Thanks for your comment. It was great to meet you at WEC. I remember a few sessions where you were typing so fast that I thought your keyboard was going to catch on fire.

While I can’t think of an event where live tweeting was done by a reporter – I can think of several examples where attendees have assumed the role of “fact based tweeter” during live sessions.

I think this role is important role for events that want to use Twitter to spread their messages beyond their four walls. These highlights or sound bite tweets are the ones that seem to be retweeted the most.

I’m also pleased that the word ‘reporter’ figured fairly prominently in the word cloud. The story behind that points to something new that was introduced to the Twitter stream during WEC. The ‘reporter’ tag might point toward a solution for organizations that have been interested in onsite social media but nervous that their messaging will be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of independent voices.

As usual at WEC, I was onsite wearing a few different hats — as an MPI member and volunteer, but also as one of several companies involved in producing the two general sessions. For each of those sessions, we had a team of two writers and one writer/editor live-tweeting the content as it was presented — so, yes, as the writer/editor on the team, I can echo your comment that it’s a tough job.

Between the two sessions, we produced 145 tweets, but the nature of the content was more important than the character count: we wouldn’t have contributed to the ‘good’, ‘bad’, or ‘fiasco’ count in the word cloud because everything we produced was focused on reporting **someone else’s opinion**, not our own. (The exception was when I shouted WELCOME, ERIC! when the gavel passed to MPI’s new International Chair.) The intent of the experiment was not to offset or dilute the social media content, but to lead toward the kind of balance that daily newspapers achieve between news reporting and opinion content.

To my knowledge, this was the first time a conference had used live-tweeting to deliver reporting as well as opinion. Time will tell whether it turns out to be a one-off attempt or a productive new way of integrating onsite content and social media. I’m telling the story at some length, not to promote the approach, but because we’re genuinely interested in gathering feedback on whether it had an impact…and if not, whether we could have produced or signposted the tweets more effectively. I’d really appreciate comments from you and your readers.