I am not a professional speaker, but I have done plenty of meeting presentations and it is certainly human nature to dislike the use of attendees’ electronic devices while speaking.

Professional speakers, just like any performer, are very strongly driven by audience reaction and sometimes rely on it to help craft their speech in real time. I think that speakers need to re-train themselves. While in the past, use of devices meant working on other things (eg. email) now if a person is tweeting about your speech (as the numbers indicate), they are likely sharing your positive message. That does three things
1. It helps spread your message well beyond the room for the organization that paid you to speak.
2. It provides great free marketing for other orgs to know about and possibly book you.
3. Because the person has re-typed (possibly re-phrased) your words, they have internalized your message much better.

I’m not saying it is going to be easy, but just because it doesn’t make you feel good, do not rail against the technology. Think about the cost/benefit of the slight loss of attention vs. the increased exposure.

There’s a great Twitter visualiser at http://visibletweets.com which we display to maintain a sense of interest and fun.

I definitely wouldn’t advocate using this during presentations though, as it is deliberately quite distracting.
PS: Wanted to say good post!

There’s a great Twitter visualiser at http://visibletweets.com which we display to maintain a sense of interest and fun.

I definitely wouldn’t advocate using this during presentations though, as it is deliberately quite distracting.

If you don’t want to click through, the basic idea is that you tell attendees to direct all their questions to a designated twitter account during the session; when Q&A starts, you then see what’s been submitted and address.

This lets people ask questions when they arise, and it strongly encourages focus (since the question can only be 140 characters long). I’m looking forward to trying this out at my next few presentations.