Learning to tweet in Azerbaijan
(Images thanks to Valida Babayeva)
Watching someone tweet for the first time is like watching a toddler take its first steps. You are always on the lookout for a fall. Thankfully, the first morning of the social media course at the Azerbaijan Media Center in Baku was accident-free.
When the course started only 14 participants were using Twitter. By lunchtime the majority of the 25 journalists, bloggers and NGO staff had set up accounts and were practising tweeting using the hashtag #mmsmw (Media Merkez Social Media Workshop) - Media Merkez is the Azerbaijani name for the centre. They were all encouraged to read the training module 'Become a global media brand in 60 minutes' to try to help them avoid the common mistake of following people before setting up a profile and tweeting some content. This afternoon they will be polishing their profiles, learning how to follow people, setting up categories and streams in Hootsuite and, hopefully, coming up with some original journalism based on their new social media newsgathering skills. Tomorrow it's micro-blogging with Posterous and creating a workshop blog for the Azerbaijan Media Center site. By the end of the week they will all be working in a social media newsroom set up for the workshop.