Twitter chats: useful resource or cacophonous nightmare?

"This'll do wonders for my personal brand" (Image: sonofabike via Flickr)

Ever taken part in a Twitter chat?

In case you haven’t and you’re not familiar with the idea (not familiar with something Twitter-related? In 2010? Shame on you! :) ), a Twitter chat is a group of people ‘gathering’ on Twitter at a pre-arranged time to talk (tweet) with each other about a pre-arranged topic (advice for PR students, media relations, professional life as an under-30, whatever).

Everyone who’s part of the chat includes a pre-agreed hashtag in their tweets, and then uses a tool like TweetChat, TweetGrid or another to pull all the tweets with that hashtag together into one big thread which they follow and respond to. Often there’s a moderator, who asks specific questions of the group and tries to stop the chat devolving into an incoherent babble of unrelated questions and answers (good luck with that).

Make sense? If not, maybe the easiest way to think about Twitter chats is as a cross between a panel session, a support group and a networking event, all happening in the magic of the interweb.

Now, Twitter chats are supposed to be a great way to ‘meet’ people in your field (or area of interest), share your experiences and expertise and gain knowledge and expertise from other helpful people. But in my (admittedly relatively limited) experience, it doesn’t usually work out that way, and they end up being more of a cacophonous nightmare than a helpful resource.

Here’s why:

1. They’re often too big — the most popular Twitter chats (things like #journchat or #prstudchat [that's for PR students, not hot male PR professionals]) just have too many contributors for you to be able to sort the wheat from the chaff and pick up on the smart people and the helpful advice among all the (unavoidable) noise.
2. The technology isn’t up to scratch yet — in my (again, small) experience, most of the aggregating tools that make Twitter chats possible don’t work fast enough to help you keep up with the conversation properly. And even if they did, there’d still be a problem with there being too many tweets for you to process in real time anyway.
3. Most people are just showing off – sadly, my experiences with PR-related Twitter chats so far (naming no names, #PRStudChat) have shown that instead of taking part to help people and share valuable knowledge, most people in Twitter chats (or at least the ones I’ve taken part in) are there to ‘build their personal brand’ and demonstrate how smart and with-it they are to potential future employers. Unfortunately, that means you get a lot of chaff and not much wheat. Lots of shouting and self-promotion, not much conversation or value.

Sad, really, because I’d like to find Twitter chats helpful and fun, but so far, I just haven’t. They feel like social media being hijacked for personal gain, without the authentic, conversational, reciprocal bits that make social media appealing in the first place.

Your thoughts? Am I wrong on this? Are there Twitter chats you’ve found helpful? Or do they all tend to be this way?