Thanks for giving me something to think about. For the moment, I think I have to come down firmly in the middle of the gray area. I think the correct way to handle this generic situation is, “It depends…”

You concluded: “I should have called on the person to present her own point of view to the group – and then encouraged the group to discuss it.”

Perhaps. I think the format of the presentation plays a big part in what you “should” have done. In some places, it may not be appropriate to start a big audience discussion. In others, it would be a great way to handle the situation.

When opinions are involved you are on thin ice. Skate carefully, or risk falling into frigid waters, or worse, a heated town-hall debate.

Thanks for sharing your experience. I’ll keep this story in mind as I prepare for future presentations.

Todd

Not to say that’s what you should have done — just that your own experience, and the comments already here, highlight what strikes me as changing or conflicting expectations at real-life presentations as the result of social media.

If one word encapsulates social media, I’d say it’s “creation.” Not that everyone creates, but everyone can. “Participation” at a conference used to mean paying to attend, and showing up. Now, for many, it’s coming to mean responding (rather than just “reacting”) and even initiating — questions outside the fixed question period, or even backchannels (e.g., live Twitter streams, displayed during the session).

The particular question of how much of that to invite, and what to do when you do invite is, is still being answered, 24 hours a day.

You make a really good point on how to engage the person with the negative opinion. It’s like the sales slogan, I think Tom Hopkins, “If you say it they doubt you, if they say, it it’s true.” By engaging a group in the discussion it definitely would work itself out. I’m assuming the group was small with lots of interaction otherwise I’d think you were worried about a problem without much of a solution.

Cheers.

But a face-to-face , lets talk this through type discussion in a real room full of real people and suddenly we’re there to hear only the speaker ?
I used to dance at the thought Social Media was putting power into the Public part of PR but I’m losing a spring to my step thinking that it may come at the expense of Relations.

While it’s always a good idea to involve your audience in a discussion, at the end of the day it’s also about what your audience wants to learn.

You were there as the thought leader or expert. That was your role and judging by the scores of almost all your audience it appears you did well.

I think you should consider the high feedback scores and remember what mom taught us: You can’t please all of the people all of the time.

You’re being way too hard on yourself, as your speaker scores reflect. The reason that you were standing at the front of the room is because the organizers wanted to hear YOUR perspective.

Of course people are going to disagree, but I don’t think the goal of the speaker should be to appease the audience as much as it should be to educate them based on your own experience.

It’s true that you could have ceded the floor to let her speak, but that would have sidetracked the conversation and eaten into your presentation time. The best thing that can come out of this is that brands stop making Facebook fan pages and start making real connections, right?

Nice work, IMHO.

I have to disagree with you. I think your views are more important, at least in a presentation setting. Opening it up to discussion may be great to connect and learn, but at the end of the day, people are there to listen to you–your experience, your sage social media wisdom.

I remember when you shared with our class your feelings on Facebook, and we understood that you were speaking from your own viewpoint and experience and you were not suggesting that we stop using it. Rather, we understood that you were encouraging us to evaluate meaningfully our social media activities.

-Irme

By the way, my #thornley T-shirt should be here any day now.

Perhaps this person was attending your session primarily to learn how to measure Facebook conversation? I don’t know.

I think you answered your own question, by restating your position, you dug her trench deeper. I agree that a open discussion on the topic with the permission of the person who brought it up might have solved some of her questions, but you would have likely scored very low on the feedback form for not preparing for her need. (I bet she just sold in a Facebook plan where she works, and is now embarrassed to hear an expert call phooey on it… who knows?)

anyway. Sometimes you just can’t do everything for everybody in these conferences.

I have found that making blanket statements about anything during talks often results in negative feedback forms. I spoke at a conference last year (that you MC’d) where I pulled a similar Gaff. I suggested that large agencies are not ready to truly engage in social media (I still believe at the time, they weren’t, now… some of them are.)

I got the same feedback… 4.5s and 5s across the room. And one 1/5 score from somebody claiming I was self serving with my views on agencies.

Interesting parallel in results. People sometimes focus on 1 thing… I stopped letting it bother me.

Personally, I look at the top and bottom scores for the written feedback. This will teach me how I can improve in the future. I remove those two, and average the scores on the rest to see how I did at that particular session.

collin