Audience... Twitter.. Does this change the plan for conference speakers?

 “Conference speakers beware: Twecklers are watching. They're out for blood. And you may be their next victim.” says Marc Parry  “Once upon a time, conference goers could do little more than passively fork their cheesecake when a snooze-inducing keynote speaker took the podium. No longer. The microblogging service Twitter is changing a staple of academic life from a one-way presentation into a real-time conversation. Flub a talk badly enough and you now risk mobilizing a scrum of digital-spitball-slinging snark-masters.  The Twitter "back channel" can be a powerful tool to quickly knit a gathering of strangers into an online community, a place where attendees at meetings broadcast bits of sessions, share extra information such as links, and arrange social events. But the same technology can also enable a "virtual lynching.".

Steven W. Tally, a strategic marketing consultant at Perdue University, points out that people are accustomed to commenting about articles they read online. Now they want to comment in real time about speakers, too.  “We’re going to have to get used to the fact that you’re not speaking to a group now—you’re really leading a conversation,” Mr. Tally says. “And if you’re not listening to the other people who are participating in that conversation, it’s not going to have a good outcome for you.”

A comment from the eduGuru post … So what’s to learn? … Know your audience, make connections, PREPARE. You aren’t untouchable on stage, and it no longer means you get instant credibility. The web is a savage, competitive field where Darwin rules. And I’m not saying that you can’t shop around the same presentation at several conferences. But you do need to keep it up to date (6 months is really pushing it for presentation age in this era), and you do need to make sure some relevance is tossed in so your audience feels like you know them. Not doing so is like a slap in the face to them, and now the audience can slap back. If you can’t put in the effort, or you aren’t good at it, then don’t do keynotes. I think from the administrative side, a careful vetting process needs to be applied to potential keynotes. There’s no shortage of people out there these days with impressive looking résumés and credentials, but that means a lot less than it used to.”

No doubt, we live in a world where everything is connected and Twitter offers a platform for audiences that it has never had.  So, what do you think?  Will the Twitter backchannel produce an improvement over time in the quality of presentations at conferences.  Will future speakers be at the mercy of a “mob-type” pack mentality of tweeters?  Has the Internet changed the way speakers need to prepare?  What about the speaker actually interacting and taking questions posed on the backchannel? 

We look forward to your comments.