The day after the week before

Well we made it!  We hosted Simply's first major conference on  internal communications last week and what a blast it was!
We sort of knew that the speaker line-up would go down well.  I mean the UK has never had Shel Holtz, Euan Semple, Gerry McGovern, Steve Crescenzo and Mark Ragan on the same bill before so we were pretty confident of the content.
But there were a couple of big surprises: the dramatic clash between the social media audience and the established media presentation by McDonald's was one.  This deserves a blog on its own, which I will do later today.
The other was the use of Crystal Interactive's feedback system which we let loose on Day 2.  This is a system of networked laptops that created a forum for the conference.  Basically people used the nifty little keyboard and screen devices to note down questions for the speakers as they were giving their presentations.  We thought this would be a neat way of empowering the Q&A process.

But what actually happened was that we had unwittingly created a backchat channel for the delegates.  Conversations started to spring up during the presentations, with delegates helping each other on bits of the Social Media that they didn't understand
Some delegates started arguing or agreeing with each other online, adding footnotes to the presentation all while the speaker was still at the podium. Then when the speaker finished we showed the feedback before they started answering.  It was a bit like getting the results of your exam the moment you stopped writing it.
Some speakers were nonplussed while other veterans actually stopped in mid flow to check what the issues were and dealt with them in real time. 
It was a conference - but not as you and I know it Captain.