Twitter is a social media network, or what some call a micro-blog. Once you set up a Twitter account, you can "tweet" in 140-character posts. In spite of the small character count, a great deal can be communicated. Twitter provides an instantaneous way to convey news to members and non-members alike from the AANA Annual Meeting, August 4-8, 2012, in San Francisco.
To learn how to use Twitter, go to the Twitter website.
AANA has made it easy to communicate what's going on at the Annual Meeting by supplying specialized hashtags (see sidebar below) for each of the sessions being held at the meeting. Those interested in what's being said in particular sessions being held at the Annual Meeting can search for the corresponding hashtag through Twitter's search function, and follow the news from the session.
Those who tweet from the sessions should remember to add the session's hashtag to their tweets, as seen in the graphic above.
The purpose of being able to communicate what has been said in a session is to pass on professional knowledge or interesting facts that might be of use to your colleagues. In this age of information overload, it's important to remember what Albert Einstein once said: "Information is not knowledge." Just because you can say it, doesn't mean it adds anything or fulfills a purpose. Meaningful tweets will be the most useful to your colleagues and to you.
Tweet with class!