Digital Disruption

This morning, I participated in my first live interview using Twitter.

Ad Lounge interviewed me for 45 minutes and we discussed creativity and innovation.

This was the second of a series of live interviews with 20 leading marketers who are participating in Art From the Unexpected, Ad Lounge’s upcoming industry event centered on creativity and innovation in the business world.

Today’s experience was exhilarating – being able to have a live exchange, asking and answering questions live at 140 characters a time.

I’ve been using Twitter for over two years and I feel very comfortable using Twitter for listening, sharing, commenting and debating.  However, today’s experience provided some interesting insights that I thought I would share.

Some key observations:

1. Clutter: I found it difficult to concentrate and focus on the one conversation with Trina Boos at @adlounge.  Her questions were excellent but with the current Twitter tools at my disposal (I was using Tweetdeck and Twitter Search), I found my eyes being distracted by people retweeting things and friends and colleagues sending me DM messaging during the interview. Bottom line: It’s hard to have a focused one-on-one exchange on Twitter that lasts for 45 minutes.  This is probably a legacy of my “continuous partial attention” problem I’ve written about previously.
2. Real-time feedback / visibility: As a counterpoint to the previous clutter issue, the fact that people could provide me with real-time feedback and comments (privately and publicly) turned this into a valuable, shared experience for more than just @adlounge and @davidfeldt.
3. Timing: The 140 character limit had the potential to make it difficult for both of us to judge when a train of thought was complete and when to move on to the next question.  We agreed before hand that we would use “…” at the end of a post if there was more to follow.  This ensured we knew when the other person was still in the process of talking vs. done talking.
4. Nuance: I was surprised that we were able to detect the nuances in the conversation and play off of each other as well as we did.  I thought it was going to difficult to have a smooth, flowing exchange.  I was pleasantly surprised at how easily the conversation flowed.

Thanks to Trina for including me in this Twitter experiment.  I loved the experience and I trust that people benefited from the exchange.  However, I think we still have a need to evolve the tools so we can truly experience the art of conversation on Twitter.

For those who “tuned in” live this morning, I’d love to get your feedback / comments.  Please do so below.  For those who didn’t witness the experience live, hopefully you can get a taste of it here.  Your feedback / comments too please!

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