Monday, May 02, 2016

Post 3 of 3 for University of Phoenix COMM/218

Using Social Media During a Speech or Presentation

     I've mentioned in more than one post during this course that I like to ad-lib.  Asking questions during some of my talks, and then tailoring the speech to the answers is one way that you can create a targeted speech, but you have to be prepared to ad-lib.  One thing that I want to try, but have not yet, is to use social media in a speech to drive that ad-lib content.  Here are some thoughts on what that might look like.


    Some of the larger IT conventions like South by Southwest, CIS, and others are starting to feature live media slideshows embedded in their talks.  The way you actually do this is to set up the photo feeds in a webpage, and then embed the webpage into your presentation.  You can set this up in a slide on your main presentation, or as a second screen depending on whether you want to visit this stream during the course of your talk, or have it live the whole time.  You can then stop and comment on interesting photos as they come up.  Depending on the situation you may need someone to filter the contents first.  Overdrive Interactive has a nice write up on this here.

     Another way to use social media in a presentation is to have a live Twitter or Facebook feed running either while you are talking or at a pre-determined point in the presentation (like during the Q&A session).  This way you can draw attention to relevant posts, and even answer question live that arrive via social media.  I've also seen this done as a ticker running along the top or bottom of the screen,

     This is nothing new really, but I think we'll see it more and more as time goes on.  I predict that the tools to do this will be built right in to presentation software.  In the meantime, here are some instructions on how to do it.

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