Conferencing with Twitter

This week, I’m going to go a little more “young professional” in this blog. I’m sure many of you have attended a professional or recreational conference at one time or another. For people who are not excessively sociable like me, I’m sure that the networking and talking gets to be a pain, names and faces run together, and you only end up remembering 5 people that you spoke with.  Sound familiar?

I have had this problem in the past and really wanted to remember people and topics discussed at the latest conference that I attended, the annual Society of Industrial Organizational Psychologists conference in Chicago this year. I wanted to strategically meet people who shared interests, such as social media and globalization and how those things impact the field of I/O in general. I planned to go to the sessions, poster presentations and panel discussions to learn what was going on in those areas from a research standpoint and to gain knowledge of who was driving that line of research. 

It was harder to remember people than I thought. Outside of the scientists and practitioners that were presenting (and I had a copy of who they were in my program) I kept forgetting who I talked to or met just attending the sessions. But one thing changed that once I discovered its full potential, and that would be Twitter. 

Now, I’m sure we all know of Miley Cyrus and Ashton Kutcher’s utilization of Twitter and that reputation that it’s just an oversharing nightmare where celebrities share too much. I have been using it more lately to read blogs and get up to date sports news (and other things), but I had never imagined how it could help with my conference situation. 

I could tweet my opinion on certain sessions and hashtag (or put a number sign, #) in front of the word SIOP or SIOP 2011 to be searchable in the Twitterverse, as well as searching about what other people were saying. It sparked great discussion and healthy debate, but actually made me remember who I met and their stance on certain subjects. I could engage in conversation long after the awkward 10 minute meeting and begin to develop more in depth relationships. 

I am actually continuing a lot of those discussions, currently, long after the end of the conference. My impression is that conferences were built to share ideas and meet new people, and Twitter really enables an individual to get a more thorough understanding of the topics and cultivate relationships over a period of time. This SIOP was awesome for me, and I got a lot more out of it by simply checking my tweets!