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I totally agree that the benefits of using Twitter far outweigh the drawbacks.
We at Positive Matrix have some experience with conference micro-blogging and wanted to share a few ideas on how some structure in the way Twitter is used at events can improve the experience and outcomes.
In short the concepts include
1.) The Technology alone is not enough
2.) Enhance the Experience with a Social Protocol
3.) Sensemaking by Identifying Themes
4.) Use of Tweetdeck for Breakout Sessions
5.) Attention to the Physical Room Setup
I think that not only Twitter event software, but also best practices in Twitter enhanced event organization are emerging.
I am excited by this post and have two comments, especially to the paragraph: "It is hard to moderate a conversation of 40 people and there are times when several people want to make a point but one gets the opportunity. I started to notice that the others would simply post their thought to twitter instead which allowed the rest of the room to see what they wanted to say in parallel with the point that was being made live."
1. It helps to facilitate such meetings if you provide an etiquette or protocol that (1) focuses the conversations; (ii) captures the inputs and ideas (and not just those of the dominant personalities); (iii) acknowledges all contributions; (iv) allows for sense/meaning-making.
After using groupware in face-to-face meetings and on-line in this way for a three years, time and time again, I have groups move very quickly from a bunch of individuals with great ideas to a high performing team.
2. These exciting digital tools are valuable only if they help us move from knowledge capture to new knowledge creation and we then go out and apply this new knowledge wisely.
I would be delighted to continue the conversation. There is a lot still to learn and do.
I cannot emphasize enough how valuable twitter is for a conference organizer. It has helped with sponsorship sales, attendee registrations, and (as you point out) content at the event.
Beyond Twitter, I've been pushing people to use Eventvue (www.eventvue.com) as well. Eventuve meta-aggregates the majority of our activity streams and republishes it back out onto a twitter account (ie, it's like all attendees get all of their content aggregated into one stream).....ie, it's like twitter on steroids. ;-)
Any event organizer NOT using twitter is just simply missing out.
One under-appreciated advantage of using Twitter at events is discovering completely new people. Like you say Fred, there's often less aggressive or well-known voices who would normally be drowned out that have interesting things to add. You can find them by keeping a close eye on the feed or using Twitter's raw search; I've also built tools to visualize the communities that form around concepts. Here's the network for #hackedu
http://twitter.mailana.com/findneighbors.php?ne...
I like the idea of 'voting' on tweets, but think it could lead to ever MORE private messages to yourself, which I don't think would be a good thing. In hindsight, I think it would have helped to post even more of those wilder observations/questions to the in-house and external audience, to spur further discussion, because I'm sure I wasn't the only one thinking them -- things like:
* importance of 'encouragement of passion'
* how to develop tests to discover what people want to know... then encourage/empower that pursuit
* what are the great examples of webapps enabling synchronous and asynchronous?
* my wavering between the emergence of video-teaching (one-to-massive) & the critical involvement of an in-person face-to-face passionate teacher/mentor (and all the other benefits of social interactions with other students, etc.)
We used to used IRC for a back-channel at panel discussions. It tended to lead more to snark-behind-the-back. Twitter moves from chat to publishing and that makes a difference in the tone and quality of the output, I think.
You're right to assign a person - or everyone - to speak for twitterers outside the room. I've seen Ethan Zuckerman do that at many conferences with IRC and he's a forceful spokesman for the world.
Twitter is also good for adding links and material supplementary to the discussion. (I was inspired to post the entire education chapter from my book to my blog and link to that from Twitter; folks outside the room also posted relevant links.)
I found it useful to record ideas and quotes that I would use later in blogging (the first of two posts here).
Besides just adding ideas to the discussion in the entire room, it's useful to have side conversations (albeit in public). Scott Heiferman and I started hatching a business plan in tweets.
I remember at earlier sessions, Fred, you discouraged open laptops as they were a distraction. With the Twitter channel, the open laptop instead encouraged deeper participation.
iPhones would have done the trick as the input device
At least with AT&T's crappy network that's a dicey proposition. Can't speak to the others. Wouldn't most attendees at these events have laptops? So what you really need at events is hardwired laptop connections.
not
basically i think live events is another target area for niche social networking. crowdvine.com is taking this approach.
Twitter stream is kind of like a radio station...they screen the phone calls -> whoever has the most interesting story to tell will get on the air. If you keep an eye on the twitter stream & use it to interrupt the ongoing dialogue when some powerful statement/discussion point comes across.
What if you made a "point leaderboard" a la Hacker News where the comment popularity wouldn't necessarily be based off of RTs, but rather, real-time impact?
--think about all the introverts that go to conferences and would never even consider raising their hands. they've got great ideas, but they keep them inside. it's not just the extroverts that are the smart ones ;)
--it also makes me think of how frustrating it would get in the classroom where only one person is allowed to talk at a time. Twitter allows for many mini-discussion "branches" and the ones that are most interesting can take off on a life of their own.
--back to the traditional classroom analogy: what if I just spoke, but I have an EVEN BETTER point to make right after? Sucks for you. You just spoke. Others need their turn..
--I think the whole concept of ReTweeting can be expanded far beyond it's current limitations.
introverts can raise their hands. people are more effective & happier if they get the guts to speak up and confront directly. you make yourself vulnerable by speaking up, but people are more civil F2F, anyway. vital socialization and confidence-building happens when people don't avoid confrontation. address passive-aggressive & asperger tendencies head-on.
One other interesting strength of having twitter as a mode for inputting questions to the speaker of the moment is that it keeps it brief and it prohibits those type of personalities who tend to take over the Q&A session with a philosophical discourse of their own. (people who love to listen to their own voice)
But a twitter simulcast in the background with streaming tweets from the audience does indeed put focus on the twittering and less focus on the speaker of the moment. It's very important to get an audience to participate in the meat of the discussion as opposed to the focus on tweeting.
There are many times that I have personally made the same statement, yet I think we need to more seriously consider the issue of "attention" and what it means to be present at an event, panel, or conference. I may be the contrarian here, but I've actually been to numerous events where I've been completely disheartened watching half the audience pound away on laptops and phones. I'm no neuropsychologist, but there must be a theoretical limit to our ability to parallel process and to remain meaningfully engaged in a dialogue.
There is clearly a massive opportunity to broaden discussions outside of the room and to allow more commenting from attendees, but I think that there are times we risk losing substantial value from not focusing our attention. There is a narcissistic element to much of the tweeting that I see at conferences that is less about value creation and more (in my arm chair psychologist's opinion) about overcoming individual insecurity that there are indeed identified "experts" on a panel whose perspectives are worth really listening to.
Unfortunately, I don't have a particular solution to offer, but I do know that we can't assume that more commenting will always be better. There will definitely be a point of diminishing returns where our attention is stretched too far and where there is far more noise than signal from outside audiences that negatively impacts the ability of an intelligently selected group to engage each other in live dialogue.
In our event, however, out of 41 attendees, only three or four had laptops
open
I think that's important
Regards,
Sal.
---
Salvatore Saieva
Regards,
Sal.
---
Salvatore Saieva
Regards,
Sal.
---
Salvatore Saieva
When you have open discussions and people are encouraged to participate it's important to provide feedback so that everyone feels they've contributed to the experience. Not only does it help individuals, but the discussion as a whole. The great thing about twitter is how accepted it is and how it encourages not only engagement, but discovery.
BrightKite just made it easy to do just this, and added a feature for non users to be able to txt in a message.
For instance, here is a wall for Boulder, Colorado (or the address of your event), with a search term for "iPhone" on twitter: http://is.gd/mpOc
Creates a full screen capable flash player for your event, includes photos with the tag and refreshes every 3 seconds.
We have used this for a few events, works out really well.
I met a number of great people and complimentary projects on twitter around the #hackedu tag. By holding the event, and opening it up, you connect, galvanize and strengthen the whole community around your topic. It helps you, as the organizer, (more ideas) and helps everyone else (more connections). Thank you for that.
Gonna reblog it at fredwilson.vc
Granted, twitter is moving to provide some of this data from a trending perspective but what is needed are more reliable contextual framing mechanisms so: a) it is easier to plug into conversational threads and b) as contexts become anchored they persist beyond NOW.
While there are spam considerations to reliability of hashtag persistency, the 140 character limits mitigates over use by legitimate users, I think.
How about college professors implementing this into lectures? Perhaps via a closed Twitter-esque system like Yammer (to keep it within a course or section/ensure conversation stays on topic).
Think: 400-person lecture hall at a larger university...multiple sections...
Works on a smaller level, as well.
Would be an interesting way to engage students, especially those who may not like to "speak" in front of the class.
Have a T.A. monitor the comments and notify the professor of the most salient points brought up so he/she could respond in context or via a follow up blog post, during the next class, etc.
<#/hackedu>
In the spirit of hacking education, why should education and learning ever be private?
Default to public unless you are sure it has to be private
So, more:
Is the hashtag sufficient or should edu-focused dialogue get a new tag and a whole aggregator/site devoted to it, a la the $$ and StockTwits?
Will Buzzable groups do? (Is no visible hash or @ address in a group reply within a user's Twitter stream a problem? vs. something like the @shakeshack bot, which at least gives context).
For example, ^hbsECON551xx = 'Harvard Biz School Econ 551, Section XX"
The section can be optional if multiple sections are taught by the same professor. Or not, encouraging dialogue across sections and gaining transparency into another professor's tract of thinking if you are a student in a different section.
To engage the public, the successful professor/TA could attract live followers by tweeting a schedule and agenda regularly in advance of the class, i.e. "@drsmith Lecture on role of gov in mkts 3/14 2pm ET. Follow ^hbsECON551"
Especially exciting would be those blessed occasions where real-time, real-world events intersect with the day's topic, i.e. A-Rod steroid use in a sport psychology class.
A Political Economy Major, I almost yearn to be back in "Government in Economics" class just to experiment.
;-)
So, who here is a professor?
Charlie?
Let's experiment!
How to filter noise?
Any concern from professors that they might lose "control" of the discussion?
Think: Rodney Dangerfield in 'Back to School'
http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/b/ba...
Search for 'widgets'
;-)
Neat.
http://tweetdeck.posterous.com/teaching-with-tw...
I suspect Facebook's coming public feed will do keyword filtering as well.
I'm with Fred, this should be public by default.
Privacy is legacy thinking from FERPA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FERPA). Changing this paradigm for the schools will take a few years at least - the students are mostly there.
Very clever indeed. One of the first time I actually read an application of Twitter with a positive aspect to it, professionally useful and, at last, convincing. I'll spread the word, thank you.
Have you ever put stocktwits on a big screen with a bunch of people in the
room?
There are many here who would never make a comment via their mouths in public, but typing things out, particularly via a handle or avatar, can really empower a voice.
It's really interesting studying how Twitter and other social/communication services are used here.
I've got an www.NYVideo.org event tonight with over 500 members attending. I want to give this a try but how do you get the hash stream to update/refresh automatically?
We did the latter
It would sure be great if it did auto refresh like stocktwits does
By the way, Fred, I'm a huge fan of this blog. Thanks so much for all you put into it.
Brenda
"Recently I read an article in the New York Times about an emerging trend called Slow Blogging. Said to be inspired by the Slow Food movement in Europe, which was born as a backlash against fast food and to celebrate the joys and rewards of growing and preparing the finest food possible, Slow Blogging (loathsome word, but we seem to be stuck with it) is likewise the antithesis to the rapid-fire, semi-literate, compulsive texting that is so prevalent these days (anyone feeling too optimistic about human nature need only read the comments that follow any online news story — shockingly, appallingly ignorant and vicious!). By definition, Slow Bloggers do not hack out quick-and-dirty opinions, but rather deliberately take their time in observing their subjects, whether a morning walk in the woods or a workplace epiphany, then frame those moments in words as artfully as they can."
As some one who is just beginning to explore (and really digging BTW!!) Twitter, the above gave me pause.
Just sayin
Flavio
It was fine
having it positioned so all can see helps; danah boyds recent speaker experience shows that:
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/...
I love twitter as a way of following events that I can't attend but it seems to work best in the way you mention if the event is a small one - the larger the event the more likely mob rule and snarky conversations will overtake the relevant comments and discussions - alongside the 'self promotion' that people keep mentioning in the comments here.
Post the slide deck if you can
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?v...
It greatly improves the interactivity of conferences and "forces" a speaker to be more on their toes.
It alos allows people that cannot attend to follow the events and even post questions to the speaker or the crowd.
A relative new development is that Twitter is being used for live comments-streams on TV shows. Have a look for the #ddire hashtag and you will see what I mean.