Speakers and presenters at conferences are increasingly finding their audience live tweeting during their presentation. In most cases, the presenter has no clue about what the audience is saying on Twitter. This leads to a disconnect between the true thoughts of the audience in contrast with that of the presenter. In order to avoid such scenarios, you can incorporate Twitter within your PowerPoint presentation both to be an active participant as well as to gather feedback from the audience.

Timo Elliott of SAP Web 2.0 has developed several free Powerpoint Twitter tools. Download the tools for MS Office from the download page [No Longer Available] for your version of MS Office and unzip the archive. You need PowerPoint 2003 or 2007 and [NO LONGER WORKS] Adobe Flash to use them. Note that these Powerpoint Twitter tools are free prototypes with limited support.

Auto Tweet Notes From PowerPoint Presentations

AutoTweet is a PowerPoint Add-in that automatically tweets Notes from your presentation. First, you need to install the Add-in to PowerPoint. Go to the Office Button, and click PowerPoint Options > Add-Ins.

Powerpoint Twitter tools

From the Manage drop-down, select PowerPoint Add-ins, and click Go"¦. In the Add-Ins dialog, click Add New, and select the AutoTweet.ppam PowerPoint Addin file that you unzipped from the downloaded archive. After you see the AutoTweet add-in installed with a checkbox, close the dialog.

Powerpoint Twitter

Next, open the presentation in PowerPoint, and go to the Add-Ins tab on the ribbon. In the Menu Commands on the left, you will see AutoTweet. Click this to bring up a dialog where you can enable or disable AutoTweet and enter your Twitter username and password. You can optionally add a hashtag to your tweets and choose to get a successful tweet confirmation while presenting.

This tool auto tweets the Notes from each slide in your presentation. However, you might have some additional content in your Notes not meant to be tweeted. For this purpose, the tool only tweets text that is enclosed in brackets: [twitter] this text will be tweeted [/twitter]. For example, here is how I made my note to be automatically tweeted during my presentation.

Here is how the tweet appeared on Twitter with the #hashtag specified in the dialog automatically added by the tool:

twitter notes

Remember that each time you run a slideshow of this presentation, the tool will send out tweets on your Twitter account! If you wish to practice delivering your presentation, turn AutoTweet Off in the settings dialog before running your practice slideshow. Also, in order to use the next feature we are going to discuss, it would be a good idea to tweet an instruction in the beginning to the Twitter audience to use a specific hashtag while tweeting about your presentation. We will see how you can use this to gather feedback in the next section.

Show Feedback From Twitter in PowerPoint

Another useful tool in this pack is a slide that allows you to automatically display a tweet cloud in your presentation with search terms you can specify. Most Blog Camps and Conferences today use a specific hashtag for tweets about it, for example #140conf or #leweb. If you are presenting at a Blog Camp or Conference, you can use the hashtag as your search term to get real-time feedback from Twitter to show within your PowerPoint presentation. You can use this as a way to discuss the feedback with the audience, or simply as an engaging display in between different sessions.

To use this feature, follow these steps:

  1. Open your presentation in PowerPoint.
  2. Open the powerpoint_twitter_tools.pptx presentation from the downloaded archive.
  3. Navigate to Slide 4: "PowerPoint Twitter Feedback Slide 1".
  4. Click on the slide content visible as a large "X", and Copy it to the clipboard.
    twitter notes
  5. In your presentation, go to a blank slide where you want to display the feedback and Paste.
  6. Adjust the size of the empty feedback placeholder to suit the template and style of your presentation.

Now, when you run the slideshow of your presentation and navigate to the Feedback Slide, you will see a blank feedback slide with instructions in the center. Enter the search term in the box on the bottom left and press Enter. Tweets from Twitter containing the search term will automatically be shown in the slide. For example, here is how the chatter on Twitter about the #LeWeb conference looks like:

twitter notes

You can click on the Twitter avatar or the tweet cloud to open a browser window that displays the Twitter profile or tweet. To move forward in your presentation, you need to click the title or side area outside the content area you pasted. The slide refreshes by itself after 30 seconds and you can view history using the page navigation arrows. Also check out Slide 5 from the downloaded presentation which displays tweets in a grid layout.

Now, the next time you present with the help of AutoTweet, you will no longer be clueless about what people are tweeting about your presentation! Also, your tweets themselves will be a part of all the tweets on Twitter making you an active participant.

Will you use these Powerpoint Twitter tools for your next presentation? Do you think this will make your presentation cool? Tell us in the comments!