Make it Social: How We Use Twitter as a Learning Tool
Chances are, someone has told you how you should or should not be using Twitter recently.
Did you know that Twitter chats are a fantastic way to share informal knowledge and spark conversation within your field or even inside your organization? Think about it: You spend all day every day sitting in your office, siloed off from the world of information ebbing and flowing all around you. What if there was a way to tap in to the collective expertise of industry experts and thought leaders, creating synergistic relationships both inside and outside your organization? This is all possible. Best of all, it’s cost-effective and easy to implement.
For the past month, Bottom-Line Performance has been hosting Thursday Tech Talk, a weekly chat on Twitter. Each week, we extend an open call for users to submit articles on emerging trends, gadgets, or tech and we curate three of our favorites to include in our discussion. You can follow along and even join in by following @BLPIndy on Twitter to see the upcoming articles and saving the #TalkTech hashtag as a search. Here’s a transcript from our chat on Thursday, 2/16:
A few tips to get you started:
-Pick a hashtag that is short yet memorable and unique: We started our Twitter chat using the hashtag #T3 and have since changed it to #TalkTech. Since Twitter limits the number of characters per tweet to 140, we thought using a short hashtag would enhance people’s experience by allowing them to fit more in to one tweet. However, we quickly realized that having a hashtag that is unique and specific to your talk is important. The stream for #T3 was always cluttered with spam and errant conversations we did not want to view. #TalkTech has been much more successful thus far.
-Brevity is the soul of wit…and good conversation: New Twitter users sometimes balk at the 140 character limit per tweet. “How will I get my point across?” Rather than being a deterrant, we’ve found that the 140 character clause actually helps participants be more concise and form their thoughts better.
-Embrace different consumption preferences: Some of our BLPers are digital natives who find it easy to rapid-fire Tweets on any topic (I fit in to this heap). However, others prefer to receive and process information at a more controlled rate. We recommend using a service like Storify to gather the conversation and preserve a record of it for easy viewing. Users who prefer to interact with Twitter at a slower pace will still benefit from the conversation by reading it later and may even become more comfortable with the medium in time. Making a transcript of your chat available after the fact will greatly enhance its value.
-It takes time to build participation: We have been encouraging BLP employees who do not normally use Twitter to hop on and try participating in #TalkTech. It has taken some time for those not used to taking part in this medium of communication to get used to sharing thoughts in this format, but we have seen great improvement from the first week.
-Twitter isn’t perfect: The platform itself has some limitations that are worth noting: Tweets do not always load immediately when you are monitoring a keyword and the stream of commentary can become confusing for some. Remember that the added value of Twitter versus a closed off chat room is the openness of the platform itself: every Tweet being shared can be searched and viewed by anyone on Twitter, any time. There is always an opportunity for someone unexpected to chime in with a new insight. Sharing your thoughts and expertise in such a way is also a great way to improve the credibility of your organization on a chosen topic.
Our experiences with #TalkTech have been all-together encouraging and we plan to continue our weekly chats. We’ll keep posting the Storify summaries once a week on this blog.
I would encourage any organization still standing on the side of the pool dipping their toes in and grimacing a bit to take the plunge in to social media and try hosting a Twitter chat of your own. You can also try participating in one of many Twitter chats already going on. Just search for what you are looking for, and odds are you will find it!
February 20th, 2012 at 5:19 pm
I’ve run into people, including consultants who should have known better, who’ve said, “Why don’t you do this Twitter chat as a conference call?” I think that’s because the lack of control, the lack of an authoritative leader, discombobulated them.
A twitter chat isn’t a seminar. It isn’t a lecture. It sure isn’t a presentation. If you’re looking for those things, you should keep looking.
What I think the chat IS like is the swirl of conversations in the bar, in the evening, during a professional conference. There’s a general focus to each conversation, but nobody’s really on Hall Monitor duty. You get little nuggets of ideas, you get some useful links, you hear how some people think. And that can give you material to reflect on or follow up later.
I urge people to use a tool like Tweetchat, where you enter the hashtag for your particular chat (like #talktech). If you log into Tweetchat with your twitter ID, it will (a) show you only the #talktech tweets, and (b) automatically stick the hashtag at the end of your contributions.
I also leave Tweetdeck open, so I can easily send messages that AREN’T for the chat, and especially so I can whisper (via direct message) without disrupting the flow.
February 21st, 2012 at 11:14 am
Thanks for the Tweetchat tip. I was not previously using that tool and I think our BLPers would benefit greatly from it.
The challenge with hosting Twitter chats for those who are new is helping them figure out what they should be focusing on. The extra “noise,” when not properly filtered, can be discombobulating like you said.
February 21st, 2012 at 11:41 am
Steve, for newcomers, I think it’s good to keep the stream metaphor in mind. You can’t drink it all. You can’t follow every ripple. Go with what grabs your attention.
Also, when you see something that catches your interest, use your Twitter client tools — for example, mark something as a favorite so you can find it later. In Tweetchat, you just click the star alongside the tweet. Later you can go to your Twitter profile to review the stuff you marked, without the hectic pace of the chat.
February 29th, 2012 at 12:54 pm
So how is using Twitter different from having a live conversation about material that is being learned?
March 1st, 2012 at 4:57 pm
Twitter is great in a distance environment where a live conversation isn’t possible. Twitter is also public…ideas that are Tweeted are available to all and searchable by keyword. By using Twitter and sorting conversations by hashtags, you essentially keep a transcript of the learning.
As tools like this become more refined and ubiquitous, there will be less and less need for live classroom situations.
March 6th, 2012 at 3:53 pm
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April 18th, 2012 at 10:01 pm
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[...]Make it Social: How We Use Twitter as a Learning Tool | Bottom-Line Performance[...]…
April 19th, 2012 at 3:16 pm
It’s hard to say what qualifies as “learning.” I think Twitter chats (collected by a #hashtag at a certain time) are a great way to get inspiration and access to resources. But I don’t know that you can learn all that much 140 characters at a time.
I find these talks intriguing because they lead me to further research and the chance to reflect on ideas in a new way. That may be more of a stepping stone to learning than it is the kind of learning that happens in the less-constrained context of a classroom, but it’s still valuable stuff.
April 20th, 2012 at 3:13 pm
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[...]Make it Social: How We Use Twitter as a Learning Tool | Bottom-Line Performance[...]…
May 17th, 2012 at 5:04 pm
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