The Opening General Session for MPI’s MeetDifferent 2009 conference had a 2000 person live audience and many more via the live webcast. They used Poll Everywhere to let people text in questions to presenters and panels moderated by CNN/NBC contributor Terry Savage.

The video is a good example of how to verbally introduce texting at large conferences, and also shows some nice reminder overlays for video programming.

Questions submitted from the live webcast page were combined with texts to Poll Everywhere and tweets from Twitter. Using our real-time text moderation panel, the most poignant questions were sent directly to the teleprompt screen.  Other on-topic questions were answered later and posted on the web.  Here’s a picture from backstage with the PSAV and MPI tech guys (and the fabulous Brooke).

I bet most in the audience had no idea we make this possible for under $400 + 20 minutes of learning and setup (or even that we have free and $65 options for smaller meetings). As I spoke with people after, it’s fascinating how their expectations for reliable Audience Response Systems are anchored to $10,000-minimum RFP’s and long sales cycles. Bleh. Who needs that?