Last Friday I spend my day at a seminar on Innovation, aimed at civil servants and focussing on new trends in social media, the cloud and crowdsourcing. Actually, we didn't get to know a lot about that last subject. The whole seminar was sponsored by the likes of Microsoft, Adobe, Cap Gemini etc and the host mentioned a Twitter account at the start of the seminar (forgetting about the hashtag, by the way, but that was remedied after the first coffee break).
The first two sessions after lunch were so blatantly commercial Adobe talk that the people twittering started to be annoyed. Which led to an unexpected result: the host entering the auditorium and cutting the presentation short, quoting the negative reactions he'd seen passing on his Twitter account. (#inno2020)
One could argue that, in an auditorium of maybe 150 people, only 10% of them were actively posting comments. Maybe a little more. The tweets were, by the way, very polite: nothing nasty or indecent, just commenting on the commercial nature of the presentations and their lack of relevance. So yes, power to social media, if tweets can cut a presentation short. On the other hand: power to a very small minority whereas the majority of the people in the room had nothing to do with it - and no choice about it either.
And certainly very embarrassing for the Adobe guys ...
