Quantum Leap: Microsharing for Meetings and Events

Guest post by Gary Koelling of Best Buy and Blue Shirt Nation fame, linking to a wonderful business use case for Twitter that he wrote. Ironically, it also wraps up the reasons for Pistachio Consulting’s shift from presentations to microsharing with a tidy little bow.

Perfection is not only overrated. It’s dead. The pursuit of perfection inside the corporate enterprise has largely been a function of the tools we use. The most misappropriated of those is PowerPoint. It is the tool that we have pressed into service for all manner of things from presenting an idea to recapping an event. But most tragically we’ve been using for creating and collaborating. With predictably mediocre results. Well, I think I can see the end from here…

We had a meeting today, about 30 of us in a room, where we heard from some very high ranking executives as they took us through their thinking on how to implement a relevant digital strategy. Sounds dreadful right? What was different was that there was a huge tv screen next to an overhead projection of the ppt. On the screen was a web app created by @benhedrington call spy. It was rolling every tweet tagged with #BBYCDS from Twitter. Almost everyone in the room and lots outside the room were tweeting thoughts and questions throughout. There were enough tweets, in fact, that the tag #BBYCDS trended on summize to number two right ahead of “sarah palin” and right behind “halloween.”

And what struck me was the dynamic of this meeting. It was participatory. No one was talking out loud except the guy presenting the ppt. But the conversation was roaring through the room via twitter. It was exploding. People we asking questions. Pointing out problems. Replying to each other all while the ppt was progressing along it’s unwaveringly linear path.

Best Buy contractor Cam Gross also wrote about the #bbycds “Twitter” meeting experience.

TREND WATCH: Live event/meeting backchannel discussions via Twitter are tremendously powerful. Ideas move more freely, participants connect better with one another, and innovations can be captured and nurtured on the fly. More ideas from a speaker’s perspective, for a short event, and for event and meeting planners. Best Buy used Spy to display the interactions. Twitter search and eventtrack are other tools for this.

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