Lazy panels and lazy tweeting

I’ve just come out of the SXSW Evan Williams keynote. Although there was the odd glimpse of wisdom (and a vaguely interesting announcement about the @anywhere service) I didn’t manage to get to the end of the session. I held out for as long as I could, but I soon joined the flood of people leaving the room.

@conradlisco sums it up better than I can:

The same happened yesterday afternoon. Jon Gruber and Jim Coudal were running a session called ‘Online advertising: the race to the bottom.’ Cool title and a great opportunity to discuss the future of advertising and how we can sell different approaches to display advertising to our clients.

Unfortunately this isn’t what we heard. Instead we got a rather too cosy fireside chat:

Here are two people on stage completely fluffing a panel. An audience that started off as being completely engaged slowly losing interest in the topic and (unfortunately) respect for the people on stage.

Faux conversations

The two people having a staged conversation seems to have been very popular this year at SXSW. Well, amongst the panellists at least. To me it comes across as an incredibly lazy way of presenting a session.

Instead of a carefully disciplined and structured presentation that has a point and a message, the audience are treated to banter and discussion. Often the key themes and over riding message is lost in soporific chat. The advantage seems to be all with the panel – no time consuming keynote slides to prepare, no time spent agonising over which points you want to make or the structure of your presentation. The panellists can just wing it as they go along and see what happens. Usually to the detriment and disappointment to the audience.

This is a format that *could* be made to work. Imagine if we were to add a dissenting view to the panel. Rather than two friends who are exactly on the same page (desperately feeding each other lines) how about two people from different sides of the argument? In the online advertising panel for example, someone from a big display ad house versus the creator of a small independent ad network? Someone who believes in slapping as may ad formats on a page versus someone who thinks that publishers should put value on their content and limit ad inventory?

Disagreement, discussion, argument, dissent. Surely more can be learnt (and communicated) through debate than a mere chat?

Follow that damn #hashtag

Could Gruber and Coudal have changed the direction of their panel as it happened? Whilst the set up of the panel meant there wasn’t the scope for dissent, could they have least recognised that the audience was getting frustrated?

Of course an astute presenter has a feel for the mood of the room through the micro body ticks the audience are sending out – sighs and crossing and re-crossing legs. At an extreme level of course this manifests as people walking out of the room…

I’ve shown a couple of tweets on this page showing the reaction to a panel in real time. Why can’t the panel follow the panel’s hashtag and change the trajectory of the talk as it goes?

The amount of times that I’ve sat in a session recently and thought the panel are in a different head space from the audience – unfortunately in some cases it’s as if the panellist has their head in a bin, ignoring everything that’s happening around them.

Why not use Twitter to not only gather questions from the audience but also to gauge the mood and react accordingly? If two people are on stage it doesn’t take long for one of them to scan a twitter stream and act quickly.

Please, just ask the question

Panels end with a question and answer session. Actually they end with a ‘personal bio, company spiel, long winded project introduction, question’ and answer session.

Whilst members of the audience introducing themselves to the floor can provide valuable context to a question, sometimes it comes across as self aggrandisement. We *are* interested in what you have to ask, but at the end of the day, we’re more interested in what the panel has to say…

What are your thoughts of how panels should be run? More debate? Less questions? I’d be interested to know what you think.