Social anxiety, meet social networking
As many surveys have suggested, fear of public speaking is one of our strongest anxieties, often ranking above the fear of dying.
The following won’t help: These days, the audience could be skewering you on blog sites — not after your presentation, but during. And just about everyone in attendance could know about it, except you.
A journalist fell victim to something like this at a recent tech conference in Texas. Her chatty, overly familiar style of interviewing a prominent young CEO grated the audience so much that they unleashed a tirade of complaints and sarcasm against her on Twitter.
Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging site to which users can post short comments that are viewable to anyone anywhere (including in the auditorium, in this case). They can send posts via SMS, instant messaging, or the Twitter site itself, using their cell phones or laptops and cellular, wi-fi or other connections.
Never, ever have I seen such a train wreck of an interview, read one tweet, as a post on Twitter is called.
The heckling soon migrated from the online space to the real world. Audience members started yelling out comments that reflected the online chatter. When the CEO suggested the interviewer might want to ask some questions, the audience erupted into cheers vigorous enough to surprise those not following the tweets.
When the audience got their turn to ask questions, they were, one tweet opined, better than the interviewer’s.
