I tweet, you tweet, we all tweet at conferences

This article made the rounds of our office recently. It discusses how Twitter has changed the experience of attending professional conferences in recent years. It can have both positive effects (fostering discussion among attendees, letting those unable to attend in on the action), but also negative (privacy concerns, distraction from speakers).

My conference/Twitter experiences are similar. I'd have to agree with what Jim Groom says in the comments about Twitter not taking the place of actually being there. However, I have found it is good for getting little snippets of information that you can research in more depth later. Or, if you follow several people and certain patterns start emerging and you can distill some good takeaways from that.

For example, if many people in the talk seem to tweet the same five points, I'd conclude that those are probably the most noteworthy topics in the talk. Last month at DrupalCon, there were so many excellent talks and several scheduled during the same time slot. It was easy to see on Twitter what the other talks seemed to be about, and if anything looked like something I should follow up on later. I remember hearing someone refer to that as "ambient awareness," and I think that's a pretty good description.

Twitter is also great for logistics at large conferences -- impromptu meetings and such. The first day at DrupalCon, I met up with a group of other higher ed folks right off the bat (the majority of whom had never met before) because someone tweeted something to the effect of: "Hey! Anyone in #highered at #drupalcon? Meet up for drinks later!" And so we formed this higher ed Drupal contingent and had some really great informal face-to-face conversations throughout the conference.

Nowviskie's article briefly touches on the backchannel discussions -- Twitter chatter by audience members during presentations. I've found these really vary from conference to conference. At HighEdWeb a few years ago, there actually was interactive Twitter discussion among people in the same talk, expanding upon the speaker's points. But at last year's HighEdWeb (that my colleague Ben Kimmel attended), a keynote speaker was basically roasted on Twitter by the audience, and he had no idea during the talk and was given no audience cues that anything was amiss. The SXSW that I attended this year was mixed in terms of positive/neutral and "This guy doesn't know what he's talking about!" type tweets. DrupalCon had the most civil and constructive backchannel I've seen.

I've found Twitter is also good for keeping up with people you meet at conferences after the conference is over. Or conversely, meet people on Twitter first, and then meet them in real life at conferences.  I feel like 90% of what my work-related Twitter friends say is not directly work-related (I know more about the personal lives of some of my Twitter buddies, many of whom I've never met in real life, than of some people I work with face to face), but the other 10% includes interesting things I might not have found through other channels.

Last year, a few people I follow on Twitter were live-tweeting a session at a small conference. The session discussed the importance of user testing in university web design. At one point, the speaker cited Duke University's website at the time as an example of poor design, which I found out from my Twitter buddies in attendance. We were in the midst of a homepage redesign at the time, so I actually emailed the presenter and asked if she would be willing to share feedback with me. Much of it were things we had heard before, but it was good to reinforce those points. She and I ended up having a great conversation. 

Several months later when we launched our new homepage, I set up a search on my Twitter client to see what people were saying about us, beyond my regular Twitter buddies. There were a lot of straightforward "Duke launches new homepage!" tweets, but I also found out that our building it in Drupal garnered a lot of buzz in itself. The Twitterverse was surprised that we went with an open source CMS (which in turn, surprised us). Two people even got into an argument about this, with one of them (who had no connection to our university as far as I could tell) claiming that "Duke would never use open-source software!" Which we found especially humorous.

So yeah. I'm a big Twitter fan. From meeting and keeping up with colleagues at other universities, to arranging meetups at conferences, to just being "ambiently aware" of what's going on.  It's funny to remember back to what conferences were like pre-Twitter; almost like something was missing.