About ten days ago ago, I attended a two-day event (the COPA COGECA Congress of European Farmers 2016) during which I was tweeting using the
Twitter account of one of the organizers of the event (our
@GAIA_Brussels one).
Everything was properly set up and there was a hashtag (#DynamicAgri)
to be used in all tweets made during the event which was properly
communicated to the participants. Through a coordinated action between
the social media people of the different organizing bodies, we managed
to have a relatively high number of tweets with the specific hashtag,
describing the progress and outcomes of the congress. This can be used
as a reference in the future and can also be visualized in different
ways (see for example the Storify board we created for this purpose). It should be noted that the specific hashtag is used by COPA COGECA in various instances so it was not unique; however, this allowed all tweets made during these days to be linked ans on top of that, all these to be part of COPA COGECA's more general timeline.
I love it when large networks like @COPACOGECA make good use of #socialmedia for information sharing! #DynamicAgri pic.twitter.com/PCADwtIi0T— V. Protonotarios (@vprot) October 6, 2016
The next day was the 3rd Panhellenic Congress on the Development of Greek agriculture,
organized by GAIA Epicheirein. Since we wanted to have a bilingual
coverage of the event (English and Greek), we had two people (one of them was me again!) tweeting at
the same time - along with the rest of the participants of course - in
these two languages. The first thing we did was to define the hashtag of
the Congress (#GAIACongress16) so that we could "link" all tweets made
during the Congress and also to make sure that all participants were
aware of the hashtag - so we just added it on the slide that was
projected before and during the breaks of the Congress. Again we were
successful in documenting the event through Twitter and this
documentation can also be used as a reference in the future or
visualized in different ways (see for example the Storify board we created for the specific event).
Well, that's me trying to keep up w/ Congress discussions & #Twitter feed, surrounded by notes & gadgets :-) https://t.co/7nB6C3pa7B— V. Protonotarios (@vprot) October 6, 2016
On the other hand, some
days ago, NEUROPUBLIC's Chairman attended a global conference (in fact he was invited to talk about smart farming in one of the round tables). Despite the fact that
there was a Conference hashtag promoted the days before the event, I soon realized that it was not actually used by the participants of the
Conference - not even by the organizer (it was a 50-50 chance for them
to use it, based on my calculations). As I was trying to figure out what was going on during the
event, I contacted the organizers through Twitter asking them to use the
hashtag that they had already proposed; however, I got no response. As a
result, I spent some time during the Conference trying to collect bits and pieces from the participants
that tweeted (added them to a Twitter list) in order to keep up with the
outcomes of the event. I soon gave up, as I realized that some of them
either stopped tweeting or were tweeting only about their / their organization's participation
in the event and it was challenging to find out who else was tweeting
during the event. As if this was not enough, the same hashtag was already
being used for totally different purposes like sports and fashion; a
fact that led to "noise" in the specific Twitter timeline and made following the progress almost impossible....
