HAVING been invited to attend an e-navigation conference, I was particularly heartened to be invited to engage in a bit of tweeting by the organiser (a self-confessed Twitter fan).
Now for those of us that are reading this in the printed version of our esteemed paper and not on the blog site, tweeting is not the name of a London suburb.
This is the act of sending short, opinionated messages and information through a social network known as Twitter. One responds, forwards and generally engages in short, sharp discussion on the themes brought up, and that is the point of it. It offers an opportunity for instant debate. It is not an essay on decorum and precision.
I also thought there is a great relationship between the use of a modern communication tool and the discussions of how to use modern communication and navigation tools in shipping.
How wrong I was, and this perhaps sums up some of the problems we could have in shipping circles.
There are too many shipping organisations and companies that like to hide behind curtains of diplomacy and obfuscation. Tweeting from a conference aimed at being ‘forward thinking’ about technology was leading to things being “taken out of context”, apparently.
I was not told this by someone responding to a tweet (one tweets rather than twitters), but by a company spokesperson who stood up and addressed the audience about concerns regarding Twitter being used in the conference (which was a success in my opinion, in that it drew up some good points of direction for e-navigation to progress).
It seems some people in the audience did not want to use social media to tell the world what it wants to know; and probably just as many agreed that there was enough other forms of existing media available to disseminate opinion, news and observations.
However, what did happen after that was the number of people following me started to climb steadily, notably by people in the conference as much as elsewhere. So complaining about it has the effect of increasing its popularity.
Blogging, tweeting and the other growing professional network with a comment option, Linked-in, are growing in popularity.
My advice to people who do not like it is to get an account and start following the discussions, otherwise you will never know what people are saying about you, and you’ll not be able to reply and have your opinion known.
One Comment
I can definitely say that Craig’s twitter account of the e-Navigation conference (@shiptech) was extremely valuable for those interested in the subject. His short reports from the event were of great utility for those who couldn’t be there, and generated a much greater amount of interest around this event.
Everyone, including the company spokesperson who disparaged twitter, need to understand that any audience is now a media. Anything someone hears, they can blog about. Or tweet. Unless there are formal or understood rules against it, and these are made explicit, anything you say or write can be republished. And, if you’re at an event, the chances are even greater.