I’m all a’twitter or am I a tweeter?
Because of my interest in social media, especially as it relates to healthcare and medical education, I’ve heard about Twitter. I’ve even tweeted on occasion. I tweeted twice before today, and have found Twitter useful for keeping track of my favorite medical blogger, Berci Mesko of Scienceroll. I have two followers, a coworker and my son's friend. In my wildest imagination, I never thought I’d be tweeting through the entire first day of the Medicine 2.0 Conference.
During the opening address this morning, there were two different display screens. One to show presentation slides and the other a steady stream of Twitter posts--or Tweets. I was busy scribbling notes with my trusty low tech #2 pencil (pictured above) and noticed that many of my scribblings were flashing by on the Twitter feed. It was one of those moments that makes you go hmmm...
I turned on my laptop and logged in to my Twitter account, and started taking notes. I mimicked the other tweets by adding what they called a “hash tag.” I prefaced other people’s Twitter usernames with @, although I wasn’t sure at first why I was doing that. Soon I was tweeting with the pros, and a funny thing happened. Someone referenced one of my tweets in their tweet. Is that a retweet? OMG my name in lights @r0wsbud! While I was using Twitter as a note taking tool, for my own selfish purposes, someone found one of my tweets worthy of note. Hey, I thought, what if other people found my tweets useful?
So, I tweeted and I tweeted and I tweeted, and another funny thing happened. The counter showing my followers changed to 3, then 4, then 5, and so on. I had this Twitter account with 2 followers for a year, and in a matter of hours, 19 people were following my tweets. Maybe these folks will wander on to our blog on occasion; maybe I’ll make connections with some “people in motion” with whom we might brainstorm or collaborate on a project. Maybe I’ll get a raise this year--okay I am asking for a little too much.
Anyhow, today I shared my notes with the entire Medicine 2.0 Community, and they shared theirs with me. Later I’ll review the feed using that #med2 hash tag I mentioned earlier and use all of my notes and about a million others to write a new post about the conference itself. But for now I think I’ll reflect on what happened to me today and perhaps consider retiring my #2 pencil.
