I was at a conference recently that was actively promoting the use of social media including Twitter. Most conferences do these days it seems. It was a good opportunity to share thoughts and experiences with other participants and to engage with an audience not attending the conference itself by tweeting for example using the conference hashtag. Indeed there were folk back home that appeared to be tracking what they were missing by following conference session tweets, and in some cases there seemed to be meaningful interaction between conference participants and those listening in, which broadens what it means to be a conference participant these days in that you no longer need to be present to join in with conference delegates.
For me, however, I have a confession. I felt totally overwhelmed by the volume of information that was flowing through my social media channels, Twitter in particular. It was partly my fault for keeping my devices, an iPad and iPhone as it happens, always open during sessions rather than just listening to what was being presented. But also because I totally failed at finding any kind of balance between what was going on at the podium, and what was going on online. The volume of stuff that was being posted was impossible to keep up with, so I didn’t even try in the end. However that created another problem for me, digital eavesdropping. By not being able to follow everything that was posted I ended up felling like an outsider at someone else’s party. I was that person on the periphery of a circle of friends clearly having a good time, but not actually contributing. That is apart from the occasional comment or interjection that invariably gets ignored.
I enjoyed the conference but left feeling that I had actually missed a vital part of it, as others were saying how useful the online engagement was. How did they manage to participate in person and online in any meaningful way? Was I, am I, missing some important new skill for the new extended conference experience, and should I be worried? It’s the last question that’s been troubling me most, and regresses me to by late teenage years when I felt a mild form of social anxiety at potentially missing all the best parties. I’m sure that probably tells you more about me than it does at the use of social media at conferences. But I do wonder.
Anyway, wondering how people manage to integrate the tsunami of tweets (I actually referred to the tsunami of twits in my only conference Twitter contribution), what are your personal strategies for using social media at conferences?