Tweet your Thanks and Praise

Before I removed the feed of National Family History Month tweets with the #NFHM13 hashtag from this blog I copied and saved them into a document. It will be interesting to compare this 2013 list with what may be posted in 2014.

Twitter is the tool that is commonly used to message from events, Twitter is a tool used by those we want to attract to join our family history groups and societies, ie younger people. If we want to broadcast and share our enthusiasm for #NFHM or other events with youngsters we must use the media they use.

Scanning the Tweets posted during National Family History Month I noted that only a couple of institutions and commercial organisations or their members tweeted about the events they hosted or attended. Twitter provides an easy mechanism for thanking and praising those who organise events on our behalf.

I estimate that a few thousand people attended #NFHM13 events and that many of them enjoyed and learnt something from those events. Did those who attended send a thank you note or a message of praise to the organisers of the events? Did they blog about the events?  Did they put a thankyou message on the National Family History Month Facebook Page? I wonder how many thankyous Shauna Hicks who devoted so much time and energy to the event received.

My mother always impressed upon me the importance of saying thankyou. I find that Twitter enables me to tell not just the organiser of or presenter at an event about the great work they have done but it allows me to broadcast my praise.

Twitter is too busy a place for me to spend time every day but it has its uses. When I attend a great event it is a tremendous tool for sharing my enthusiasm, thanks and praise with the world. And, as I can't be everywhere, it is also my window to other events.