And so Allegra begins its AAA aftermath. Yes, in blog-time it has been lightyears since the event ended (in real time 7 days), but there is something to be said for letting impressions settle before sharing (still remember our Slow Food for Thought Manifesto?)! Today we begin with a social media update, and will soon follow with more.
Let’s be frank: when it comes to such technologies as Twitter (is it even called a ‘technology’?!), your humble Allegra moderators are quite useless! However, this would hardly be Allegra if we didn’t find ways to get over our limitations. Hence, we are delighted to introduce to you our very own Social Media EXPERT: “Ixak”!
We found “Ixak”- appropriately – at the AAA ‘TweetUp’ (and no, we had no idea what an earth this meant either! Turns out it is an informal gathering of anthropological bloggers and tweeters, which by now has turned into an annual thing). This year was apparently the first time that the AAA had complementary wi-fi, and not surprisingly the end result was quite the social media frenzy with the most zealous tweeters sending updates at what felt like every five minutes.
At the TweetUp this surge of energy was equally present, with excited participants sharing their latest Tweets – and of course continuing happily their electronic chirping. It was quite soon after we began chatting with “Ixak” that we realised that, in fact, he is exactly what Allegra needs: both knowledgeable of Twitter and anthropology. A hop, skip and whatnot later – and we had found our very own Allegra social media expert!
We’ll do a proper introduction of “Ixak” and his social media wizardry soon, but to get things going he agreed to do a summary of the best AAA social media. We admit that we understand only half of what follows, but we are persuaded this is mere confirmation of his social media brilliance!
Thus THANKS and HERE YOU GO – Allegra’s Social Media “Ixak” and AAA social media highlights! ENJOY this smooth surfing on the tweetosphere!
“Social Media is social at its core, and so it is only fitting that my initial connection to the Allegra team was at a social Social Media event – the AAA2013 @SavageMinds “Tweet-up” at Kitty O’Shea’s in the Chicago Hilton. (Note: A “Tweet-up” is where people with common interests stand around filling and creating gaps in conversations by posting to twitter.)
Given the nature of the gathering, our conversation quickly turned to Twitter, and I walked them through the creation of their own twitter account – @allegra_lab. In light of their relative newness to twitter, they suggested that I pull together a quick rundown of AAA2013’s top tweeters.
These things are a bit tricky to track retrospectively, and at that point most of the conference had already passed, but it seemed like a worthwhile endeavor, so once the dust had settled I went back through the past two weeks of AAA Conference-related tweets to get a sense of the whole thing.
From a sheer hashtag volume standpoint, @Johnleetao was the clear tweetMaster for the event, using the official conference hashtag more than 120 times during the conference. This was double what the second and third most prolific hashtag users (@DonnaLanclos and @Chris_Ly) were putting out over that same period (stats generated via hashtracking.com).
Of course, hashtag use is only one measurement of social media activity, and there was plenty of other chatter on and around the conference. @JNRutherford deserves special mention for curating some great session tweets via storify, and @aasher seemed to be engaged in dozens of conference-related conversations every time I checked my phone.
Some of my other favorite conference tweeters (in no particular order) include:
@AhearnLaura – @dtpowis – @lauratgonzalez – @npseaver – @GregDowney1 – @AnthroPunk – @JasonAntrosio (and I would have liked to see a bit more from @biellacoleman and @sarahkendzior)
In terms of organizational twitter feeds, the folks at @culanth, @savageminds and @WennerGrenOrg were pretty great about keeping their feeds lively, and @NapaAnthro, @SocMedAnthro, @news4anthros and @AmericanAnthro were all worth following as well.
The algorithm that Twitter uses to push “top tweets” is pretty opaque to me, so I’m sure that there were plenty of people tweeting on and around the conference that I never saw. Who were your favourites?”
