Everyone’s been doing such a lovely job of recapping sessions they attended, so I wanted to get a little meta on you guys and talk about how Twitter was used at PLA this year. For a little context, the way I was keeping up with PLA happenings on Twitter was partly though the people I already followed but mostly by monitoring tweets tagged with #pla10, so I did miss anything that people I didn’t know said about the conference that wasn’t tagged.
What worked
Twitter turned out to be great for getting snippets of sessions I didn’t attend. It was sometimes hard to decide which of two or three concurrent talks I wanted to go to, so it was nice afterward to be able to scroll back through recent tweets to see if anything particularly interesting (and necessarily pithy) had come out of the ones I missed. It was interesting, too, to see how many people quoted the same thought, and it was especially interesting to see what sessions Twitter users attended. There were, as you’d expect, a lot of tweets about the technology sessions, and there were a fair amount from the youth services sessions, but there were very few from the management track sessions. Make of that what you will.
What didn’t work as well
Unfortunately, the #pla10-tagged tweets seemed to mostly be people putting out ideas without much dialog happening around those ideas. That is, Twitter looked like a room full of people talking at and not with each other. I did see some short exchanges, and it’s possible that these follow-up conversations and elaborations happened in @-replies that didn’t get tagged (I know I had a few of those myself), but it didn’t seem like Twitter was being used much to build ideas or community.
My other main disappointment was that plans to have a tweet-up (an in-person meeting of Twitter users) weren’t well published and mostly fell through: one person said that only five people said they’d be there and then only two actually showed up–but I didn’t even hear about it until it was over. This missed opportunity to build community was especially sad since national conventions are such a great time to meet people you normally wouldn’t, or to finally meet people you’ve “known” online.
I’m really glad that I was twittering publicly at PLA, though. I’ve been using Twitter for almost two years now, but with a locked account and just among friends; it’s only in the last few months that I’ve created a public account and started socializing outside of my immediate circle. It added a depth and dimension and feeling of connection, both to content and to people, that I didn’t have at ALA. And from the experience I’ve gained more followers and started following some new people I wouldn’t have found without Twitter and hashtags and the conference. The complexity of what we say is somewhat limited by Twitter’s 140-characters-or-less format, but I’m looking forward to seeing more ideas and thoughts from new library friends in the coming months.
- Gretchen Kolderup
www.librarified.net
There are 13 Comments to "Tweeting at the conference"
[...] what was going on at PLA, I also twittered at the conference–and then wrote a blog post, “Tweeting at the conference”, about it for the PLA [...]
I found the same problems with Twitter. I could have a Twitter conversation with people in the room, but couldn’t find them in person. One tweetup had about a dozen but it was the
Wednesday before the full conference. Thank you for sharing, thought I was the only one.
I’m glad there was a better-attended tweetup than the one I heard about, although 12 is still a pretty sad number. I do think it can be hard to try to organize things like that on an ad hoc basis, though. Here’s hoping we’ll all do a better job next time!
Gretchen, I know what you mean about it sometimes feeling like it wasn’t a conversation but at the same time, I don’t have a SmartPhone and I wasn’t staying in a hotel with WiFi access. I had to use it in the lobby at night. (hence my lower volume of posting on this blog.) I tweeted the only way I could: via text messages from my old phone. If I had a SmartPhone, I might have had easier access to engaging in back and forth traditional @ twitter conversations by seeing other responses, but I was mostly just tweeting my experiences and tagging them as I went along, hoping they were of some use or contributing to the twitterstream in some way.
This, I think, ties into a larger digital divide question I think gets glossed over at conferences. Oh, the conference hotel doesn’t provide free WiFi even though you’re paying $140 a night and you don’t want to lug your laptop all the way to the Convention Center and have to carry it through sessions, exhibits, meals, and shuttles all day? Just use your SmartPhone and/or netbook … I mean, everyone has SmartPhones and netbooks as well as laptops, right?
True, real communication can be a bit hectic, especially at conferences when it seems like people are more interested in broadcasting than conversing. But sometimes that isn’t a bad thing. For example, I was use it to let conference-goers know when we were having an author signing in our booth, and that didn’t especially need a response to be effective.
Oh, love the spam comment, by the way.
You’re so right–the way I used Twitter changed drastically once I got a smartphone, and having it be so easily accessible during the conference was what led me to want more of a back-and-forth. Were I still just sending updates via text, I would have been expecting (and able to participate in) a very different experience. I should have considered that when I was composing this post, I guess.
In general I think that the people who are at conferences are a somewhat self-selecting group since you have to be able to pay for a membership, a conference registration, travel, lodging, meals while you’re away–and even if your library is paying, you have to be working for a library that can afford that. I’d like to see more opportunities to have that funding covered so we can have even more diversity of representation in conference attendance.
I’m glad that you were able to successfully announce author signings! That’s definitely the useful kind of broadcasting, and you’re right that no reply was really needed.
I didn’t even hear of a tweet up…would have loved to attend. Hopefully next time it is better publicized. ALA Midwinter – had a huge tweet up.
I really didn’t care that there was no tweet-up or that there wasn’t much conversation following session ideas expressed via tweet. I just appreciated that good ideas from sessions I couldn’t attend were being shared with a larger group. I found Twitter very useful at this conference – it was all the better that this conference center offered wifi – and thought that it expanded my overall PLA experience.
Sara, I’m so glad that Twitter expanded your conference experience! As down as I was on the lack of interaction, it was definitely a useful resource for me, too.
This was the 1st conference that I tweeted. I did receive a number of DM’s asking questions, but messages were mostly from staff at home who were following along. I appreciated the vendor broadcasts. My conference reports will be gleaned from the #pla10 notes that I made or favorited!
[...] what was going on at PLA, I also twittered at the conference–and then wrote a blog post, “Tweeting at the conference”, about it for the PLA [...]
[...] this spring’s PLA conference in Portland, Oregon, Gretchen Kolderup observed that the stream of tweets tagged with #pla10 could be likened to “a roomful of [...]