Last week I attended the Future Summit as a member of the Twitter crew, the ‘unofficial’ official back channel of the two-day conference. Our mission was simply to attend the event and twitter about what was said and our thoughts on the summit. It’s something I’ve seen referred to recently as event-casting. As well as ‘pushing’ out what was happening at the event, our goal was to ‘pull’ some of the conversation from outside back into the conference. We had a number of questions come through Twitter that were asked of speakers and panelists. We were given free-reign as to what we said and there was no expectation that we didn’t voice anything negative about the conference. I wouldn’t have attended had there been any direction against what we could tweet, but I think it’s something that’s worth acknowledging as fairly progressive especially given the rigid formal nature of these events. And we certainly did the avant-guard proud, despite our scrubbing up, I can certainly say the Twitter Crew stood out among the sea of grey suits.

Twitter Crew

Quite a bit has been written about the event itself, but I’d like to give a few thoughts on the logistics of event-casting and what I learnt from my Future Summit experience. I always like to think about how we could do things better next time, so these are my thoughts on improving the effectiveness of the conversation with the Twitterverse.

Spamming the Twitter timeline

Admittedly there was some hesitation about flooding my Twitter followers with a whole lot of #futuresummit tweets. There were some public complaints about it from my followers, others just unfollowed me and added me back after the event was over. All of which is fair enough, but it does raise the question about how willing we are to accept these sorts of Twitter interruptions as they become more mainstream. It’s not happening often at the moment and not at saturation levels like it does during #SWSX for example, but I suspect it will become a more common occurrence.

Most of us who were invited have been on Twitter for some time and have a decent following (I hate to focus on follower numbers as I find that unhelpful, but necessary to discuss here) which was part of the reason for our invitation, getting the event out to as wide an audience as possible. My advice to someone who complained to me was to use a filter on a Twitter desktop client to weed out #futuresummit tweets, but I think overall we should be supporting the intentions of conference organisers who try and implement Twitter engagement. As little as three years ago, we couldn’t have done this and I think most of us would agree that we certainly brought ’something’ to the event – dare I say edginess?

The limitations of 140 characters

The challenge of reporting fairly dense (and heavy) topics in 140 characters was made pretty plain to me at the conference. It was quite hard to give some context to what was being said and by whom (we often added speakers names to the tweets, but realistically I doubt many followers knew who any of those people were.) Some sessions were easier to tweet than others, but my overall feeling is that we may have relied on Twitter a bit too much. It occurred to me afterwards that using more video and perhaps taking turns in writing short blog posts (about what was coming up and what was said) could have better created a context around what we were then tweeting. Kate Carruthers did some great vox pops using video and in hindsight I’d like to have experimented using video a bit more. Perhaps a video of few of us giving a brief summation of talks straight after they happened would have been good and kept up with events. Ideally streaming is the way to go, but logistically the mesh network (which was brilliant) would not have coped with it that well (if at all).

In conclusion, it was a great initiative by Steve Hopkins to have organised for us to be there. I think the response and experience was very positive. I write this post as a big supporter of twittering at these sorts of events. I learnt a lot about the logistics and challenges of event-casting and I hope some of my thoughts can improve on future conversations. Long live Twitter and the Twitter Crew!