Twitter at Live Events via PowerPoint

Our passion has always been engaging your audience by reflecting their opinion as part of your presentation. Back at the 2000-person Meeting Planners International event, we let people text in their questions for an expert panel. We helped them manually combine questions from Twitter with those sent via the web and text messages, and thought: hey, why shouldn’t this be automatic? After all, using Twitter is cheaper than sending a text for many audience members.

Real Time Moderation

Fortunately we already had our moderation engine in place, so if you want to be sure that only the best, on-topic tweets make it to the screen, you’re all set. We have a video to demonstrate this which features an inappropriate dinosaur pinata named Eddie (a gift from WuFoo).

How the Audience Participates

Each open-ended “Free Text Poll” has a keyword, for example, shout. Just tweet the keyword and your message to @poll like this:

@poll shout Hi, this is live from me to your PPT

Multiple choice polls have one keyword per choice. We have a cats vs. dogs poll, and you can vote just like this:

@poll dogs

We don’t support receiving votes via direct message yet. It would be nice for private voting, but it’s too complicated right now, since by Twitter’s rules, it would require people to follow @poll first.

Share your polls on Twitter too

We were always impressed by tools like StrawPoll and TwtPoll. If you just want to put your question out to your followers to vote over the web, click “Tweet this poll”

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You’ll need to tell Twitter it’s OK for us to tweet on your behalf, then you’ll end up tweeting the poll title with a tiny link to a simple and friendly web voting page:

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Who’s Using It?

In the first week we’ve seen people at Google using the Twitter feature, tons of churches, at least two universities, and two languages we can’t even read. Learn more about Twitter in PowerPoint and try “twoting” (ugh.. seriously? even makes us gag and we wrote it) here. Your feedback is always welcome! Email questions@polleverywhere.com or follow @polleverywhere

Brad is Poll Everywhere’s CTO, co-founder, and head of coffee quality. Before creating the magic of live polling for the masses, Brad did a stint at Deloitte Consulting and graduated Indiana University at the ripe age of 19.