An all new aapor.org is now available.

Thanks for your interest in the advancement and exchange of knowledge about public opinion and survey research.
Click here to visit the new site.

Twitter

Twitter allows users to send status messages of up to 140 characters from wireless devices or from PC or Mac-based apps (including web browsers) to their "followers," and to anyone watching or searching the public Twitter feed.

It's a particularly good way to communicate about an event like the AAPOR Conference - to share highlights from paper presentations or addresses, social get-togethers, etc., with other attendees and for those who couldn't make it. And it will make a neat collective notebook after the fact.

If you do tweet the 2009 conference, make sure to use the "hashtag" (identifier) #aapor2009 in your posts so all related tweets will come up in a Twitter search like the one linked above.

If you're just getting started on Twitter, check out this beginner's guide  (from webguild.org, one of many such how-to pages you can find via Google).

Here are some tips for "live tweeting" #aapor2009  (drawn in part from this excellent tip sheet from clinincalcases.org):

  1. NO PRESSURE. Take your time; don't miss important presentation points or Q&A to fire off a tweet. Have fun at the conference, and tweeting it.
  2. Think before you hit "update" - boiling down what may be a complex point to 140 characters can take effort. Ask yourself if the tweet would make sense to someone who didn't see/hear/experience what you did.  (And note: Unlike with Facebook, it's not possible to delete all traces of a tweet once you've sent it if you want to fix a typo or something -- it'll still show up in Twitter search and apps like Tweetdeck, at least for a while.)
  3. "Non-live" tweeting -- in the evening or after the conference -- is good too, after you've had more time to reflect on the proceedings.
  4. Don't just tweet about the serious work done at the conference -- share the fun stuff. The annual AAPOR conference truly is "a meeting place" on social as well as scientific levels. Twitter can be a great way to capture the event's many different dimensions. (Will we have twitterers reporting from the Applied Probability session Saturday night?)
  5. Tell other conference attendees you're tweeting; get them involved and share feedback.
  6. Ask your Twitter followers who aren't attending the conference what they want to know about it.



Back to top