Live Tweeting From Conferences
I made a first foray into this venture recently and hope to do more at the Educause Conference in Perth in May. Twitter friends gave excellent feedback and advice:
Livetweeting is *incredibly* useful for those of us who can’t attend, especially the international conferences. I do a few things when I arrive and set up:
- Park in the front. Near an outlet.
- Hit the ‘mute’ button or turn off all volume on my computer.
- Try to sit at the end of a row. If someone sits next to me I mention I’ll be typing throughout the session. If the session isn’t packed, I put some things on the chair next to me.
- Remind Twitter followers that today I’ll be livetweeting, and if they don’t want to get slammed by that tsunami, they’re welcome to unfollow for the duration of the conference.
- If there’s a particularly juicy question, I try to involve tweets – what do you guys think? Anyone have questions they want me to ask at the end of this session?
- Let tweets know when I’m leaving and how they can contact me until the next day’s sessions (email, etc).
- Give myself some time to discharge after the day’s sessions are done….it’s pretty intense!
- Augment tweeting with longer quotes (I use microrecorder, or notebook, or even “Jott to self” feature via Jott.com on mobile) if I think there’s a larger issue I want to address.
- I file those longer notes in a manilla subject folder or email folder right away, and post the item to my Google calendar for followup later (do the same for contacts).
- Coveritlive is alternative to live tweets if u want ppl who are not on Twitter to be able to easily read your Conf comments
- Take your time, don’t feel pressure to post. Think before your hit “update”
- If you are in the middle of a lively conversation, posting on Twitter is counterproductive, wait.
- Tell other conference attendees you are tweeting, they will be more engaged and provide feedback.
- Don’t forget to enjoy the conference and your live tweeting from it. Otherwise, it’s worthless
- Ask your Twitter followers what they think of your updates & what they want to know from the conference
- I live tweeted from NEJM, ACAAI and multiple lectures. Enjoyed it every time and my colleagues were fascinated & encouraging
- Live tweeting can be ‘non-live’ in evening too = better quality
- Summarize all of your live tweets from the conference in a blog post. Helpful for later reference.
And this is exactly what I have done.
Loading ...
Another tip is to work out a way early on how you can comment on the conference without it being thought to be the speaker talking. When live tweeting I prefaced my comments with (PSw) so that it was clear, but you could also preface each of speaker’s comments with their name. The problem with that method is that it takes precious characters from your 140.
My second tip is to use another hashtag if there is more than one workstream / workshop. That way people watching will know which room you are in, otherwise the twitterstream can be very messy and unclear.
My third tip that you may want to consider is that livetweeting is valued by the presenters, but not all will be able to cope with very negative remarks. Encourage your followers to tweet constructively and everyone will get something out of the back-channel.
Great article!
[Reply]
Heidi Allen Reply:
November 1st, 2009 at 9:05 am
some good tips there – although with including your name may take up too many characters, I would say it can be assumed that if you’re tweeting it’s your interpretation of the comments. The use of a universal hashtag is definitely a problem. With negative comments, my rule is not to say anything I wouldn’t say to someone’s face. Great comment. Thanks
[Reply]