Build Relationships Through Social Media

Social media channels give your audience a lot of control over your PR. People can broadcast bits of your content to their followers—quoting you, synthesizing your ideas, adding their own comments. Even if you have only 30 people in front of you when you speak, hundreds more—perhaps thousands, if your audience is highly networked—might catch a glimpse of what you’re saying and what others think of it.

When the comments are positive, your ideas gain traction. At one event, a group of new attendees came to my talk about 15 minutes after I started. I found out afterward that an audience member had tweeted about my session, so some of his followers came to check it out.

But sometimes the comments aren’t positive. Look at these sample tweets that went out during a higher-education conference presentation in Milwaukee:

@jrodgers
Starting to see the OMG I AM TRAPPED looks on faces.

#heweb09

@jShelK
We need a drinking game for every time he says “actually” and “actionable.” #heweb09

@stomer
We need a tshirt, “I survived the keynote disaster of 09.” #heweb09

Within hours, someone created a shirt on CafePress and shared it with conference attendees (figure 7-1).

In The Backchannel, communication consultant Cliff Atkinson writes about social media’s impact on presentations. He points out that the “backchannel”—the stream of chatter before, during, and after your talk—is constructive when it:

• Enriches your message as people take notes, add commentary, and suggest additional resources on the topic
• Provides a valuable archive of information to review after the presentation
• Connects people in the room, building a community around the ideas
• Allows people who can’t attend your live talk to follow dispatches and engage in conversations about it
• Increases your reach to more people

It’s destructive when it:

• Distracts audience members so they pay more attention to the backchannel than to you
• Steers the conversation to unrelated topics
• Excludes audience members who are unaware of the backchannel or unable to join
• Limits people’s ability to convey nuance or context, because of the brevity of the posts
• Injects a rude or snarky tone, since people feel comfortable tweeting thoughts they wouldn’t say out loud

Your goal is to avoid a backchannel revolt, where people rally one another to reject your message. How? By making the folks online feel heard.

With or without your involvement, they’ll have conversations about you. So participate. Engage with people like a skilled conversationalist, and they’ll engage more fully and fairly with your ideas.

Build relationships with them by:

• Observing their behavior: Pay attention to what else they’re commenting on. Active social media users can point you to hot spots online—a Linked In discussion group, for instance, or a brand’s fan page—where you can begin or join conversations with potential customers or advocates.
• Providing a channel: Create a Twitter hashtag for your presentation and invite audience members to use it to chat with you and one another about your message. (Of course, this is appropriate only for external presentations with broad audiences. You wouldn’t broadcast content from confidential company meetings, for example, or client sales calls.) Encourage attendees to use the backchannel before, during, and after your presentation; display your hashtag on an introductory slide.
• Asking for their input: Try presenting a partially developed idea and asking people to help you refine it through social media. I do this all the time and get useful replies. When I don’t know much about an audience I’m preparing to address, I’ll do some digging on my own—but I’ll also ask my Twitter channel what might be on the minds of people attending a certain event, for instance, or working for a particular company or industry.