Daily Q&A – Day 15 – All about the Q&A


Question: What makes a great event even better?

Answer: The Q&A.

“Whatever you do, don’t drop the mic…”

Formal business events like conferences and seminars often have a question and answer element, more commonly known as the Q&A session. It’s a chance for the speakers to interact with the audience and to engage everyone in the venue with the topic covered. Quite often the Q&A is the more memorable part of an event, due to the interactivity involved.

Social platforms like Twitter and Facebook excel at involving attendees and those watching online in the Q&A at events. On Twitter, in particular, those live tweeting from events typically see large spikes in retweets and likes when sharing questions and responses from speakers during the Q&A session.

Interactive Q&A before the event

There are some limitations in using the mainstream social networks to involve a pre-event audience in the Q&A session of an event, though, fantastic as they are in their current form. It’s fairly straightforward to monitor audience chatter around an event’s hashtag using Hootsuite, Buffer or one of the many social media management tools out there but tracking questions and their answers requires a little more work.

That’s where Assenty comes in.

We’ve built an interactive platform for asking and answering questions in real-time at assenty.com. It’s free to post and vote for questions, and incredibly easy to use, simply log in with Twitter, visit the relevant question board and post your question in seconds flat. And, because questions can be rewarded, the ‘asker’ could nab Gold, Silver or Bronze question award, something to tweet about!

Linking questions to their answers

Assenty makes it easy to track questions and their answers; by using a question board hosted on the platform, each question is permanently linked to its answers, and the hashtag automatically added whenever a question or question board is shared on social media.

Our series of posts in the Daily Q&A challenge always include a question board you can interact with and this one is no different.

The events team at ThoughtWorks Manchester have put together an inspirational event celebrating International Women’s Day and the conclusion to Women’s History Month.

I’m looking forward to attending later today and I’ve put together a question board with some questions on ‘being bold for change’ and ‘diversity beyond gender’, the themes of the event.

Do you mind adding a question to the board?

How to add your question:

It will look a little like this, embedded in a blog post:

Stay in the loop

We’re blogging and tweeting our way through the Daily Q&A challenge. For updates, follow @AskWithAssenty on Twitter or like our Facebook page.

Want to run your own?

Fancy running a Q&A yourself? It’s easy to create your own question board. Details here.

Image Credit: Trustwave