Timo- This post rather beautifully illustrates my post on the summit, at least from the nTag perspective. Could SAP have used the nTag for in session voting? Didn’t need to – twitter mining did the trick.

For better or worse, Twitter is the channel that audiences are currently choosing. Different tools could be appropriate in some circumstances, but I don’t think it would have worked here (or, to be honest, in most public conferences with Twitter-savvy audiences).

I actually think taking questions over tweets can be a big improvement over people raising their hands and asking questions. It’s faster, since people can ask questions while the presenter is speaking; it means the virtual audience isn’t left out; and it can help reduce the problem of long, rambling, or off-the-topic questions (this latter part doesn’t apply to an analyst audience, obviously).

I suspect that the people in the audience that were doing the most twittering in the early sessions were the ones that had already seen similar content before, at other SAP events — but that was only a portion of the audience. Unless you can get everybody to watch content in advance (which is unlikely), some level of “getting everybody on the same level” is inevitable.

And I’m not sure that the level of tweets shows that people aren’t listening — I actually find I end up drifting away less if I’m trying to tweet about a presentation, since it becomes a conversation, not a monologue. It forces me to pay more attention to the content, and consider what I think about it.

It’s worth noting that in this case, there were additional 1 on 1 sessions planned for the analysts to ask more questions, but I agree with you that formal presentations will be shorter. In general, I think the new technologies can help make the whole presentation more interactive, with less need for an abrupt change from “presenting” to “Q&A”, with the presentation being a more loosely coordinated set of points to be covered.

Presenters will need new skills to monitor the twitter stream and be comfortable reacting to tweets as they go along (which means knowing what you’re talking about!). I predict that we will see a rise in:
* Presenter/moderator formats or multi-person presenting (so that the other person has time to see the questions)
* Teams of backup experts ready on Twitter to help add detail / context
* Non-linear presentation tools (Prezi or PowerPoint with linking and embedding).

And if any of this helps save the world from stilted, uninteresting PowerPoint presentations, that would be a wonderful thing!

The big lesson for SAP and other vendors is this: analysts want to ask questions, not listen to an executive in bs mode. The tweet volume shows that no-one was really listening to the guy on stage. You can no longer force us to sit quietly and listen all day, thinking you can leave ’20 minutes at the end for questions’, so you might as well work within that reality. Actually the old technology of raising ones hand, standing up and asking a question would actually work much better than Twitter – so why not support that? Make the formal bits shorter, and have longer and more frequent Q&A sessions.