Element Descriptor

The ability to explain what is happening at a meeting, an event, a demonstration, during a TV show, whatever in real time for people who are on Twitter and not present or watching the actual event and explaining to them not only what is going on, but the other things that could and should be, and some context. Not having live tweeting doesn’t mean that your organisation will fall over: it just means you miss an opportunity to get to a wider audience than normal because well-crafted funny tweets do get shared.

Level descriptors

Novice	Practitioner	Expert	Ninja
Can with preparation planning and forethought tweet several well- crafted but basic tweets about what is happening with some links to relevant documents, website.	With little time for preparation is able to produce a steady high frequency stream of Funny, insightful, clear tweets that expose not only the banality of what is going on, but missed opportunities and ideas for what could and should be happening.	From a standing start, produce a flood of beautiful, funny, vicious, just this side of libellous tweets, which enable readers to understand what is going on and inspire them to get involved in your campaign	From a standing start able to live tweet long, complex events with a beautiful cadence and tempo. Knowing what to tweet and what not to bother with sarcasm and bile for all the tweets are so well judged that they can be unrolled as a thread and turned into a blog post virtually at the touch of a button

Element Overview Essay

This is a draft. If something doesn’t make sense, or you see typos, or if you have further ideas, please email us on contact@activecitizenshiptoolkit.net

The reason live tweeting is not done well Is that even among those of us who do use Twitter we mostly use it for sharing cat photos and subtweeting people we don’t like

The use of Twitter as a tool for monitory democracy, for reporting on what our lords and masters are spinning at any given time is rare and the work of live tweeting is glamorous but time consuming and requires touch typing and organisation around what links are where 

The consequences are not mission threatening. It’s more about lost opportunities. Because if you can do good, live tweeting, what happens is you build your credibility, you build the background, awareness of the issues and some understanding of the issues almost by osmosis. And usually you pick up some followers though of course, you can lose followers too, if you do it too much or badly.

And if you timestamp your tweets, you can find out exactly when something was said or done during the event if it is being archived, which is useful.

So the fixes are simple to start small. So if there’s a two hour meeting, don’t try to live tweet the whole thing straightaway. Choose the one bit, which is of particular interest to you and everyone else. And then you will learn as you go. But obviously, you need the Twitter handles of all the people who are likely to speak, you need the URLs for documents, which are likely to be discussed. And you might want to Bit.ly those in advance. You want to choose hashtag or hashtags. And you can even have some basic template tweets open in browsers. So all you have to do is type in new stuff, and hit send. 

There are guides to live tweeting available on the internet. So you should be able to if you want to get up to expert level pretty quickly. The beauty of live tweeting of course is it can be done from the comfort of your own desktop, bedroom. If it’s a webcast, or a TV programme, you are tweeting about obviously if it’s a demo, you’re going to need Wifi on your phone, etc

Development Resources

Assessment Resources