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Dan Zarrella is a social media and viral marketing scientist. You can read his blog and follow him on Twitter. Be sure to attend Dan's free webinar, The Science of Presentations on August 19th, and download the accompanying eBook.TwitterTwitter is here to stay but there is some science to creating a perfect, "tweetable moment" during a presentation. That is, a memorable moment that sticks in the mind of your audience long after the presentation is over. How do you get those moments to happen? How do you get an audience to tweet it? How do you fit it into 140 characters or less?A few months ago, I started to analyze why people share content from presentations and how marketers can leverage those motivations to deliver more contagious talks. I conducted a survey, gathered data from a huge webinar, talked to a bunch of celebrity presenters and extracted some data from the SlideShare API.From that information I've collected the essential elements you need to create Tweetable moments in your presentations.

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Priming

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Before you deliver your Tweetable moment, you should spend some time priming your audience to get them ready to Tweet your ideas.

• 1. Expectations

  Over the past few decades, psychological researchers have been successfully experimenting with a behavior modification technique called "expectancy manipulation," similar to the placebo effect. Essentially, if you tell an audience to expect something, they will often look for that same outcome.

  For example, if you can establish the expectation that sharing your content will somehow benefit your audience, you may be able to increase the amount of sharing that occurs. In fact, many survey takers told me that they were motivated to share presentation content by the potential benefit to their reputations.

• 2. Ingratiation

  Many respondents said they were motivated to Tweet about a presentation if they liked the presenter. Ingratiating yourself is a strategy to persuade a person based on their positive feelings towards you. In the 2008 edition of Introduction to Social Psychology, the authors highlighted two types of ingratiation that may be useful to presenters: Flattery and self-presentation.

  By flattering your audience you may be able to positively influence their feelings about you and encourage them to share your content. Most people can tell if you're being honest, so don't just throw out compliments at random. Be genuine with your flattery and you'll be rewarded with tweets.

• 3. Calls-to-Action As with any form of marketing, calls-to-action are extremely important. You have to tell people exactly what action you want them to take. If you ask your audience to Tweet, they'll follow suit.

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Delivering “AHA”

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Now that you’ve primed your audience to be ready to share your Tweetable moments, you need to actually deliver a moment that induces an “AHA, I need to Tweet that” feeling.

• 1. Novelty

  In my survey, many respondents cited novelty and newsworthiness as a key motivator to sharing presentation content. People want to share ideas that they and their audience have never heard before.

  Novelty doesn’t have to be something no one on earth has ever heard before, only something that members of your audience haven’t heard in quite that way. Be sure to put your own spin on things, and avoid saying things that people have heard many times before.

• 2. Delayed Orientation

  Like jokes, a key aspect of contagious content is delayed orientation. This means that the audience is following your setup, but then a “punch line” shows the audience a piece of information they didn’t previously know.

  A good Tweetable moment using delayed orientation will walk the audience through a commonly understood situation, but climax with the new idea or piece of information you’re delivering to them in a powerful punch line.

• 3. Humor Writing jokes can be very difficult and fail badly. If you’ve given presentations about a topic a few times, you may have identified several quips that tend to get a good audience reaction, so you can polish these up and use them to deliver the “AHA” you need to create a great Tweetable moment.

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The Sound Bite

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You’ve primed your audience, and set up the context to deliver “AHA.” Now you have to craft the actual quote you want your audience to Tweet.

• 1. Length You have to create a sound bite that is less than 140 characters if you want your audience to be able to fit it into a Tweet. You’ll actually want to aim to keep it under 100 characters so that they can add your user name or a hashtag.
• 2. Understandable Out-of-Context Not only does your sound bite have to fit into a Tweet, but it has to make sense to people who aren’t in your audience, since your audience’s Twitter followers might not be in the room with you. Think about your quote outside of the context of your presentation, can it stand on its own or does it need further explanation?
• 3. Stats or Rules of Thumb Concreteness is best for Tweetable soundbites. While opinions are sometimes retweeted, most often people share concrete ideas, like statistics, data or rules of thumb. Use whatever interesting numbers or elegant rules of thumb you have.
• 4. Pause After you deliver your Tweetable soundbite, the most important thing to do is to shut up for a few moments. Let it sink into your audience, let them feel the “AHA” and give them some time to actually Tweet it for you. Many survey takers said that they didn’t Tweet about presentations they really liked because they were too busy trying to focus. Give your audience time so they don’t feel like they’re missing something else great.

[Note: the above graphs were compiled from 400 survey respondents and a webinar with 13,000 registrants, 5,700 attendees and 3,900 tweets.]

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More Twitter Resources from Mashable:

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- 5 Terrific Twitter Mapping Tools
- 5 Fab Twitter Follower Visualization Tools - 10 Free and Fun Twitter Bird Icons for your Website - 5 Free Ways to Never Miss a Twitter @Reply - The Origin of Twitter’s “Fail Whale”

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Cliff Atkinson is author of The Backchannel: How Audiences are Using Twitter and Social Media and Changing Presentations Forever (New Riders, 2009).

What do you do when you’re giving a presentation, and notice that your audience is looking down, busily typing on their laptops and smartphones? And what about when you get the sense that they are turning against you?

When audiences use TwitterTwitter and other tools to communicate with one another during live presentations, they create a new “backchannel” where they share comments, questions and sometimes criticisms about the person speaking.

This new dynamic has led to high-profile blowups between presenters and audiences, which makes it more important than ever for presenters to do the right things to avoid similar disasters.

To short-circuit a possible disaster, keep in mind these five things you can do to prepare and engage the backchannel.

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1. Calibrate Your Content so You Don’t Misfire

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One of the major causes of backchannel disasters is a mismatch between what audiences expect, and what you deliver. Make sure you match your audience expectations when you are planning your material by using Twitter to reach out to the followers who will be in attendance. Ask for their feedback. Query them about challenges they are facing that you can help resolve, case studies of how they tackled situations related to your topic, or suggestions of what you should be sure to cover.

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2. Defuse the Snark Bomb Before it Blows Up on You

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Audience members who use Twitter during a live presentation will often assume the speaker is not paying attention to their comments, so they may be more prone to be snarky or say things they wouldn’t say to you face-to-face. Prevent this dynamic at the outset by publicly welcoming audience members using Twitter and let them know you’ll be monitoring what they write, and possibly reading aloud to the whole audience what they tweet.

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3. Spark the Conversation Early and Often

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The whole point of social media is that people want to get more involved in experiences, rather than be passive recipients of opinions pronounced from on high. To get people more involved, plan your material in a way that allows you to take Twitter breaks.

When you break, switch over to a browser, review the audience tweets and respond to questions both from the backchannel and from the live audience. These breaks give you the chance to take the temperature of the audience, make sure you’re on track, and to make any adjustments to your presentation based on the feedback you get.

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4. Grab the Twecklers Off of the Web and Into the Room

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When you take a Twitter break and review comments, you may find that audience members made negative remarks or even heckled you. What should you do? You’ll need to make a judgment call here –- if you can’t do anything about the issue, or if it reflects the personal view of that one person, you might just ignore it.

But if the comment is disruptive and you see it’s affecting the comments of others, you may need to address it directly. In that case, read the comment out loud to the audience, and take a poll of how many people agree with the comment. If many people agree, ask the individual to explain it further, and then address it. If only a few people concur, let the commenter know you’ll be glad to talk further after the presentation and move on.

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5. Don’t Stick Your Fingers in the Social Media Socket

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The last thing you want to do is lose control of your presentation because you’re overwhelmed. Trying to deliver your presentation while monitoring the information flowing from the Twitterstream can be difficult. If it’s too much to do both, which is the case for most people, focus on your delivery first, then engage the backchannel when you turn your attention to it during Twitter breaks. That way you accomplish what you came to do –- delivering an effective, memorable presentation as you promised in your session description, as well engaging and involving your audience during breaks.

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More social media resources from Mashable:

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- How Companies Are Using Your Social Media Data
- The Science of Building Trust With Social Media
- How Twitter in the Classroom is Boosting Student Engagement
- 3 Ways Educators Are Embracing Social Technology
- How Social Media is Taking the News Local

Images courtesy of iStockphotoiStockphoto, Splitcast, Alina555