Livin’ that live-tweetin’ life
This last week I had the opportunity of doing some live-tweeting for an event. We were required to live-tweet at least 10 tweets that concerned the event, with one of them including a picture. We had two options when it came to this assignment, we could either report it as a journalist or as a public relations specialist.
The event was hosted by the RSO that I am a part of, the International Student Association. So, because it was the RSO I was a part of, I decided to come at it from a public relations angle. I, not to toot my own horn, also put together this event. The event I tweeted was a panel discussion that revolved around a movie showing. The movie that was shown was “Girl Rising” from 2013.
The movie is about the importance of women’s education across the world, and the good it can do for a country’s economy. This movie was followed by a panel that featured representatives from the gender and women’s studies department, the sociology department, the Her Campus RSO and SafeZone. These panelists included Dr. Colleen Denney, Dr. Tim Nichols, Abbey Williams and Lindy Westenhoff, respectively.
The experience was actually pretty fun. I can honestly say, this was the first time that I have genuinely enjoyed something to do with social media. I like the fact that this assignment was something that I have never done before, and I got some pretty cool results from live-tweeting.
Time for me to brag…again. One of the tweets I tweeted, was actually liked and retweeted by the official Twitter of the movie that we watched, “Girl Rising.” This was one of the coolest things that I have ever had happen to me on social media. The “Girl Rising” Twitter page has almost 111,000 followers, which means that my tweet was seen by 111,000 people potentially.
That’s pretty dang cool.
I learned that it is harder than you think to jot down tweets that are quotes of people talking during a panel discussion, because sometimes it is hard to get the full context in 140 characters or less. However, I was surprised at how easy it was to find things to tweet about because there were a lot of really interesting things being said.
If I could go back, I think I would plan it out a little more, I also would have provided more context to the picture.
I think that my future career is going to mostly revolve around social media. To be honest, my job right now as the online editor at the Branding Iron, the student newspaper, mostly revolves around social media. And I don’t like doing social media as an independent party, but running it for the newspaper, and having a purpose behind it is really cool. I really enjoy doing this stuff because I have a reason to be writing outside posting political things or selfies. What a good time that was to get to tweet about things that are actually interesting.
Seth Sigward Haack 