Social media types are coming out of their bedrooms and emerging, blinking into the light of real-life social interaction! Actually, I never believed that stereotype. But what started as homemade media and geeks behind keyboards is finding new applications in real life all the time. One thing Twitterers like to do is meet each other in person: Twitter, like many social networks, can be a facilitator of real life networking.

Twitter meet-ups (or ‘tweetups’) have become increasingly popular over the last year, and this trend looks set to continue. I shall certainly be attending and organizing some myself. Here are my top ten tips for running a successful tweetup:

1. Have a focus for the event. This depends on the size and aims of your tweetup – sometime you just want a post-conference drink, an informal gathering of local people, or a chance for an online community to meet and chat in real life. But you can also have a more formal networking event, guest speakers or a panel discussion if you so choose.
2. Get organised. For a small ad-hoc gathering a quick shout-out on Twitter might do. If you have a larger event to organise, use Twtvite – a great free tool to manage your guest list, and even print out name badges with Twitter names, user names, and avatars. If you plan to charge for your event, use Eventbrite. You can also use this for free events, or to invite people to make a donation if they wish. You may consider creating a Facebook event too, for those on Facebook but not Twitter, and publicising through sites such as Meetup and Upcoming.
3. Choose your venue carefully. Make sure it is large enough (you can specify a maximum guest capacity on Twtvite), and caters for any food, drink or audio-visual requirements you may have. Most important of all, make sure there is access to WiFi so that people can tweet from their laptops. At the very least, there should be a good mobile signal so people can tweet from their phones.
4. Anounce the hashtag. Hashtags are keywords with the # symbol in front of them that become links to a list of all tweets using that keyword. Pre-announce the hashtag to be used. Twtvite has a facility for doing this and displaying a list of all tweets using it.
5. Use a Twitterwall. This is a real-time updated, animated list of everyone tweeting with your hashtag. Use www.twitterfall.com, plug in your hashtag(s), set the speed you want, and you’re good to go. Then project it onto a wall for all to see at the event. This may encourage people to tweet at the event, since their tweets will be highly visible – some may tweet just to knock someone off the top spot! It also enables people not physically there to participate.
6. Encourage people to take photographs. These can be live-tweeted on the night using one of the Twitter photo services such as Twitpic. You could also set up a group pool on Flickr for people to post to. Ask them to tag their Flickr photos with the event hashtag so they can be found easily, and even be pulled into a widget on your website.
7. Let’s hear what’s going on. Why not audio too? AudioBoo is a new service that started this year, and the easiest way to describe it is ‘audio Twitter’. Like Twitter, it is part of the real-time web. It’s a free iPhone app (though you don’t need an iPhone – you can now also record direct from your laptop or upload an audio file). Record some audio – perhaps a short interview with someone – on your iPhone. Take a photo. Upload both to your AudioBoo account with a short description, and it automatically tweets to your Twitter account and/or updates your Facebook status. It even includes a little geo-located map showing where you recorded it.
8. Live-stream or record your event. If it seems appropriate, take your media a stage further and consider live-streaming your event, or part of it, using a service such as www.ustream.tv. That way, people outside the room – even outside the country – can see what’s going on, tweet comments and questions, and feel involved. This is useful if, say, you have a large international Twitter following and you’re running a speaker event. And/or you might consider audio or video recording your speakers, and then podcasting it for the benefit of those unable to attend.
9. Consider sponsorship. While you may not want to provide food and drink – for the sake of your budget or to screen out those only coming for free booze – sometimes it may be appropriate to invite sponsorship for the event to cover these things or any other costs associated with your tweetup. There is a space on Twtvite to list sponsors as well as organizers. You’re more likely to attract sponsors if you have previously arranged events with a large niche audience that a sponsor wants to target, or if you generate a decent-sized guest list in advance of your event.
10. Facilitate networking. Create a Twitter list of attendees after the event so that people can make contact with those they met. Twtvite will provide a guest list; or why not use the new Twitter list feature?

Make it your New Year’s resolution to attend a tweetup this year – and maybe I’ll see you at one!

The Guardian newspaper was gagged from reporting a question to be asked in Parliament later this week, on legal grounds which appeared to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights. The question related to press freedom in light of injunctions that included the dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast by a giant multinational corporation, as reported by BBC Newsnight in May (they are themselved now being threatened with legal action).

The press injunction was a ’super injunction’, meaning that they couldn’t even tell anyone they had been injuncted or by whom. A worrying legal trend, used by big bad corporations who don’t want people to think they are big bad corporations.

Fortunately, we now have the Internet. Political bloggers have a huge impact on public debate today. The Parliamentary question could be found in full on Guido Fawkes’ Blog last night. And, while traditional news media are still injuncted from reporting the contents of something called the Minton Report, you can find as much mind-numbing detail about it as you can handle, with a simple web search. If you want.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger tweeted about it today, before appearing in court, and was re-tweeted by Stephen Fry to his 829,207 followers. Once that happened, it’s not surprising that the top three trending topics this morning related to the story. And lawyers Carter-Ruck dropped their injunction.

Rusbridger said on Channel 4 News earlier this evening: “The effect of Twittering… was a PR disaster for Trafigura – if they were trying to keep it secret, suddenly they had the whole blogosphere on their case, and I imagine their PR advisers said ‘for heaven’s sake, this is  causing endless pain, let’s just stop it.’”

The message is clear. It is more difficult to restrain free speech in the age of the Internet than ever before. Wherever the freedom of the press is threatened, from Ahmadinejad’s Iran, to Berlusconi’s Italy, to Brown’s Britain; whether political or corporate; the Internet – particularly the ‘real time web’ – fills the void. The use of injunctions to prevent corporate embarrassment doesn’t work in a world where the culture of top-down publishing has been replaced by mass participation in social media sites. You may injunct the Guardian or sue Newsnight – but you can’t silence us all.

In fact, it has the opposite effect to what you intend: most of us would have been unaware of this Parliamentary question, fascinated as we are – again (yawn) – by MP’s expenses this week. But now the Twittersphere is agog.

People on Twitter are suspicious of big corporations, especially when they behave in a heavy-handed way. We saw a smaller example of this in the summer, when Chicago-based Horizon Realty tried to sue a tenant for $50,000 over a single tweet that portrayed them in a bad light. The company desribed themselves as a “…a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization.” Oh dear. We don’t like that at all on Twitter. The resulting backlash propelled Horizon to the top trending topic, and they apologised, but with their reputation damaged perhaps somewhat more than by the orignal tweet.

As Techcrunch Europe said this evening: “There’s nowhere to hide if your name trends on Twitter. Is there, Trafigura?”

Related articles

• The Day Twitter Destroyed a Gagging Order (onemanandhisblog.com)
• Note to Trafigura/Carter Ruck: you can’t suppress Twitter (blogherald.com)
• Guardian gagged from reporting parliament (blogs.journalism.co.uk)
• Twitter users undermine attempt to gag UK media (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Did the Guardian use Twitter as a weapon of free speech? (inquisitr.com)

What are hashtags?

Hashtags are simply a way to group tweets together by topic. They are a keyword, or words (with no spaces), and start with the # symbol. You don’t need to register them anywhere – you just make them up. By using the # symbol, they become clickable links. Click on a hashtag and you will see everyone’s tweets containing that hashtag as a list updated in real time. Click on this one to see what this looks like: #followfriday

The most popular show up in the ‘trending topics’ list in the right-hand column of your Twitter page. Trending topics may or may not include the # symbol.

So what is #followfriday?

‘Following’ on Twitter is like ‘friending’ on other social networks, except you usually don’t need to get your follow request approved – unless someone has protected their tweets. You just click the ‘follow’ button on their Twitter profile, and their tweets will show up in the timeline on your page.

#followfriday is a little game that Twitterers play on a Friday. It’s a way of recommending interesting people to follow. It can also be a way of finding people to follow (especially if you’re new to Twitter), and for building your followers if your friends think you’re interesting enough to recommend!

Other alliterative variations take place on other days of the week:

• #musicmonday for recommending music
• #charitytuesday for recommending – you guessed it – charities.

Other days are more or less up for grabs, if you want to have a go at starting your own trend. Various attempts at this have been made, including #woofwednesday for following pets. I know.

How to #followfriday

Don’t just recommend your mates – at least not without a reason. #followfriday works best when you list a few people, and give a reason, or group them by the type of Tweeters they are. That way people can decide if your recommendations look of interest to them, without having to click through to the accounts of those people first to find out what they tweet about. One of the downsides to Twitter is that it’s just so vast – where do you start to find people to follow? #followfriday is a way of using your network to filter through the great unwashed mass of information on Twitter.

Here are a couple of examples from my recent past:

So now you know how to #followfriday, get following, recommending and tweeting!

Yes, over the weekend more Reefer Madness style moral panic about social networks broke loose. This week’s contender for the Susan Greenfield Award for Utter Nonsense Talked about Social Networks was Archbishop Vincent Nichols, head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales. He suggested that Facebook and MySpace can lead children to commit suicide. And he’s not alone in making such wild, unfounded claims.

In February, we had Professor Greenfield’s speculation in the Daily Mail that social networking sites harm children’s brains and may lead to autism. Also that month, Dr Aric Sigman stuck his own tabloid oar in, with fears that Facebook may cause cancer.

Both were roundly criticised by Dr Ben Goldacre on Newsnight, who argued that “this is Baroness Greenfield unfortunately abusing her position in order to give extra weight to conjecture and opinion”. Her piece on Newsnight looks less like a contribution to rational scientific debate, and more like a hoodwinked celeb on a Chris Morris show – specifically Neil Fox’s statement on the spoof current affairs series Brass Eye that “there’s no real evidence for it, but it is scientific fact“. The Baroness almost delivers that line verbatim.

Now the church is weighing into the debate too, with assumption, speculation, conjecture and fear – but without actual evidence. What’s going on here?

This doesn’t seem much different to any previous technology-based moral panic, whether about television, cars or the telephone. Technology itself is neutral – nuclear fission may be used to create bombs or energy. The impact technology has on society is a complex, fascinating topic – and one worthy of research rather than tabloid speculation.

When public figures  make alarmist pronouncements on social media they neither understand nor use, they contribute little to public understanding. It’s fashionable in some quarters to rejoice in one’s own bewilderment about social media. Radio 4 is my favourite organ of ignorance in the UK, from arched-eyebrowed interviews  on the Today programme that just stop short of including the word ‘new-fangled’, to Will Self on Any Questions saying “the only way I would twitter is if a songbird flew into my mouth” – to squeals of delight from the audience, one of whom ‘admitted’ to using Twitter. But when such ignorance becomes judgemental warning, there’s something wrong.

Social networking sites are neither a Good Thing nor a Bad Thing. They’re just a thing, a tool, another way to communicate, publish and share information. With 200 million users on Facebook, an exploding Twitter population of 45 million, and more and more of our time spent online, they appear here to stay. Yes, there is bullying, spam and porn. There is also online support, fundraising, and philanthropy. Just like the Internet. Just like real life.

Social media isn’t for everyone – and using it depends on your attitude to openness, transparency and risk. But if you have something to say, information to share, a cause to raise awareness of, or even something to sell – it’s worth a look. You won’t get cancer, go mad or kill yourself. Really – don’t have nightmares.

See also:

• Bad Science: “Facebook causes cancer” Ben Goldacre’s blog, complete with references to actual research, 24 Feb 09
• Is Facebook damaging your brain? (video) Guardian interview with Susan Greenfield, 25 Feb 09