There’s been quite a lot of discussion about how to behave on Twitter lately. Last week @charlesarthur said it was all about the links and got a few conflicting comments below his blog post about how to be interesting (or not) on Twitter.
Earlier in the week, one of @journalismnews followers said they didn’t like too many Tweets from an event, without prior warning.
So, over to you our lovely followers … Do you think we should have a specific events Twitter name for all events, or specific ones for each event we attend, which we’ll publicise the name for from @journalismnews?
Tweet back, or drop us a comment below.
I’ve no real problem with it, but one soultion would be to have a seperate Twitter account – journalismnewslive or similar – that way we know what we are getting ourselves into
I’d prefer feeds on dedicated accounts for specific events where reporting will be heavy. I follow quite a lot of other journalists on Twitter and can think of at least three occasions where they got pilloried by their followers for overwhelming Twitter by tweeting on their own account from major events. It can be very irritating for those not interested in the coverage as it makes it very hard to keep track of unconnected tweets from others. Set up a special feed then use your main Twitter account to tweet the occasional reminder that anyone interested in coverage from the XYZ event can find it on @XYZjcuk if they want to follow the live tweets.
Ideally I don’t want a flood of Tweets. Rather, I would favour another account posting to Hashtags. (However, Twitter has broken this nice third party extension to its service. More generally, the role of journalists is still to write proper event reports, not to thread together Tweets.
“More generally, the role of journalists is still to write proper event reports, not to thread together Tweets.”
We don’t have any plans to replace our normal coverage of events with Tweets. But we do feel using Twitter at events could add value as part of an overall package that mixes blogging, microblogging, straight reporting and multimedia.
Also, in a broader context, I think it’s the perfect medium for breaking news stories, whether they be niche or mainstream.
@nico, @john – I agree with both: Twittering should be a complementary service for those wanting instantaneous feedback/reaction/coverage. Can then provide fuller reports for that same audience and for those wanting a more digested version of an event/conference.
NB – I’ve seen reports that have been threaded together from other people’s tweets, who were at an event, and I think this can be very misleading. Not something we will be doing!