Another round of updates to the PowerPoint Twitter Tools, including:

• Auto-tweeting
• An additional feedback slide
• An option for secure internal use
• A customizable text-zooming tool
• The ability to set up values in advance (for example, to add the tools into a conference template)

To access all these tools, please go to the main download page: http://timoelliott.com/blog/powerpoint-twitter-tools/. Here’s some information about each of the new features:

PowerPoint AutoTweet

The PowerPoint AutoTweet functionality, available as a PowerPoint Add-in, lets you automatically update your twitter status during your presentation.

As you go through your slides in presentation mode, any text in your note pages between the tags [twitter] and [/twitter] will automatically be tweeted when you reach the appropriate slide.

The plugin uses Microsoft VBA (visual basic for applications), so is only supported in PowerPoint for Windows (the idea is based on similar functionality already available for Keynote on the Macintosh).

Checking the “Display success status of tweets” option will show a dialog box during the presentation, telling you whether the tweet was successful or not. It will close automatically after a second or so (the actual time may vary depending on the vagaries of Windows processing).

You can use the twitter feed to reinforce the points you are making in your presentation, or ask the audience questions related to your content, and include a feedback slide later in the presentation to review the audience replies.

New Feedback Slide

Here’s another feedback slide tool for high-tweet locations (web 2.0 conferences, etc.), showing twice as many tweets as the original. Like the original, it auto-refreshes every 30 seconds and supports pagination and custom feeds (for example using a service like http://TidyTweet.com for a moderated feed, or any other atom-based feed).

Secure Internal Use

What if you would like to use the PowerPoint Twitter Tools for an internal meeting, but don’t want to blast your critique of executive strategy over the internet?

One option is to use the open-source microblogging platform from Status.Net (motto: “Your life and your business are your own. Take control of your status.”). You can see an example of this product in action at www.identi.ca

To use the product, you’d need to install a server inside your organization, invite your employees to register, and then use a custom feed such as:

http://yourinternalserver:1088/api/statusnet/tags/timeline/thetagyouwanttofollow.atom

The two feedback slides and the ticker bar all support the use of custom feeds. Unfortunately, some of the status.net feeds don’t include the avatars link, so you only get the text updates using this method (e.g. see the screen shot below using the public feed for the “enterprise20” tag from identi.ca: http://identi.ca/api/statusnet/tags/timeline/enterprise20.atom).

Zoom Text Tool

This tool doesn’t connect directly to twitter just yet, but it’s a nice graphic effect that you can customize with your own words. Here’s a glimpse of what it looks like (this text moves towards the viewer, and you can click on values to move them to the center)

Support for Predefined Values and Templates

Do any of these apply to you?

• You’re tired of entering the same keyword values each time you open the presentation?
• You have a technically-challenged manager, and you need to set the values in advance?
• You’re scared that the audience might – gasp — see the mouse on the screen? (this is a surprisingly common fear among conference organizers)
• You’d like to set up a conference template for others to uses

The answer to all these is to use the setup variables, now supported by most of the tools. To set variables in advance, simple right-click the tool in PowerPoint and add them to the end of the movie name. Here’s a quick list of the variables available:

• “keyword=yoursearchterm” (use %20 instead of a space if you need two words)
• “locked=1” hides the bar for the search term, effectively “locking” it to whatever you’ve pre-set
• “votes=10” to set the maximum number of votes
• “customfeed=1” to enable a custom feed
• “customfeedurl=http://yourcustomfeedurl” to set the value of the custom feed
• “days=4” increases the number of days votes are valid for
• “percentageorvalue=1” to show percentage by default (0 to show value)
• “choice1=YourChoiceText” for the hover-over text on the voting charts (choice1 through choice6, as appropriate – and use %20 instead of a space if you need two words)

For example, if you wanted to set up the feedback slide so that it automatically opened with a search for the tag “#sap”, you can simply right-mouse click on the movie, and add “?keyword=#sap” to the end of the “Movie” Parameter (note that in theory you should use URLencoding of values, e.g. %23 instead of #, but it seems to work anyway)

And here’s an example of the text to add in order to get a locked-down, custom moderated feed:
“?locked=1&customfeed=1&customfeedurl=http://timoelliott.tidytweet.com/SAPWeb20.atom”

Here’s the result – note that the search term can no longer be changed:

To see which values are valid for which movies, click on the “embed” button, and view the options for the embedded HTML:

To access all these tools, please go to the main download page: http://timoelliott.com/blog/powerpoint-twitter-tools/

I’ve posted a new set of tools to the PowerPoint Twitter Tools pages. The new features include:

• Moderated tweets
• New tool to tweet directly from PowerPoint
• New “mood meter” tool
• New voting pie chart tool

Moderated Tweets and New Feedback Slide Options

Are you scared of your audience? Me neither. But when I recently asked several senior executives if they were interested in using the PowerPoint Twitter Tools in their conference presentations, the reaction was identical, three times in a row: “Wow, that’s a great idea!”, followed by “but maybe not this time…”

The biggest fear was that people would tweet something inappropriate, and it would appear during the presentation (profanity, swear words, “your presentation sucks”, etc.).

I think the fear is overblown (if anything, putting the “backchannel” on the front screen helps make it more civilized, and if it’s in the twitter feed much of your audience is already seeing it), but to keep the sensitive exec types happy, I’ve introduced the ability to have moderated tweets, thanks to a new “custom feed” option, and the services of TidyTweet.com.

To use the service, you first sign up for a free account at the beta TidyTweet site, which gives you full control over the twitter stream you’d like to show – you can automatically filter out profanities, users you don’t like, likely spam accounts, etc., and even decide manually on a tweet-by-tweet basis what gets shown.

Once you’ve set up your account, you can use the new “custom feed” option at the bottom of the screen, and paste in the URL of the RSS feed provided by TidyTweet (supported in both the feedback slide, and the twitter ticker bar).

Now only the moderated tweets will appear in your slides (if you’ve chosen manual filtering, you’ll need a colleague in the room who can log into the TidyTweet site and moderate as you present). But remember, the filtering only works for the slides, not for any audience members who are on Twitter directly – if you decide not to show a “tough tweet”, the presenter may be only one who’s not aware of it.

To be fair, there are always some bad apples out there. Here are some of the good reasons I can think of for moderating a big keynote:

• Attention-seekers who might revel in the notoriety of disrupting a big keynote
• Spam artists that jump onto any trending topic
• Consultants and others than can’t resist using the forum to pretend to ask a question while actually pitching their products/expertise
• Way-off-topic posts that sneak through if you have an ambiguous search term (e.g. “#sap” misses a lot of SAP-related content, while “sap” has a lot of junk)

Also, note that the custom feed doesn’t have to be used only for moderation – it can be any RSS feed you like (although certain aspects of the slide might not be supported, such as the people icons). For example, you can use it for more advanced Twitter options, using all the advanced search operators, such as the ability to combine tweets from several different people (e.g. http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?from=businessobjects+OR+sapnetwork+OR+_sapcrm)

In addition, there are several other new features in the feedback slide:

• The texts now automatically highlights the search term, and you can click directly on any mentioned links to open them in a new web page.
• The addition of the “page” indicator in the lower left makes it easy to step back through older tweets.
• A new “locked” option is now available for advanced users who want to embed the feedback slide into presentations with the options preset and invisible (for example, in order to provide it as a standard slide for a conference template, locked to the conference hashtag). More instructions will be available shortly in the “advanced” section of the Instructions page.

Tweet Directly from PowerPoint

I’m not sure what circumstances a presenter might want to do this, but it was a request, so here it is… To use it, simply add the bar to your slides, fill in the message to tweet and press “send tweet”.

PowerPoint will prompt you to enter your username and password for twitter, then send off your message.

Note that the bar uses only “basic authentication”, which means some restrictions apply:

1. The bar’s .swf file must be in the same local directory as your presentation (unlike the other tools, which are automatically pulled from the SAPWeb20.com site as necessary).
2. Whether or not you can use it depends on your computer setup: if you get a #2048 error, your PC or PowerPoint security settings are preventing the login box from appearing (I’ll provide more information on how to fix this once I figure out what’s happening).

PowerPoint Twitter Mood Meter

I designed this tool to accompany debates, or presentations designed to persuade the audience.

It’s a variation on twitter voting – the audience can signal their agreement or disagreement with a proposition, and you can track the sentiment of the audience in real time.

For example: you ask the audience a question (e.g. “does innovation come from small companies, or large companies?”, or “will Web 2.0 transform organizations?”)

In the course of your presentation, the audience can tweet either “@votebytweet warmer myuniqueid” to indicate that that they agree, or “@votebytweet colder myuniqueid” if they disagree, and the indicator in the bar will move to the right (warmer, redder) or to the left (colder, bluer).

Because the bar shows the average of the last n tweets (10 by default), you can use it to track how persuasive you are being with your arguments, as the bar tracks the current “mood”.

As with the ticker bar, this should be installed in the powerpoint slide master if you want to use it across slides. See http://timoelliott.com/blog/powerpoint-twitter-tools/instructions for more details

New Pie Chart Voting

A new variation of the voting tool is available, showing a pie chart. Options allow you to customize the text of the options shown next to the chart.

Enjoy the tools, and please keep the feedback coming!

New tool: PowerPoint Crowd Meter

When you want to take a break from using Twitter for interaction, try the PowerPoint Crowd Meter – monitors and displays the noise of the crowd in the room, and shows the maximum volume over the last ten seconds – use it for crowd voting!

New Features

“Quiet” Voting. A new option avoids all your followers having to see your votes. Simply use the format “@tweetbyvote 1 myvote”, where myvote is the ID you’re using for the vote. Try using “xcelsiustweet” if you want to do testing.

More Voting Options. There’s now a choice between seeing the voting results as either percentages or vote totals, with the numbers displayed on top of the bars, and you can click through to a Twitter web page to see the actual votes cast.

Automatic Refresh. The feedback slide and the voting slides now refresh automatically every 30 seconds. Beware of keeping them open for too long, or you may run into issues with Twitter Rate Limiting.

Easy Access to Instructions and Embedding. The widgets now all include information and embed icons that give you access to the instructions page on this site, and the HTML needed to embed the widget in web pages:

Predefined Values. For advanced users, the widgets now include support for Flash variables for predefining certain options, such as the search text that appears in the lower left, the number of votes to be counted, etc. Examine the code available through the embed icon, or see the instructions page for more details.

Please keep your feedback and feature requests coming! http://twitter.com/sapweb20 or timo.elliott@sap.com

As a frequent presenter, I’ve been wanting to add some more interaction to presentations for a long time. A couple of years ago, I used some .php code I found on the web and an early version of Xcelsius to display a ticker bar during the presentation that contained the subject lines of emails sent to a particular address. And after some frustration, I even managed to put together a simple voting-by-email service that was adapted by the BusinessObjects demo team and worked perfectly during a large internal kickoff.

The system worked, but it was cumbersome: it required server code that broke when my service provider upgraded my hosting service, not many people were equipped with the suitable phones, it was awkward to type out the addresses, and letting somebody else use it meant setting up a separate system.

For all these reasons, the prototype just sat on one of my ancient “to do” lists – until now. Exactly two weeks ago, I suddenly realized that the world had moved on, and that the arrival of Twitter had provided me with a perfect opportunity to revive the prototype.

Twitter provides a service that’s available everywhere, for free, on just about any device (even older phones, using SMS), and lots of people (at least in the Web 2.0 world) are already using it during presentations. And texting/accessing web pages is much easier than it used to be with a new generation of smarter, easier-to-use phones (e.g. there’s a great TweetDeck for the iPhone). So I set out to figure out how to link it to Xcelsius and put the result into a PowerPoint presentation

I looked at the search API, which turned out to be perfect for the job: a simple URL call, no ID required, which returns an RSS/XML results. I used the Xcelsius Excel XML Map integration to grab the data, added a ticker bar and a few buttons, and hey presto!, I had a basic prototype in just a few minutes.

I’ve dabbled in the past in some Flash scripting, but I’m completely out of my depth when it comes to the latest ActionScript 3.0 object-oriented code. Xcelsius made it easy for even somebody like me – a slightly geeky marketing guy – to build these tools without using anything more complicated than some Excel formulas.

I tried it out at a conference, and the feedback was very positive, so I shared it with some friends within SAP, added voting, and then decided to release it publicly on my other site, http://timoelliott.com/blog/powerpoint-twitter-tools

The prototypes are in “beta”, ready for testing. There are currently three tools — but others are in production!

• PowerPoint Twitter ticker bar
• PowerPoint Twitter feedback slide
• PowerPoint Twitter voting

Display a real-time twitter Bar at the bottom of each slide

The twitter ticker bar sits at the bottom of each PowerPoint slide, displaying the ten latest tweets that contain a particular search string (e.g. “#businessobjects”). Status is maintained across slide transitions.

Display a feedback slide with questions and comments from Twitter

Replace your standard Q&A slide with a twitter-powered version!

Real-time voting over Twitter

Let the audience vote on choices by sending a tweet! Supports up to six choices, and up to 100 votes.

When you launch the PowerPoint file containing the tools, it calls the Xcelsius .swf files from the sapweb20.com site – so that I can easily update them with new features, and people will automatically get the latest versions.

You can follow news about the project on http://twitter.com/sapweb20

Feedback so far has been great, and downloads from the site are sky-rocketing…

And many, many others…

Go to the Powerpoint Twitter Tools page to download the tools!

In today’s web 2.0 world, sometimes the presenter on stage is the only one who doesn’t know what the audience is thinking – because everybody else is viewing the Twitter stream.

These new prototypes fix that problem, allowing you to give presentations in web 2.0 style, with the comments from your audience appearing directly on the screen, in real time, during your presentation!

Based on the SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius dashboarding technology, but completely free to use, the prototypes can be embedded in any PowerPoint slide deck, and provide a real-time Twitter ticker feed, a Twitter feedback slide, and a set of Twitter voting templates.

Go to the Powerpoint Twitter Tools page on this web site to download the tools!