How to use live twitting and tweets in events
Dan Thornton | October 14, 2008Here’s an interesting guide to live twitting from events – guest posted by Julius Solaris, blogger and event planner extraordinaire.
On the 29th of November 2008, I’ll be involved in ecoCampLondon a BarCamp about the environment and sustainability. The aim of the camp is to produce a document with all the discussion of the sessions. For the previous edition we just gave out a template which the session promoter needed to fill in. Boring and time consuming.
We felt that this solution was a bit 1999, so we decided to look at new ways to collect discussions. And here it goes: LiveTwitting
How does it work?
- Every attendee needs to follow either @livetwitting or @livet
- There are very simple commands to learn
| FUNCTION | COMMAND |
| To start livetwitting | d livetwitting ON Name or ID of Conference # Session Title
Example: d livetwitting ON BlogWorld 2008 # Keynote Example: d livetwitting ON 25 # Keynote |
| To record your notes | Just type away! Every status update will be recorded until you turn it off. You can send direct messages (d livetwitting your notes) if you don’t want to share your livetwitting with your followers. |
| To mark a segment with a Topic name (optional) | d livetwitting TOPIC Name of Topic |
| To mark a speaker (optional) | d livetwitting SPEAKER Speaker’s Name |
| To mark a Question & Answer segment (optional) | d livetwitting QA |
| To pause recording (i.e. to say hi to someone else) | d livetwitting PAUSE |
| To resume recording (after a pause command) | d livetwitting RESUME |
| To end livetwitting | d livetwitting OFF |
- You can manage all the sessions talks on the LiveTwitting website.
BarCamps are a fork of Open Space Technology. The aim of these unconferences is to produce something in a team effort rather than just loosing all that precious interaction among attendees. When the method was elaborated it was the mainframe era and static websites were common. With Web 2.0 things change.
Twitter allows to capture conversations in a great unbiased manner and therefore should be used for most if not all conferences, tradeshows and events in general. The 140chars nature of the service pushes attendees to actually summarize what is going on and synthesize the content in a great way.
Making your event more compliant with new technologies is the way to go and you may be missing out on precious feedback and content if you fail to do so.
