Tweeting During Conferences

“I’m so jealous. I wish I was going to (insert conference name here).”

This is what someone says to you before you leave for the big conference. You’re excited, your left-behind colleagues are jealous, and all is well. Except you’re out thousands of dollars attending the thing and they’re not. And you’re tweeting every second of the whole thing, thereby giving your richer-than-you colleagues free attendance to the event.

Yes, it irritates me when people tweet every thought mentioned at a conference. And yes, I know I can stop following those people and fix my irritation. That’s not my point here.

Why do you go to conferences? Is it to learn, explore, meet and engage with others of similar interests and careers? Or is it to be able to announce to everyone you already know at home you’re somewhere they’re not?

I know people learn differently than I do, and I know people think using cell phones in public is not as rude as it truly is (there are exceptions I won’t talk about here) but I don’t understand how anyone can glean any information from a conference while staring at and typing into a phone the entire time.

Whether the speaker considers it rude or not for the audience to be staring at phones through the whole presentation doesn’t matter—it is rude. You’re being rude. You are a terrible audience member.

Independent of that, how are you learning anything? Are you going to go back through all your tweets as if they’re notes? Maybe there’s some value there, but then why not just take notes?

Most important, why are you giving all your friends back home free admission to the conference as filtered through your interpretations?

Stop with the little nuggets of wisdom, spend your time and effort learning something, then come back home and do your own presentation. That’s where your nuggets of wisdom are wanted. And where you can make money instead of spend it. Take what you already know, add some new stuff, come up with your own spiel, and go for it. I know you can do it. So do it. Then, I can rant about all the jerks tweeting during your conference.