For several years now, I have live-tweeted (or live-blogged) conferences I attend. At yesterday’s Health Care Marketing and Public Relations Social Media Conference, I tried something different.

Live tweeting and blogging produce benefits for both myself, others attending the conference, those who couldn’t make it and the conference organizers.

For me, it forces me to identify key points, then the act of writing it down engages me in active listening; it’s the social equivalent of note-taking. If I need to remember it later, my notes are all there, ready to be retrieved.

For others attending the same conference, whether or not they’re also tweeting, being able to see my notes helps them determine whether they heard the same message as somebody else in the room.

For those not in attendance, information previously unavailable to them is now accessible.
And for the conference organizers, the quality of the conference is marketed for free. Yesterday, for example, I saw a number of tweets noting that the Mayo Clinic/Ragan Communications conference seemed outstanding, based on what they were reading via Twitter. That could lead to more registrations next time.

It was clear as the conference began yesterday that a good number of participants were planning on live-tweeting the event. As Lee Aase, director of the Mayo Clinic’s Center for Social Media, began speaking, the tweets under the #mayoragan hashtag began flying. And the reptition quickly became evident. Lee would say something interesting or insightful, and a number of attendees—all constrained by Twitter’s 140-character limit—used roughly the same approach to make the same point.

Anyone trying to follow the conference based on the hashtag would have to spend a fair amount of time identifying tweets that repeated information they’d already seen. That brought to mind Clay Shirky’s observation, “It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.”

So rather than add to the tweets, I decided to try my hand at being the filter. In other words, I tried my hand at curating the flood of information coming from conference attendees.

I already have a beta Storify account, so I created a new story, then began searching Twitter on the #mayoragan hashtag:

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As a speaker made an intriguing point, I’d watch the tweets that reported it and select that one that, in my view, did the best job of summarizing the most pertinent information, dragging it into the story. Some of the participants, like Inova Health’s Chris Boyer, went an extra step and found links to content speakers had mentioned, sharing them with the group. I added those, along with some relevant opinions and even some photos that were taken and shared via TwitPic or Flickr.

I opted to order the tweets and other content chronologically. For anyone following along in real time, that might have been a hassle, but I assumed most people would read the story after the fact and this let them start at the beginning and scroll through to the end. The result is a start-to-finish recap of the key points made by each speaker along with some additional commentary and links. It winds up looking like this:

I’ll go back later to pick up any blog posts or other content that people might add after the fact.

Note that the story is easy to share or even embed on your own blog or website. Could Ragan Communications somebody make a curated review of its conferences a regular feature of its website?

I got a couple benefits from curating other people’s tweets rather than tweeting my own. There was no gap in my coverage of the event when it was my turn to speak. I simply sat down after my talk was over and curated what people had tweeted during my talk. I was just as focused on the content as I would have been had I been tweeting myself, perhaps even moreso since I was evaluating multiple tweets to determine which ones to use. And I hope it makes it easier for everyone else to peruse a blow-by-blow of the conference that has just the right amount of information (as opposed to overload).

Live-blogging and live-tweeting have added a new dimension to the conference experience. Real-time curation of those efforts may well be the next step in increasing the value of the knowledge speakers and panels share. I would be remiss if I didn’t also credit Bryan Person, who undertook a similar exercise with the Austin, TX Social Media Breakfast earlier this month.

Take a look at my Storify story and let me know what you think.Is there a future for this kind of effort?