Tweeting While You Work: Event review

Meghan Jones, Assistant Electronic Services Librarian at the King’s Fund, has written a review of the recent SLA Twitter seminar.

Thanks once again to Lexis Nexis for their sponsorship of this event.

Tweeting While You Work was an utterly fascinating event, hosted in very genial surroundings. The three speakers: Julie Hall, Judith Lewis and Dr. Hazel Hall took us through the benefits of using Twitter in professional contexts as well as pointing out the potential pitfalls and how to avoid them – Judith Lewis from Seshet’s talk was particularly invaluable on this point and I would definitely recommend reading her slides/listening to the audio as taking pratfalls on social media is something that all professional users need to put at the top of their list – and how they used the service as a means of gathering information, disseminating information and in Judith Lewis and Julie Hall’s case – gaining business

All three women had multiple accounts with very clearly marked boundaries between them and that came through as a very important point – keep business separate from pleasure when it comes to Twitter (and other social media

As mentioned, Judith Lewis’s talk focused on the pitfalls of Twitter and most importantly, what to do when you’ve fallen down into them, while Julie Hall’s talk focused on how she has used it for her company Woman Unlimited and what she has learnt from that. Dr. Hazel Hall provided an excellent list: Ten Tips in Ten Tweets, where she used Twitter itself to post and illustrate the potential uses of Twitter in a work related context, with an example of one of her academic projects

The panel was ably hosted by Bob De Laney of the sponsor, Lexis Nexis, who posed an interesting question – would the panellists use Twitter if they had to pay for it? The answer was mostly yes but with caveats!

Another reminder that SLA members can access all the presentations and recording of the event via the SLA Europe Wiki space. If it’s your first time on the wiki you’ll need to log in to the SLA website at www.sla.org and create a username. If you’re already registered you should be good to access via this link.

And finally, save the date: the next SLA Europe event is on 18 May.

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