Back-Channel Tweeting at Medical Conferences

The number of new uses for microblogging that continue to surface is a pleasant surprise. For today's note, I will focus on what is being referred to as back-channel tweeting at conferences. One of my main challenges of managing such conferences is to make them more interactive by stimulating input from the attendees. Part of this problem is that many of them don't want to approach the microphones and ask questions during the Q and A sessions. Now comes Twitter to help solve this problem (see: How to Present While People are Twittering). Below is an excerpt from the article with boldface emphasis mine with emphasis on how speakers need to psychologically adjust to having audiences members tweeting during a lecture:

People used to whisper to each other or pass hand-scribbled notes during presentations. Now these notes are going digital on Twitter or via conference-provided chat rooms. Up until now, this back-channel has been mainly confined to the Internet industry and technology conferences....So the next time you present at a conference, instead of being confronted by a sea of faces looking at you, you may be phased by a sea of heads looking down at their laptops. The challenge is how to adapt to presenting with the back-channel. As a presenter, the idea of presenting while people are talking about you is disconcerting. But to balance that, there are huge benefits to the individual members of the audience and to the overall output of a conference or meeting.

• It helps audience members focus
• The audience gets more content
• Audience members can get questions answered on the fly
• The audience can participate
• The audience can innovate
• You don’t have to be physically present to participate
• You can connect with people
• You can do something else

Yes, presenting with the back-channel is challenging. Prepare yourself for what it will be like. 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.

Stimulated by this article, I have set up a Twitter account (labinfotech) so that I can solicit tweets from the conference registrants during the upcoming Lab InfoTech Summit. While sitting in the audience, I can monitor this account using the browser on my cell phone and repeat some of them from the podium for those not following the back-channel on Twitter. I am hoping this this new conduit will be less intimidating for attendees than walking to the microphone and asking a question or making a comment.

For me, an interesting aspect of this new way to solicit input at conference is that the limit of 140 characters for tweets. I doubt that this will be a barrier. Also, the input from conference registrants can obviously be in the form of both questions and comments. This allows the opportunity to tap into the accumulated experience and knowledge of the entire audience rather than that of only the faculty members. It will also be possible to install a gadget in Lab Soft News so that the readers of this blog not attending the conference can see a feed of the tweets being generated real-time at the event.

Comments

[Karl Robstad, M.D.]

From the article it sounds confusing if you want people to @labinfotech or just hash tag it #labinfotech... i suppose either way would work and am curious to see how it works out. Definitely post about how it all went down as I am unable to go to Las Vegas :-/
-karl

[Mark Pool, M.D.]

I wonder if medical student, resident lectures wouldn't be more interactive using this. For example, giving them an inline quiz after 5-10 minutes of content (and making the cumulative score count for their grade). Thanks (again) for the great post.

[Michael Lougee]

Good ideas, here are two more questions:

--Twittering would be enhanced if every presentation included a "moderator" who could monitor the Twits in real-time, which the speaker cannot.

--I wonder if there is an application which can accrete "multiple-choice-question" Twits into "scores," in the fashion of audience-response "clickers." If yes, less need to rent expensive "clicker" systems, and more interactive sessions.