Today I ran an experiment to use Twitter for a discussion. It was an hour long and went quickly. There were excellent discussions by the participants. Here are some quick thoughts I have about the experiment.
Managing the Discussion
The discussions went in different directions than originally planned, but it was a good discussion; I didn’t want to stop it or redirect it. In fact, I think it was better. Instead of talking about using Twitter, we used it to talk about social media in general. Better! Hence, I think it would be good to let the conversation flow – unless problems come up. Then I think the moderator should try to shift direction, or assign something to staff to follow up on directly.
Beforehand, I thought I should line up people to help as moderators and have one person each monitor different parts. Since this was a small one, I decided to do it myself. For a company, I would definitely have multiple people monitoring and moderating, Ideas:
Moderator
Serve as lead. Direct/address input on other media avenues as needed & reported by people in charge of them. Also, redirect conversation if it veers too far off-topic
Facebook
Set up another page admin to watch comments there.
Blog
Have someone monitor and respond to comments.
Twitter
Assign people to different topics that come up.
Go-to person
Ready to coordinate with tech support, marketing, dev & other departments if need be. Have everyone ready.
I think some discussions could quickly get out of hand, depending on number of participants. I definitely think a team approach should be used.
Planning & Advance Notice
I started giving notice two days ahead ahead so people could schedule it.
I had planned to write a blog post and announce the discussion topic and reasoning the day before, but ran out of time. It didn’t get out until one hour before discussion. Not good!
Time
This was set up to maximize time zones in North America, which of course is not enough in this day and age. It was at 10 am PDT, 1 pm EDT, and all the other time zones in between. (I have an idea for another experiment that I’ll want to try in a bit, so stay tuned.) For now, I will send @ notes in Twitter to some people in other countries to see if they could chime in later on.
Tools
Definitely need to use an app such as HootSuite or TweetDeck so you can easily set up columns and monitor multiple hashtags. There’s no way that would have worked in the Twitter app itself.
Special hashtags: Use of #TCdisc & #TCexp worked great. They kept the discussion separate from the regular #techcomm tweets. Otherwise, the discussion would have completely overloaded #techcomm. I had HootSuite set so I had three columns always visible: #techcomm, #TCdisc, #TCexp. Tweets kept coming by in #techcomm during the experiment, so I think that aspect worked. However, I posted an update halfway through for those that may have been following it there.
Considerations
Demographics would definitely play a role, I think. We need to address users in various places. This was discussed some in the tweets, and in blog comments.
Pros
- Was able to get many different viewpoints of different aspects quickly
- People were able to join the discussion easily. This might come in handy if people hadn’t heard about it, but saw it on Twitter and wanted to join in on the spot.
- Because the time was set and notice was given, people had it in their schedule
- Use of hashtags made it easy to group, find, and focus on the topic. This kept it separate from the main hashtag used: #techcomm. As noted above, if we hadn’t used the separate tags, I think it would have overwhelmed #techcomm and some important tweets would have been lost in the shuffle.
Having an article posted on the blog about it made it easier for people to provide more info in comments and expand on thoughts raised in tweets. If the article wasn’t there already, there wouldn’t have been a place to easily provide such comments. While you can add comments in Facebook, there still is a character limit. So I think that blogs are an important piece to the puzzle.
Larry Kunz added a comment on the blog that discusses an example of how this sort of thing could be used in Twitter. Take a look at it!
Cons
It was difficult to keep up! Tweets were flying. It was definitely hard to manage, as discussions went in different directions, to some degree. It seemed like we all should have been able to respond more quickly. However, it was probably just a matter of a few minutes. So is that really critical? Or has real-time made us think we have to act right now?
Use of two hashtags made it harder to fit in the 140 character limit. I had thought about using #TCexp for planning & up to the start of the discussion, then switching to #TCdisc only. However, I don’t know if that would have been more confusing. I also used both due to my suggestions in recent blog posts. Since it was an experiment, I wanted to use that one, too. Probably best to use just one, though.
The 140 character limit posed a problem. This was noted several times. Peggy Harvey and Ben M both noted this in a blog comment.
Closing Thoughts
I think it was a good experiment. There are definite problems, so use of Twitter as a discussion medium would take more research and testing.
I may update this later, but right now, I’m out of time. In the spirit of real-time, I just want to get this out now! I also want to write up a synopsis of discussion points, but I’m really swamped today. I also must take a break, so this will have to do for now. Sorry peeps! The reality of real-time. Everything done in pieces.
Thanks very much to all that participated! So far, that’s @larry_kunz, @paharvey, @juliov27612, and @bocomendoca. Couldn’t have done it without you! To those that followed the discussion, thanks for doing so. By all means, feel free to join in at any time. Add comments here, on my Facebook page, or add more tweets to #TCdisc and #TCexp.
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