Does Tweeting Indicate a Lack of Sufficient Attendee Interaction at Events?
Wednesday, November 24th, 2010
When Event Camp East Coast was taking place Nov. 12 & 13, a lot of people on Twitter were wondering why participants weren’t tweeting much. It’s a good question. A good number of ECEC participants are AVID tweeters and well known on the Twitter hashtag community, #eventprofs.
Contrary to what some people have asserted, however, tweeting was not banned at ECEC. So why was conference tweeting so sparse? I believe that the answer is very important for event planners.
As a participant, from the moment the conference began I was interacting with others in attendance. Listening, sharing, relating in a way that few conferences allow for more than a few minutes. There weren’t many times when I sat in a chair passively listening to anyone and this seemed to be true for most of the ECEC participants.
As a pretty rabid tweeter, I felt bad about not tweeting but I was too busy interacting in real life. I spoke to many Twitter friends there who felt the same way. Though they would usually be tweeting away at a conference, they found themselves too involved in what was going on in real life to bother about reporting it to those in the virtual world.
So, it occurs to me that maybe the reason many people tweet at conferences is to experience a higher level of interaction with the content that is being presented. Sure, we always want to share great information with our peeps, but for many of us, tweeting helps us feel a part of what’s going on. It also helps us remember important bits of information.
As an attendee, your role is usually to absorb the information that is presented to you. But at ECEC, we weren’t only absorbing content, we were creating it at the same time. I would submit that it’s much easier for one to absorb content while tweeting about it, than it is to absorb content and tweet about it while at the same time creating it.
Now I know that many of us have spent the last couple of years trying to convince skeptical colleagues and clients of the value in conference tweeting. And I agree, in most instances it adds great value to a traditional conference. But I would ask my fellow events/social media geeks out there, not to be blinded by our own evangelism. As my friend Eric Lukazewski put it, the number one priority of all events professionals has to be our attendees. Maybe, just maybe, sparse tweeting is a sign that we are providing a quality experience for them. In that case, the only way to give online communities a better experience would be to live stream video of the event. But live streaming can also affect the quality of the experience when candid sharing by participants is an essential part of the program.
I don’t have the answers, but I do believe that we all need to be able to ask these questions. Open, civil discussion can help us to more successfully adopt changes in event technology and formats. So what do you think? Do you tweet during conferences? Why? Do you find you tweet more or less as an attendee when your conference experience is more interactive?
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