I’ve blogged the Social Work Distance Education Conference before, and my tips for any conference organizers haven’t changed. Many thanks to Our Lady of The Lake University for all their effort in making social media engagement a success. Some good things that organizers like OLLU do:
- Establish and promote the official hashtag early and often.
- Make sure nobody else is using it (this happens with some frequency; another conference I attended years ago used the same hashtag as a music event in Southeast Asia.)
- Make the detailed conference schedule available to participants who can’t be present. A lot of colleagues want to learn from the presentations at a conference, but can’t make it.
- Make the Twitter engagement board easy to see. When participants are here, they see first-hand what is being shared via Twitter.
Presenters are networking while they disseminate their knowledge, of course. Here are my quick thoughts:
- If you have a professional Twitter account, or other social media hub that communicates to your audience who you are and the work you do, make that handle known. It’s more meaningful to me than a standard business card. (In fact, put your @ on your business card.)
- Put your name on every one of your slides, and consider giving permission for attendees to share your presentation live. I live-tweet with permission. When I can’t attend a con, it’s at least helpful to me to know how to find you and follow your work.
I say this because I think the #SWDE conference is incredibly valuable, and I cannot thank OLLU enough for supporting this gathering. and I’m grateful for the opportunity to attend.
Here are some Twitter highlights from Day 1 (Wednesday, April 10). I selected these (I hesitate to say I “curated”) somewhat randomly. I encourage readers to check out the #SWDE2019 hashtag and look at all the impressions on Twitter. Like I noted earlier, conference organizers can help facilitate the sharing of conference materials. (Virtual, asynchronous access to conference content would be the standard I’d like to see, but social media facilitates what we can do now.)
KEYNOTE HIGHLIGHTS
Stephen Cummings 
Thank you for blogging, Stephen! Helpful, especially for those of us #NotAtSWDE2019!