Nancy Duarte wrote a brilliant piece (http://sbit.ly/fNiwLw) about how social media is turning presenting into an interactive conversation. She claims that social media is forcing the art of presenting to become an interactive conversation. Presenters who embrace audience participation connect their audiences to their ideas through tools such as twitter. She gives six ways to utilize social media while planning a presentation to ensure that a relevant conversation occurs.

Ms. Duarte recommends using social media as a connection tool, especially auto-tweet live by pre-writing tweets that get sent out when you click to advance your slides. The audience is thus involved in some sort of enhanced anticipation of what is about to happen. One reviewer commented that he uses "social objects" in live-tweets. Audiences get key points, images and links that they can use content with as they listen to the speaker.

But, before you start on such an adventure, be certain that your audience actually understands and uses social
media. You may get a blank gaze when you start fooling around with this stuff. Also, an audience is often not
able to interact with social media and still pay attention to the presenter. The tweet becomes more of a distraction
than a benefit.

To make this a success you must do substantially more work than just preparing a presentation. Is it really worth it?