Learning from our Twitter xperiment

[Lynda Kelly]

If you've been following my other post called Project AMEP you'll know that we are trying out some Web 2.0 tools for one of our large projects here. The Australian Museum Eureka Prizes (AMEP) are Australia's premier science awards, culminating in a gala dinner for over 900 assorted VIPS and science-types. We wanted to do live updates of winners and other assorted tidbits from the dinner and decided to use a Twitter feed.

These are the things I learned (and hopefully Francesca and Vanessa will add their thoughts):
* Have a dedicated person or 2 to manage all the social networks on the nite - Twitter, uploading images to Facebook and wall posts
* For an event like this have a list of winners to hand so it becomes a cut-and-paste - spelling can be a problem and we wanted to get their names spelt correctly (altho personally I don't have so much of a problem with that)
* Rather than use a laptop have plenty of mobile devices on hand - although my laptop is very small it still tended to get in the way and I was worried about spilling wine on it!!
* Alert potential followers earlier and also remember to follow them so their tweets go to our page
* The live Twitter feed to the AMEP website was really good
* Take a torch so you can see what you're doing!!
* If you're running several tools as we were one is bound not to work - in this case the RSS app wasn't updating (Vanessa found out it was a problem at FB's end, not ours). Lesson here is to actually have multiple tools in case this happens
* Promote it better - staff here knew about it and several of them logged in during the nite to see what was happening, but I think we could have got more people at the event and at home adding their tweets

Overall, I'd definitely do it again. I'm getting the feeling from peollpe here that they know something cool is going on and are starting to want to be a part of it. Watch this space!!

[Lynda Kelly]

Here's another post on Twitter and it's use in the US Presidential elections - some nice links there too.

[Lynda Kelly]

Here's a great post from the Ideum blog giving a whole range of Twitter links.

[Erietta Sapounakis]

hullo all, a little postscript to the twitter experiment ... Twitter has updated the application this week and launched an interesting twitter site for the US election. Looks like they are scanning election commentary tweets. http://election.twitter.com/

[Lynda Kelly]

We ran the Twitter feed for a few more days - I tweeted from the seminar and we also found that people were finding our feed when they did a Google on eurekaprizes, so we decided to leave it on the main website for awhile.

I have signed the account off for the moment (ie still an active account but with a tweet that says we're signing off for now). Overall, we did 91 tweets and ended up with 9 followers (ands learned a heap along the way).

Thnx all for your interest and support.

[Lynda Kelly]

Thanks Francesca, really great feedback.
BTW we seem to have several followers now - several I know, but as to the others?? Curiouser and curiouser...

[Francesca Ford]

Must admit it was a challenge to post on both Twitter and Facebook and spell 'photovoltaic' correctly not to mention all the names of those who took the stage on the night. I'd say a live feed on social networks for an awards night is probably best handled by 2 peeps, one to touch type (in the dark) and one to spell the names out, cutting and pasting is just too hard!!! In a perfect world the Twitter feed would have fed rapidly onto the Facebook page so no wall updates would've been necessary. The advantage of a laptop over a mobile device is that you can get the details into Twitter rapidly and with minimal abbreviation, it's very difficult to shorten long award titles without offending someone - Vanessa and I tried every combination so probably offended everyone! In saying that if you are going to abbreviate award titles or something similar then those abbreviations should ideally be worked out beforehand for continuity. Um, I think that's it for now.

[Lynda Kelly]

Here's some winners vox pops from the dinner if anyone's interested
amep winners 08 v2.mp3

[Lynda Kelly]

Thank you Eri, couldn't have done it w/out you! At this stage Russ and I are the only Twitterers here, altho it's something we're thinking about for scientists to use when they're in the field - another awesome idea of Russ's.

Thanks Vanessa for putting up those links - that has now opened a whole new set of possibilities for me...

[Erietta Sapounakis]

congrats guys, sounds like a success. maybe next year you will have a mini laptop and an itty-bitty-book-light ;-) I hope all the hip young science things start following twitter. Do any of the scientists have a twitter account?

[Vanessa Smyth]

ABCnews twitter feed http://tinyurl.com/5kshjt to soundfile on the winners just posted on their website http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/08/20/2340906.htm