquing the value of the meeting in real time. Start looking for ways to harness this new energy, and get the collective power of one mind working for you during your presentation.
Remember, you only get one opportunity to capture someone’s imagination, and now your audience has unlimited opportunities to compete directly with you — and you may not even know it is happening.
