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SHARON PRIEST FIGURES she's boring her audience when she sees them pecking away on their smart phones.
"I feel like I need to shut up and get off stage," said Priest, executive director of the Downtown Little Rock Partnership. "I suppose I could look at it in terms of maybe they're taking notes?'
Priest said she'd noticed that these days people are quick to check their BlackBerrys or iPhones, which have easy access to the Internet, during presentations.
Two schools of thought are developing over the use of smart phones during meetings or presentations. In one corner are those who say checking e-mails or posting items to social Web sites such as Facebook or Twitter during meetings or presentations is disrespectful. But others are encouraging the use of smart phones during seminars.
A smart phone can be a valuable tool in the hands of an audience member, said Blake Rutherford, communications director for the advertising agency Stone Ward in Little Rock. Rutherford has a blog called "Blake's Think Tank," which covers politics, media and public affairs.
"People can be using the devices to live Tweet," said the 30-year-old Rutherford. "They can be using it to shoot video, if they have the new iPhone. They can be using it to update their blog about what you're talking about or to text people with information about what's going on."
Rutherford said he didn't think smart phones were a problem during presentations.
"I don't see that as any breach of etiquette," he said. "It really can help."
He said, however, that in internal meetings, smart phones should be put away unless there's an emergency.
"We always like for people to pay attention to the meeting at hand," Rutherford said.
Etiquette coaches are increasingly being asked to speak on etiquette involving smart phones, said Dale Chapman Webb, the director of the Protocol Centre in Miami, which offers business etiquette training.
"It's on everyone's mind because we're trying to navigate our way through how to make it manageable and still be professional," Webb said.
More people are sending and receiving text messages than ever before.
The use of texting has soared since the first quarter of 2007, when the typical U.S. mobile subscriber sent or received 129 texts a month, according to Nic Covey, director of Insights at the Nielsen Co., a marketing and media information company headquartered in New York. In the first quarter of this year, the typical subscriber wrote or received 486 text messages.
But it's the teenagers who are wearing out the keypads on their phones. In the first quarter of 2007, the typical teenager between the ages of 13 and 17 wrote or received 435 texts a month, Covey said. In the first quarter of 2009, the number increased by more than 500 percent--to nearly 100 a day.
Constantly checking a smart phone for messages has become an addiction, Webb said.
"It's seductive," she said.
A Question of Manners
Etiquette coaches say that to make the best impression during a meeting, audience members should turn off the smart phones.
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"Walking into a meeting and sitting there with your BlackBerry on the table and checking it every five minutes is not a good way to make a good impression," said Ruth Sherman of Ruth Sherman Associates LLC, a communications consultancy based in Old Greenwich, Conn. She is also a speaker and author of "Get Them to See It Your Way, Right Away: How to Persuade Anyone of Anything."
She said a number of executives had told her they were frustrated by the number of people who are fiddling with their phones during meetings.
In 2007, a poll of 150 senior executives from across the country found that 86 percent of them said the professionals whom they work with read and respond to e-mail messages during meetings, according to Robert Half Management Resources of Pleasanton, Calif., a division of Robert Half International, a specialized staffing firm that has 360 offices around the world.
About one-third of the senior executives, though, disapproved of the practice, according to the Robert Half poll.
If someone is thumbing his smart phone during a meeting or presentation, the message is the smart phone is more important than what the speaker is saying, said Lesley Nalley, division director of the Robert Half Finance & Accounting office in Little Rock, which is also a division of Robert Half International.
"So you have to be careful if that's the message you want to send," she said.
The people who haven't used that much technology will think checking the smart phone while someone is talking is rude, Nalley said.
Others might think that if an audience member is pounding away on a keypad, then that person is probably sharing information.
Checking the smart phone during a meeting could be damaging to a person's image, said Kathryn Lowell, owner of Image Matters Inc. of Bentonville and a certified image professional.
Her No. 1 rule is that people trump devices and all attention should be on the person.
"It will guide you in the situations that you find yourself in," she said.
At the beginning of a meeting, speakers should tell the audience to turn off their phones. Speakers can tell when people are checking their phones, no matter how well they try to hide it.
"I can identify that fast muscle twitch under the table and ... that look like you're in a silent prayer," she said. "You're not fooling anybody."
Different Approaches
Some speakers, though, have embraced the technology. During a recent presentation in Pine Bluff, Millie Ward, president of Stone Ward, asked the audience members to text questions to her during the presentation.
"I said, 'I know you guys are going to be checking your e-mail and texting while I'm talking, so why don't you text us the question,'" Ward said. "We sort of made texting questions part of the presentation ... and sort of acknowledged the fact that it was going to be going on anyway."
Ward also said she had noticed it's become a common practice for people to sit in meetings with their smart phones on the table so they can monitor messages.
But she said she won't do it.
"If you're going to be part of the meeting, it seems like you need to be there and be present in mind, body and spirit," Ward said. "And not just body."
Some speakers said they feel lucky to stand before an older audience because they typically don't have smart phones, which is the case in Bella Vista, said Ed Clifford, the president and CEO of the Bentonville/Bella Vista Chamber of Commerce. When giving presentations, Clifford said, he tries to avoid PowerPoint presentations because it's just asking for the audience to pull out their smart phones.
He said his strategy is to maintain eye contact with his audience, so if someone dares to take out his mobile device, Clifford will know it.
In addition, how the room is arranged can determine how much attention people pay to the speaker or to their phones, said Blair Cromwell, the vice president of sales at the Bentonville Convention & Visitors Bureau.
If the room is arranged in a theater setting, people in the audience think they'll be blocked from the line of sight of the speaker and can get away with peeking at their smart phones, she said.
But in smaller groups, Cromwell said, she doesn't see the audience paying as much attention to their phones during a meeting.
Still, "people try and hide it more," she said. "You see the glow, especially if the room is turned out dark."
Acxiom Corp. of Little Rock coaches its employees on customer service so they will have "a good feel for what would be and not be appropriate in a meeting setting," said Acxiom spokesman Scott Maple.
Nevertheless, he said, instant access to the Internet has helped during meetings when someone raised a question. Maple said an audience member has been known to shoot someone a text and then share the response. "That oftentimes can expedite the progress of the meeting, when you're able to provide a quick answer like that," Maple said. "At a company like Acxiom, we really consider technology to be our friend."
Verizon Wireless doesn't have a strict policy on the use of smart phones during meetings.
"Of course, our culture is centered around respect for others and respect for our customers," said Lucie Pathmann, manager of public relations for the south-central region of Verizon. "So part of that is using your phone appropriately."
She said company officials understand that employees are busy and might have to field a message during a meeting.
"But sometimes we need to make sure that we're paying attention to the meeting that we're in," she said.
By Mark Friedman
mfriedman@abpg.com
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