[Web4lib] The value of Twitter as back channel

[John Fereira]

Just to add my own story about twitter at conferences, I'll describe a bit about my conference twitter experience for the Internet Librarian 2009 conference.

First, the hashtag for the conference was created well before the conference attended and I started following it a couple of weeks before I left.  There were a few that were more active than others and having attended techie conferences for 20 years or so I realize that one of the most beneficial aspects of these conferences is not the one hour sessions one my attend but all the networking opportunities that are available.  By following the twitter stream prior to the conference I was able to start that networking before the conference and identify a couple of people that I wanted to meet face to face before I left.  Since I my arrival at the conference was almost a full day early I was free for dinner the night before and rather than eat alone I shared a table with someone else that was posting to the twitter stream, and because the location was shared on the twitter stream there were others that showed up later.  Due to the use of twitter the face-to-face networking started before the conference.

I know that I saw at least one or two tweets for coordinated ride sharing from the airport to the hotel.

During the conference, the person that was providing computer/networking support was following the twitter feed.  He'd frequently send a tweet asking about wireless access in the various locations and would respond quickly if there was a problem. At one point a couple of people complained about the temperature on one of the rooms and within minutes someone from the hotel was in the room to adjust the thermostat.  

While attending a session, whenever someone showed a slide with a URL someone would post a tweet about it.  I never had to try and write down a URL before the slide changed.   Sometimes someone would post a url to a related site that the speaker didn't even mention.  Despite modern technology we still don't have the ability to attend concurrent sessions physically, but by following the tweets I could not only see what was going on in the session that I was attending but could also follow what was going on in the others.  On the second day, I was chatting with someone just before the lunch break and when I was done I found that everyone had scattered so I went off looking for someplace to eat by myself.  I checked the twitter stream and someone posted that he was at a certain restaurant and welcomed anyone to join him, so I did.  I still follow that person on twitter.

I started following 20 or so new people at that conference and although I'm no longer following some of them, there are others that I'm reading every day.  The entire twitter stream, tagged with #IL2009 was archived onto twapperkeeper.  When I got back home I had to give a presentation about what I learned at the conference ant the twapperkeeper was an invaluable resource for looking up sites that were mentioned during the presentations I attended.

The IL2009 was a really too conference that was made a *lot* better due to use of twitter before, during, and after the conference.